INDEX ON CENSORSHIP | VOL.52 | NO.4
Up F ront
EDITOR’S LETTER
Still laughing, just
There’s a global assault on laughter at a time when we need comedians the most, writes JEMIMAH STEINFELD
IF YOU WANT proof of how resilient and defiant humour is head to London’s Weiner Holocaust Library. There you will find a collection of comedic works from within Nazi Germany. In 1939, for example, Count Alfred Hessenstein published a collection called The Joke’s on Hitler: Underground Whispers from the Land of the Concentration Camp. That same year Kitty Fehr, a 15-year-old school girl, emigrated to the UK bringing her diary of jokes from the Reich with her. Today, when the sign outside the libary was defaced with graffiti, they responded in somewhat humorous fashion by saying they’d add it to their collection.
Humour survives, even in the darkest of times. But that doesn’t mean it survives easily. Earlier this year, within a short period of time, two comedians were arrested in China and Vietnam. This was against a backdrop of rumblings in the UK as comedians were being no-platformed. The scenarios were and are different but tied together by a common thread – they were being silenced. Our special report was born of these events.
We explore the myriad threats comedians face and who is still standing-up. Salil Tripathi writes about comedians in India having lawyers on speed dial, not too dissimilar to the UK where Rosie and Charlie Holt say comedians live in fear of litigation. The charge of offence comes up a lot from everyone and everywhere. The strict religious code of the Taliban leaves little room for humour, write Spozhmai Maani and Rizwan Sharif, but even Canadian First Nations comic Janelle Niles found herself in hot water when a joke from a guest she’d invited to her comedy night landed terribly.
Despite the risks comedians continue, as Shalom Auslander writes in his poignant opening essay, because comedy “masquerades as folly, but it can take down an empire”. We see this in places like Uganda, where Danson Kahyana speaks to a troupe who use the Shakespearean concept of the fool to bravely laugh at the leadership, and in Turkey, where Kaya Genç interviews comedians who challenge authority in a way few others would dare.
Jokes are “one of the best ingredients for survival” said Aung San Suu Kyi, they’re what stopped Gandhi, he quipped, from committing suicide. The comedian Vicky Xu tells us that stand-up has helped her deal with being the target of extensive attacks from the Chinese state. John Sweeney writes about the festival he runs in Ukraine, where the comedy acts are essential for keeping up morale. Indeed, the jokes within these pages have helped us. We began research on the issue before Hamas’ attack in Israel and Israel’s response. The world has felt more fractured since and we open the magazine with a long piece from within Gaza and Israel. We don’t linger there though and not just for the mundane reason that we’d already started commissioning for this report. Instead because when all is exploding around us we still have to laugh. As Mark Twain said “humour is mankind’s greatest blessing”. So here’s to the comedians.
On a final note, please turn to the culture section to read Punitive Squad, a trippy, pacey new story from celebrated Belarusian writer Alhierd Bacharevič.
Jemimah Steinfeld, editor-in-chief
52(04):1/1|DOI:10.1177/03064220231219873
C R E D I
T F O R F R O N T
C O V E R :
M i n t I
m a g e s L i m i t e d A l a m y
Pressure from the party and the people
Our cover artist Yue Minjun is one of China’s most prominent artists and also recently the target of a hate campaign
YUE MINJUN IS known for his iconic “laughing man” paintings and sculptures. While his works are largely celebrated in China, back in May Yue was accused by China’s growing body of extreme nationalists of insulting the People’s Liberation Army due to some of his signature images donning military regalia. He was denounced as a “cultural traitor”, the braying crowds demanding his investigation and punishment. Some of Yue’s paintings were then blocked from Chinese social media platform Weibo.
The attacks on Yue were just days after Li Haoshi, a Chinese stand-up comedian who joked about the PLA, was arrested, and shows the many pressures ar tists face within the country.
INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG 1
