The Assault of Laughter a Foreword from Amnesty International
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THE ASSAULT OF LAUGHTER A FOREWORD FROM AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL As a human rights organisation, we hadn’t yet celebrated our fifteenth birthday when ‘A Poke in the Eye (With a Sharp Stick)’, the first of the three shows that began the sequence of Secret Policeman’s Balls, was staged over three nights at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London in April 1976. The idea of fundraising for Amnesty by putting on anarchic evenings of comedy sketches – a cross between a Beyond the Fringe- style revue and a night of stand-up – was hatched the previous year by Amnesty International’s then assistant director Peter Luff and John Cleese, star of the comedy hit of the decade, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and of that year’s new TV sensation, Fawlty Towers. Luff had asked Cleese, an Amnesty supporter, if he had any fundraising ideas, and Cleese suggested he’d arrange a comedy benefit gig featuring ‘a few pals’. They turned out to be the cream of UK comedy talent, including most of the Python team, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller from Beyond the Fringe, Eleanor Bron and Dame Edna Everage (aka Barry Humphries). It all came about with a kind of happy serendipity – and it happened at a crucial time in Amnesty’s history. The Amnesty story began in November 1960 with the personal outrage of an English lawyer called Peter Benenson. He told of reading a newspaper article about two Portuguese students who, in a Lisbon bar one evening, raised a toast ‘to freedom’. Students often do things they regret in pubs, but toasting freedom isn’t usually one of them. Under Antonio Salazar’s regime, however, they were reported to the authorities and sentenced to seven years 8 A POKE IN THE EYE in prison. The regime’s absurd response to this so-called crime moved Benenson to write an article in the Observer newspaper called ‘The Forgotten Prisoners’. Published in May 1961, it urged readers to write letters on behalf of ‘prisoners of conscience’ – those imprisoned simply for peacefully expressing their political, moral or religious beliefs – throughout the world. Benenson’s appeal sparked an international grassroots campaign to protect human rights, and Amnesty International was born. The new organisation quickly built a reputation for meticulous research, political neutrality and impartiality, and this gave Amnesty a moral authority that meant we were listened to – even by those who would rather not hear what we had to say. By 1976, thousands of prisoners had been released, in whole or in part because of pressure from Amnesty. Our annual report, a detailed country-by-country summary of the human rights situation around the world, was recognised by governments and organisations such as the United Nations. And we broadened our agenda to include campaigns on specific issues such as torture and the death penalty in recognition of the fact that human rights abuses against individuals would continue to proliferate until such practices were outlawed everywhere. As our public profile grew, so too did international recognition. In 1977, the organisation was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for our work against torture and for having ‘contributed to securing the ground for freedom, for justice, and thereby also peace in the world’. Throughout our fifty-year history, Amnesty has grown, developed and changed in response to global challenges, consistently promoting all the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights while campaigning on specific abuses. From our early focus on prisoners of conscience and political prisoners in the Cold War era, we have increasingly exposed other forms of cruelty and oppression (for instance, at one point researchers concluded that there were ‘no political prisoners in Guatemala, only political killings’). ‘Disappearances’, control of FOREWORD 9 the arms trade, poverty, discrimination of all kinds and corporate responsibility have all become part of our human-rights campaign agenda, as have abuses connected with the rise of armed conflicts – mass killings, widespread displacement of people, the use of child soldiers and the unchallenged impunity of mass abusers. We also find constructive ways of working with other organisations and grassroots movements; for example, Amnesty’s campaign to end violence against women produced effective joint actions with local women’s groups all over the world. Individual casework remains the backbone of our work, reminding us always that the concept of human rights is not abstract – it is about real people. The Secret Policeman’s Balls have been part of this journey. In the first fifteen years, Amnesty’s principles, purpose and practices were clear and well developed. By the time of the first show, we had approximately 70,000 individual members in sixty-five countries, with some 1,600 active Amnesty campaigning groups in thirty-three countries. The organisation was highly respected by governments, campaigners and everyone concerned with protecting human rights. But to become even more effective and to put human rights at the forefront of the worldwide conversation, Amnesty needed to reach out to the millions of potential supporters who were not already committed human rights activists. The UK comedy fundraisers proved a surprisingly good vehicle. Is there a contradiction between the deadly serious work that we are engaged in, and the laughter generated by the Secret Policeman’s Ball? Many of the prisoners of conscience we try to defend spend years in prison, sometimes in horrific conditions. Many are tortured or otherwise abused. Some are murdered or simply ‘disappear’. There’s nothing remotely funny about what happens to these people. Yet the Secret Policeman’s Balls are all about laughter – the more of it the better! The Private Eye editor and Have I Got News For You star Ian Hislop once described feeling that ‘humour and Amnesty are unlikely bedfellows’ after announcing the winners at an Amnesty Media awards ceremony. 10 A POKE IN THE EYE How, he wondered, is it possible to laugh about things such as torture and the death penalty? ‘I went on stage following a catalogue of extremely distressing reports of human rights abuses. It didn’t seem the ideal time to make such a joke, but I felt obliged because one of the winning entries had contained such a good joke that it would have been unfair not to pass it on. It was about a secret policeman who was ordered to catch a lion in the desert. This seemed an impossible task until the policeman revealed his secret. He would catch a rabbit and force it to confess it was a lion.’ The audience loved the joke. He said, ‘This is black humour, gallows humour, even, but it does indicate that even in the worst of circumstances people want to laugh and that laughter has the power to make them feel better.’ But the relationship between comedy and satire and Amnesty’s purpose in defending freedom of expression goes beyond making people feel better when the world looks bleak. Laughter and freedom of expression are intimately linked. More than a hundred years ago, the American writer Mark Twain said, ‘Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.’ It is a powerful, non-violent weapon against those forces that would deny freedom. Dictators hate laughter, especially when it is directed at them. Freedom of expression – or rather, the lack of it – lies at the heart of many of the human rights violations that Amnesty deals with. We believe that everyone in the world has the right to speak and write freely, without fear of persecution, provided thay are not violating someone else’s rights. One can measure freedom within a society by the attitude its government has towards free speech, particularly that of high-profile voices such as dissidents, political and religious figures, artists, musicians, writers and comedians. Regardless of what we might think about any particular government in Britain or the United States, a comedian can walk on stage and insult a leader without fear of imprisonment and torture. But millions of people around the world aren’t so lucky, which is why Amnesty defends the right to freedom of speech, and FOREWORD 11 fights for the release of thousands of political prisoners around the world. When oppressive regimes clamp down on their citizens, freedom of speech is normally the first thing to go. But what does a dictator and his army of thousands have to fear from a peaceful lone voice? Quite a lot, actually. Authoritarian leaders live in fear of dissent. And they know that an idea, spoken by a single voice, can spread virally and inspire a whole nation to stand up for change. The Burmese comedians the Moustache Brothers, aka U Pa Pa Lay and U Law Zaw, spent seven years in a labour camp with shackles on their legs, for singing a funny song about the country’s ruling generals. They say, ‘Jokes share the suffering. That’s what government is afraid of. Jokes are like wildfire. They want to hide deep problems under the covers. But jokes spread the word.’ The world has changed dramatically in the fifty years since Peter Benenson’s newspaper article, but many of the problems we face remain the same. Bloggers in Egypt are detained. Access to the internet is blocked in Iran. Students in Azerbaijan are arrested for posting comments on Facebook – just like, back in 1960, those Portuguese students got in trouble for raising a glass in defiance of a dictator. In the internet age, Amnesty’s role is as important as ever. In many parts of the world, social media and the internet increasingly attract the attention of the security apparatus of oppressive regimes, because of the speed with which they transmit ideas and stimulate debate.