Difa-e-Pakistan Video of the Day

I would have posted this yesterday but sometimes weekends should remain weekends i.e. work-free, no matter the happiness work may bring. In any case, this has to be the best thing to have happened in Pakistan yesterday or perhaps even the year. And may I add, it could not have happened to a better blowhard at a better occasion (a meeting of the leadership of the Duffer-e-Pakistan Council).






Given his past exploits rigging elections, General Hamid Gul sahib should have known by now that there's no guarantee of the kursi once you leave it.

Comedy As Serious Business

“Ever wondered what you could do in light of ongoing terrorism, the Haqqani network, the Taliban, the al Qaeda? Tried shooting off a punch line, or throwing a joke at them?”

So began this piece in the Express Tribune today praising This Is Standup Comedy, a four-part web series in which local comics Saad Haroon and Danish Ali ostensibly “try and explore the effect terrorism has had on Pakistani society”. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that as the series loaded I was already thinking but haven’t we got any psychologists for that?




Half the point of good comedy is that it isn’t earnest, well-meaning or motivated by the desire to please people or explain the world. It is about subversion. A good comic will not say the right things. He or she will say the wrong things. And if, in the process of saying the wrong thing, they punch a hole in my own Line Of Bullshit Control, well then ladies and gentlemen we have a winner. Or rather, a loser. Because that’s what genuinely funny people or POVs tend to be, losers aka misfits, underdogs, freaks, misanthropes, outsiders.

Take the delightful David Baddiel-written film starring Iranian funnyman Omid Djalili, The Infidel:




Take Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kulvinder Ghir, Meera Syal and Nina Wadia’s experiences of growing up in multicultural Britain in Goodness Gracious Me:




Take Fifty Fifty, which proved that censorship doesn’t have to be a bar to the pithiest of social commentary:




Take Chris Cooper, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong’s Four Lions, which showed us the difference between making fun of jihadis and making a funny about jihadis:




Now take This Is Standup Comedy, which consists largely of Saad Haroon and a host of other people pretending stand up comedy didn’t exist before English-speaking Muslims in a post-9/11 world discovered it, lamenting how hard it is to a) be misunderstood b) get a visa, and go outside and jump up and down on it.

You should do this not just because it’s good for your hams and glutes, but also because both Haroon and Sami Shah* – the genuinely wacky Danish Ali, despite his top billing, sadly only has four lines – are both talented, experienced comics and really should have known better than to try to pass of intellectual laziness as an ethical stance.

[*Update: We have received clarification from Sami Shah that he was not involved in the creation of the series and was merely interviewed for it. We apologize if a misleading impression was given by the above lines.]

The series does not explore the effect terrorism has had on Pakistani society as much as it explores the unfortunate results of comics being unable to transcend their own social/religious/ethnic/sexual identities. The answer to why this is so might lie in this line from the ET review:

"Haroon and Ali are well known among the hip crowd for being Pakistan’s première English language stand-up comics."

This is pretty much the comedic equivalent of jumping into a river with a concrete block around your ankles, which, as anyone else who has tried it at home can tell you, is really not funny.

When it happens – as This Is Standup Comedy inadvertently showcases - what you are left with is not the tight writing or detached dissection of universal human traits the four examples above feature but different versions of punch lines that can be summarized thus:

Terrorists are stupid.

People who think I’m a terrorist are stupid.

Why don’t you like me?

Live shows or series inhabiting this position don’t do themselves any favors. First, the comics seem to feel that being brown, from a conservative background and funny is in itself a novelty so they don’t work very hard and the material just isn’t good enough, especially when you compare it to thematically similar work that has already been done in both English and vernacular languages. This goes back to that notion of the wider world, and specifically discrimination, not existing before 9/11. Local comics looking to get mileage out of Islamophobia as a lived experience should look to the Jews. Not to convert (you’d have to be a real motherfucker to do that) but to contemplate what Jewish comics learned years ago; the trick is not to make fun of the goyim being anti-Semitic but to make fun of the Jew experiencing anti-Semitism instead. For example, Sami Shah's throwaway line about just wanting to 'understand the Taliban' could have led into a riff on hipsters at Espresso discussing ideology over a latte, but instead we are left again with the hackneyed profiling joke.

Second, I don’t really believe a stand up show on the day after a bomb blast is fighting the Taliban any more than I believe a fashion show an hour after a bomb blast is fighting the Taliban or my naanwala sticking bread in a tandoor the morning after a bomb blast is fighting the Taliban. Sometimes trying to make a living is just that, trying to make a living. The only difference between a certain kind of Pakistani in the creative sphere and my naanwala is that he doesn’t make a song and dance (and documentary) about it.

And now for something completely different…

The Mooning of Pakistan

Stung by intense criticism of the cretinism of Pakistan's maulvis and their perennial inability to reconcile even the basic concepts of natural science with their warped ideas of religion, the Ruet-e-Hilal (Moon-Sighting) Committee has this year attempted to allay some of the concerns by going out of their way to address them...

Here's Mufti "I Love Muftas" Muneebur Rehman, head of the central Ruet Committee attempting to sight the moon...

Meanwhile, here's Peshawar mosque Qasim Jan's Mufti Shahabuddin Popalzai, head of his own Ruet Committee attempting to do a moon landing in his own inimitable style...

First of Ramzan mubarak. Or Second of Ramzan. Or whatever. And don't miss the full moon on the 12th of Ramzan.

No Jokes Please, We're Fashionable

Pakistanis, in general, have little tolerance for satire about themselves. That is why political humour programmes on television usually have to preface their episodes with a disclaimer, labeling them clearly as satire and not to be taken seriously. But of all Pakistanis perhaps none are as dour, humourless and self-righteous as members of the fashion 'fraternity' (let's just say this fraternity is no Animal House). For all their claims of 'playfulness' and 'fun' in their designs, they are one acidic and sour lot when at the receiving end of even good-natured ribbing.

Witness the indignant response to Express Tribune's rather funny April 1st joke on its Lifestyle pages. ET's April Fool prank 'broke' the news that the Lahore-based Pakistan Fashion Design Council (PFDC) and the Karachi-based Fashion Pakistan (FP) - often roundly criticized for making their own daerrh eenth ki masjidein - were to merge, and carried fake quotes from prominent designers welcoming the move.

The joke that went over the fashionistas' head

Ms Sehyr Saigol, the chairperson of PFDC, Saad Ali, the CEO of PFDC and Amir Adnan, CEO of FP, then decided to fire off this letter published in ET today:

The letter reads:

"We, the Pakistan Fashion Design Council (PFDC), Fashion Pakistan (FP) and Libas International, are writing to you in complaint of the false story published in The Express Tribune’s Life & Style Pages dated April 1, 2011.

We take strong exception to the false, incorrect, baseless, inaccurate statements and information based on conjectures and surmises, supported by statements of renowned industry personalities, which have been reported as established facts without soliciting our, or indeed anyone’s, confirmation as to the authenticity or veracity of the contents published in the aforesaid story.

This story is misleading and, in fact, represents a complete falsification of material. It also used and distorts a logo (of Libas International) without the consent of the logo copyright holder (Sehyr Saigol), infringing copyright and intellectual property rights therein.

Further, the story published has portrayed us as non-law abiding citizens and has exposed us to the threat of possible legal action by falsely reporting that the PFDC and FP are merging.

Amir Adnan (CEO of FP), Sehyr Saigol (Chairperson of the PFDC), Kamiar Rokni (member of the executive committee of the PFDC) and Hassan Sheheryar Yasin (member of the executive committee of the PFDC) shall hold your newspaper liable for any consequential damage to their reputation, and would like to strongly establish herewith that any and all information attributed to their names within this piece is false and a misrepresentation of fact and of their nature.

It is disappointing that a well-reputed newspaper such as yours has overlooked ethics and relevant laws, especially those pertaining to libel, and has published this story. We demand that you tender an apology to all the parties misrepresented and misquoted herewith and publish the same, along with a retraction of all misinformation and misquotations.

Sehyr Saigol
PFDC chairperson (executive committee) and publisher, Libas International
Saad Ali
CEO PFDC,
Amir Adnan
CEO, FP"

You just can't make this shit up. Not only do the we-take-ourselves-so-seriously authors not exhibit the slightest clue that the piece in question was quite obviously a prank (if nothing else, the organogram that posited that the 'bad boy of fashion journalism' Mohsin Sayeed would be the new 'Chairperson for Life' in the new set-up might have provided a clue to anyone with half a brain), or show any circumspection about the date of publication, do not miss the self-righteous threats of legal action and claims of 'damage to their reputations'. After this patently idiotic letter, you may well wonder, what reputations? Certainly none involving a sense of humour it would be safe to say.

The self-righteous leading lights of fashion also obviously don't even regularly read anything beyond what is sent to them as a clipping. The very next day after the joke, i.e. on April 2, ET had in fact published this story clarifying things for the dimwitted. So, just to reiterate, the poor ET editor had to publish the following clarification once again in response to the letter:

Say it slowly, in bold type, they're not the sharpest scissors in the drawer

I can sympathise with ET completely on this one. Instead of tacking regrets on to that clarification, it must have taken a lot of restraint from the editor not to have said where he probably really wanted the fashionistas to put their letter. But I guess he didn't want to take on people who have single-handedly defeated the Taliban.

Parody of the Day

Just came across this hilarious skit from Dunya TV's Hasb-e-Haal, where the resident comic genius known as Azizi (real name Sohail Ahmed) parodies former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi's persona after his recent bombastic speech. In common parlance, this would undoubtedly be known as the 'taking' of Shah Mahmood... Enjoy.

So You Want To Be A Pakistani Talk Show Host?

So, taking the cue from that previous video I posted and the pointing out by a reader that, in fact, one could make one's own videos on that site, here is my tentative first offering... Basically just fooling around and testing the software, so to speak. It took me a grand total of less than an hour to get this out. Next time, will work more on the script.

Don't Peg Me

Only a Sardarji could have come up with this one.

This is an actual whiskey being marketed in the UK. The name is apparently based on a rather (inside) desi joke about what to do when you ask someone what drink they would like and they respond "Kuchh Nai" (Punjabi inflected 'Kuchh Nahin' meaning 'Nothing')... So, of course, out would come this bottle...

You can read more about this enterprising Scotch with a desi name here.