The pathetic treatment of Intellectual homour !!

I was itching to write about this topic for a while now. I have seen some of my US or European peers who co-facilitate Summits or Conferences with me possess a great sense of intellectual humour. But to their woeful dismay they find themselves not ticking with the audience who are supposedly well-bred Indian Executives.

Well, I am a lover of great humour myself that comes at you sideways, clever, witty, sardonic, with wordplay, no smiles, with a dash of bitters. Oh, yeah !! You need that flair to get it. But here is what I’ve noticed on the contrary, something not so profound, but a bit disconcerting to my friends at the least. Their best interspersed and thematic jokes, throughout the programs, have flown across the room, making no evident connection with the audience and then have silently disappeared into a far corner where they went to die. No, the jokes just weren’t working for them.

Well, as I mull over it, the reason is quite simple .. we have culturally developed a sense of humour which we expect to hit us straight on the nose, with big smiles or facial contortions telegraphing the punch line, plain goofy slapstick and physical comedy with no ambiguity whatsoever. That’s what we pass for a joke, don't we ? So I took my pathetic looking friends aside over dinner and euphemistically clarified the need for them to tune their pitch to the Indian ears slow and easy. And voila, I was glad to note that they began doing so and have received more genuinely amused and giggling audiences as a result. But summarily, I am inwardly so embarrassed to note that our brothers are stimulated by such oafish humour which almost equates with "someone putting on clowny pants and honking a horn”.

So, yes !! Humour can be invigorating to a sedate and lifeless audience but quite unsettling to the very dispatcher of it if it happens to miss the mark. Well !! I am not ready to pay such a big price with our Indy audience yet.