Bachi Karkaria, Chhimi Tenduf-La with Amit Verma entertained the audience with their wit and humor in the hilarious session ‘Comically Yours’ at Speak Out that added laughter to the already lovely atmosphere.
Amit Verma quipped about Bachi coming from an era which was completely different from his and opened the session with a question to Bachi, “When did you start thinking of yourself a funny person?” Bachi responded with her own version of satire that she was not from the Jurassic era before she answered. “I read a lot of joke books to understand how to get the pitch right, timing right, and the content right. We watched spoofs and British humor influenced me the most. I was a big fan of Flanders and Swann.”
The same question was put to Chhimi and he casually replied with a shrug, “In my family, we never had a serious conversation,” he paused, waited for the laughter to die out and continued, “I didn’t set out to be funny. As a kid, I had an attention span of a minute. But there was this one teacher of mine who was really funny, always managed to catch my attention. Later when I became a teacher, I tried to find out who is really laughing and who is pretending to laugh.”
Amit turned back to Bachi and asked, “How did humor change your life?” and was immediately shot down by her as she replied, “It is not metamorphosis. It was not like that I was in a cocoon and one fine day, I came out as a butterfly. Humor is in my daily life.” The audience burst out laughing one more time and it took even more time to settle down again. Chhimi followed the tradition and added, “If nobody gets your satire, that’s when your life changes.”
“What sort of role does humor play in your life?” Amit directed the question to Chhimi first this time. “It taught me not to take everything that’s happening in your life seriously. It’s very liberating. People can make a joke about themselves and what they have done. In a conversation, I don’t have to be careful but can make fun of each other,” he responded.
As the conversation took a slightly serious turn, Amit’s next query tracked the same way as he asked about the political correctness of the humor. Chhimi volunteered to take that, “There are certain things that you can joke about and there are certain things that you can’t joke about. This is where things get nasty. Especially with Twitter, people tend to be insulting and the hashtags allow another group to follow the same way. This needs to be toned down.” Bachi agreed with him, “Some subjects are serious that can’t be joked about. For any subject, use the context very well and play with the words. This is what I would like to call as intelligent association of words with context.” Chhimi nodded, “Jokes are to uplift someone’s day. You like to laugh, but you don’t like to get laughed at.”
With that, the stage was open for the audience and the session was concluded with the panelists providing valuable inputs on handling privileges and stereotypes and how not to be a slapstick writer.
About the Author: Lavanyaa is a fiction writer, published author, wannabe dancer, and voracious reader. To support all these fun activities, she works in the software industry. She currently writes for Bookstalkist.