Television news programming, with its associated genres of talk shows, commentaries and analyses, etc is all very well but to my mind, things begin to get particularly interesting once the entertainment side of the business – particularly humour – gets its teeth into the politics of the day.

When the otherwise deadly serious businesses of governance and policy formulation become inspiration for laughter, the provision of cultural and social context is part of the process. The scriptwriters present, in effect, a citizenry’s view of and response to political matters which are then, in cultural terms, turned into something greater than the sum of their parts. Meanwhile, this also lends the programming greater depth for not only does it become rooted in reality, it also becomes a comment on that given reality. This, in turn, mitigates to some extent audience members’ feelings of powerlessness and impotence towards political realities over which they have little control.

Consider, for example, the BBC show ‘Yes, Minister’ and its sequel, ‘Yes, Prime Minister.’ We don’t like to think that the people running our country may be corrupt, manipulative or just plain foolish, but we know that this is often the case and that there is precious little we can do about it. When they are turned into iconic stereotypes by the media – literature, theatre, film or in this case, television – we poke fun at them and in doing so, laugh a little at our own lot. In doing so, furthermore, in the very act of laughter, we express our opinion about the subject matter, whose characteristics then become part of a cultural history and are rendered almost impossible to dislodge. Which is why if I were president or prime minister – not that there’s any such likelihood! – I would worry at least as much about what the citizenry is laughing at me for as about what the commentators are saying. In addition to all we know about Bush and his war crimes, for example, we also know that he feels misunderestimated and believes that Wall Street got a hangover. Donald Rumsfeld, similarly, earned himself a place in the world’s cultural history with “As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know, and we also know there are known unknowns.” And here in Pakistan, of course, we have the “Extremism has become too extreme”, “There is a government within the government” and the stellar “I have imposed emergency – you must have seen it on TV” that our leader felt it fit to inform us of on Nov 3 as he became the first man in the country – perhaps in the world – to successfully stage a coup against himself.

But I digress; the sentences I’ve just quoted were uttered not by media-constructed spoofs of political figures but by the real life, flesh and blood versions.

However, the fact is that the political charade played out over the past year or so has given rise to some delicious comedy, and the comic stereotypes thus constructed will remain part of our cultural language long after the real persons have been relegated to the footnotes of history. The stereotypes become all the more deeply entrenched through being played repeatedly on television, such as the quite delightful song on Geo’s ‘Hum Sub Umeed Say Hain’: Sitting on a stage, playing a harmonium, President Musharraf plaintively sings “Meray jaanay ki zidd na karo; Hum to ghar jayain gay, bilkul lutt jayain gay, yun hi aapas main lartay raho … meray jaanay ki zidd na karo.” Stereotypes of all kinds, but in particular those that invoke laughter, are constructed through a shared collective of public imagination that the media then distils into identifiable characters. Stereotypes tend to take a complex event or person and first reduce it to the bare minimum of recognisable characteristics, and then rebuild from the bottom up while focussing on and caricaturing just those salient characteristics. This is precisely what makes them such dangerous, insidious little devils.

If the country’s politicians – and particularly our misguided president – want to get true measure of their worth and how history will remember them, they should be listening to the jokes.

Postscript: That the president should resign has now become patently obvious to most rational people, even his erstwhile supporters in the western world. How fitting it would be if he were to do it today, exactly two decades after we bid farewell to his predecessor. Well, that announcement will almost certainly not come today but the general would be well-advised to follow, for once, his own maxim of ‘Pakistan first.’ History remembers Gen Zia as the Pakistani president who, amongst other misdeeds, sowed the seeds of what would lead to the spectre of Talibanisation, and citizens call the place he’s buried Jabra Chowk. Gen Musharraf is already referred to as the Pakistani president who, amongst other missteps, watered those seeds and allowed them to bear fruit.

— hmumtaz@dawn.com