You ever seen a man at an airport desperately patting his pockets, rummaging wildly in his bags, throwing things around because he has lost something important?
It reminds one so much of the media here, looking for their sense of humour. It is lost, stolen, deliberately suffocated to death. Or is that shrivelled up little worm on the dusty floor what's left of it?
With over 600 journalists battling the English language in situ, it is an acrid testimony that not one even tries to aspire to generate laughter. Reckon we have all sort of tacitly agreed that if we take laughter seriously nobody will take us.
Seriously, that is.
Of course, it has a lot to do with our own insecurity, the fragile expat nature, the Colonel Blimp pomposity that arises from our love affair with designations (I'm the COO to the CIO to the CEO-Special Ops- naah, gerrrouttahere) and the stupendous belief that what we write shakes the world.
How can we be frivolous or trivial when we are dedicating our lives to making a better world? If you are working for a publication that comes out with 1000 copies every 48 to 56 days you have to take yourself very seriously. No one else does.
Sad, that we have stopped laughing. That's why editors, in their infinite wisdom, slug the occasional foray into the dark and grim world of humour with just that word in case the reader doesn't figure it out.
But it is the whole approach to funny ha ha and funny peculiar that has gone wrong. We have surrendered our zest for that most distilled gift in writing that of reflecting ourselves and all our delightful silliness in a circle of funny mirrors, distorting the gravitas of our vanity with self-mockery, stretching our little illusions like Turkish taffy and pulling it all out of shape, just having a good laugh at ourselves.
Has the stamina for taking a dig at hallowed stuff drained away along with our self confidence or is it that we are afraid of being laughed at, rather than laughed with?
There has to be a reason why taking the mickey out of ourselves, our friends and our institutions is forbidden territory and we'd rather write 2500 dreary words on the old man and the souk, like we were little Hemingway castaways.
What we have done as a tribe is 'shushed' it out of existence.
No, we can't hurt sensibilities, no we can't poke fun at 'them' because we'll lose ads, Sshhhhh, they might misunderstand, you want trouble? We can't be seen to be banal, we are a serious paper.
Well, I have this to say about that.
I am up to here with serious papers. And humour is not banal. Very simply, all these hush hush, no can do warnings, handed down like revered legacies to newcomers have created a whole slew of scribes (okay, it has some alliterative value) who equate humour with critique, laughter with scorn and nothing could be further from the truth.
Give your readers the warm roll on the floor of mirth, people. Stop taking yourselves so solemnly.
You leave the job, they won't remember your name next week, that's how vital you are. And take it from me, it doesn't matter what you write, the earth won't move.
But at least you might get a laugh from someone, add a little sunshine to their day.
What greater benediction for a writer than that.
Bikram Vohra is editor of the Bahrain Tribune
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