KARACHI: In Woody Allen’s film ‘Crime and Misdemeanour’, a character says, “Comedy is tragedy plus time… when the night Lincoln was shot, you couldn’t joke about it. Now time has gone by, and now it’s fair game.” Known comedian Saad Haroon proved this notion right on Thursday night during his stand-up act in the PACC auditorium.

The man has razor-sharp wit and the presence of mind of a sprinter in track and field competitions. His jokes, which had the audience double-up with laughter, reminded you how difficult it is to laugh at things that relate to issues you tend to overlook, deliberately at that.

The difficulty with comedians is to know what kind of audience they have on a given day. Sometimes the people in the hall are receptive to a certain kind of humour and sometimes they’re tuned to a different set of situations. Very rarely do you have a discerning audience which gets the joke as soon as the punch-line is delivered. Haroon got that on Thursday. It wouldn’t be wise to give away the jokes (for the show is to carry on for three more days) therefore it would be safe to claim that it was a hilarious evening punctuated by one-liners and build-up sentences that were funny yet thought provoking.

He has developed this technique whereby he engages the audience, interacts with them initially to warm himself up and then to take a dig at them. It’s a successful formula for it gets him going. Then he creates a super structure, in Thursday case a bubble, and divides it into a lot of smaller chapters. But what’s so heartening to know is the subject he chooses.

Haroon picks issues such as violence, albeit in a roundabout way, class disparities and economic woes and puts a delightful spin on them. And the man knows how to laugh at himself. During the show, his take on the Dilliwala community, to which he belongs, and the Defence-Cliftonian lot he’s part of was simply brilliant. At one point when a member of the audience told him that he was an ENT specialist and explained what it meant, Haroon said: “Sir this is not 1842, we know what ENT means.” When asked about the most recurrent ailment in the ENT category, the doctor replied ‘cancer’. To Haroon’s credit, he diluted the severity of the answer by saying “Why did you have to say that sir? Now who’s going to bring the show back to life?”

It was praiseworthy how Haroon in the climax made an extempore song on the different professions that people in the hall belonged to.

Talking to Dawn the comedian said, “I start writing when I see something unusual and funny around. I keep thinking about it and mulling over it for a while then I sit down and spend some time going over different variations of it. Then I start to try it out on people and finally get to the finished product.”

Earlier, a young man by the name of Akbar Chaudhry opened the show for Saad Haroon. His brief stint on stage was also quite funny. One of his jokes was about the changed nomenclature if gay marriages started to happen in Pakistan. “There would be two valimas and everybody would be the larka wallah,” he said.

The performance will be held on a daily basis till Feb 16.