The Empire Tickles Back: Hybrid Humour (and Its Problems) in Contemporary Asian-British Comedy

Rainer Emig

The limits of hybrid humour can be seen in the appropriation of clichés and stereotypes in and as jokes. When the former butt of the joke becomes the joker, does he therefore cease to be the victim? This question is addressed in relation to successful forms of Asian-British humour in literature, film and radio and television shows. On the one hand, Asian-British comedies corre- spond closely to Homi Bhabha’s model of a third space. They fulfil its criteria of hybridisation and exist in a tension between national and global cultures and in a constant state of interroga- tion, both by themselves and by their various cultural “outsides”. At the same time, the suspicion remains that humour’s conciliatory effects also take away much of the potential critical edge of this new space. Films like My Beautiful Laundrette, Bhaji on the Beach, East is East, and Bend It Like Beckham show an increasing trend towards “acceptable” and marketable ways of portraying alterity. Successful “ethnic” stories like The Buddha of Suburbia and Anita and Me use humour to defuse potential tensions. A detailed analysis of selected sketches from Goodness Gracious Me shows that subversion and containment are indeed possible within the same humorous for- mat.

“‘Have I made the first joke? Will everybody always be told how I made the first joke?’ ‘No, little friend’, said the Lion. ‘You have not made the first joke, you have only been the first joke.’”1 This charming and seemingly harmless little episode, which concludes the creation of a magical world in a famous English children’s book, the first story of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, has some relevance for the analysis that the present essay wishes to undertake. The difference between making a joke and being a joke is partly a question of skill, be it linguistic, social and cultural, or all of these. Yet it is also largely a question of one’s status and therefore of power. As two schol- ars of television comedy put it: “funniness is not a property of utterances themselves, but a property of circumstance (social or individual), a property thus subject to negotiation and dispute”.2 In C.S. Lewis’s children’s tale, the benevolent creator-Lion reminds the forward little jackdaw of this rule when he admonishes it in the above quotation. Yet shortly before, he had encour- aged the animals (whom he had just granted speech) to use humour: “Laugh

1 C.S. Lewis, ‘The Magician’s Nephew’, The Chronicals of Narnia (1955; New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 7-106 (p.72). 2 Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, Popular Film and Television Comedy, Popular Fiction Series (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p.65. 170 Emig and fear not, creatures. Now that you are no longer dumb and witless, you need not always be grave. For jokes as well as justice come in with speech.”3 This rather philosophical statement on humour shows that it need not be condescending to apply an insight from a children’s book to seemingly very different expressions of humour, contemporary Asian-British comedies.4 On the one hand, Lewis’s tale represents in large parts a colonial situation -- with many obvious missionary elements. At the same time it remains noticeably aware of what it is doing and postulating. Its idea of access to speech as a prerequisite to articulation both of jokes and justice also corresponds to vari- ous crucial concepts of postcolonial theory that we will encounter below. Furthermore it applies to general theories of power in society, those that emphasise that it rests on articulation. In the case of the media, this articula- tion requires forms, genres, but also valuable broadcasting time. Lewis’s stance on joking is in fact not very different from that proposed by the most influential twentieth-century theorist on humour, the Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose idea of “justice” is a levelling of social hierarchies through humour in his ideal scenario of medieval carnival. There, he suspects “a temporary suspension, both ideal and real, of hierarchical rank [...] permitting no distance between those who came in contact with each other and liberating from norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other times.”5 Bakhtin’s rather utopian view of humour is countered -- in the context of postcolonial situations and texts -- by Gayatri Spivak’s cautionary remarks concerning what she terms “subaltern” utterances, that is interventions by those who are relegated to an inferior position of rank and power, namely women and the colonised. Her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ doubts the possibility of creating statements, positions, and texts from a post- colonial position that truly enter into a dialogue with dominant positions.6 Her point is that a position from which such an utterance can be made and from which it might be comprehensible requires a subscription to the hege- monic power of the coloniser. This power already manifests itself in the structures of the colonising language (English in our case), but also extends

3 Lewis, p.72. 4 This shift also forms the background of Marie Gillespie’s essay ‘From Comic Asians to Asian Comics: Goodness Gracious Me, British Television Comedy and Representations of Ethnicity’, in Group Identities on French and British Television, ed. by Michael Scriven amd Emily Roberts (New York: Berghahn, 2003), pp.93-107. 5 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), p.10. 6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), pp.66-111.