—Malcolm Muggeridge

Humour is too important to be left to the humorists. Especially since most of them are miserable sods: alcoholics, suicide-prone, gloomy, rude and exceedingly grim company. There is something about the business of producing humour for a living that seems always to make the practitioner of the sublime art unpleasant, morose and decidedly unfunny.

I have known R.K. Laxman since the mid-’80s. This national treasure has never said anything remotely memorable or laughable when I was around—which was quite often. The late Abu Abraham drew superbly witty and sly cartoons, but he was never scintillating company. Mario Miranda, happily still with us, and the deceased Mumbai icon, Busybee, masters in their vocation, were strangers to jokes and jest—something they readily acknowledged. O.V. Vijayan, a particularly austere individual, once told me he “hated” drawing cartoons because he felt he was under obligation to amuse his audience. Abu constantly agonised over whether his cartoons would provoke even a small titter; he frequently called in the office peon to pronounce on his work. “If I couldn’t make him laugh, I tore up the drawing.”

One of Charlie Chaplin’s wives wrote in her autobiography that the world-renowned clown was funny only on the screen, off it he was mean and self-serving. Peter Sellers was a vicious misanthrope. James Thurber was trapped most of his life in terrible and debilitating domesticity. Vicky, arguably the most revered and respected British cartoonist of the ’70s and ’80s, committed suicide, unable to come to terms with an unjust world. Woody Allen, whom I heard playing jazz in New York, never makes eye contact with his audience which is merely three feet away. And after his weekly performance at the Carlyle Hotel, he rushes off since he is “terrified of meeting people”. The Ahmednagar-born comic actor-writer, Spike Milligan, was in therapy all his adult life. His tombstone reads, “I told you I was ill.”

After countless books, biographies, dissertations, we are still no wiser about why full-time humorists are such melancholy people. William Shakespeare wrote only a few comedies; most of his plays are tragedies. The Russian short story writer, Anton Chekhov, noted: “Any fool can write a tragedy, it takes real genius to write a comedy.” Interestingly, you can call a person all kinds of foul names but if you accuse him of not having a sense of humour, he will immediately challenge you to a duel. Everyone believes they are irresistibly funny.

I have tried my hand at humour occasionally and unsuccessfully. I wish I could come up, like Nora Ephron, with this gem. Talking about her first husband, the famous Watergate journalist, Carl Bernstein, she said, “He is so sex-mad he is capable of having sex with a Venetian blind.”

After a lifetime of studying humour, I have come to two conclusions. There are essentially only six or seven “original” jokes, the rest are variations on a theme. Second, people who tell non-stop jokes are invariably colossal bores—they’ve mugged up from Khushwant Singh’s joke books.

So, which is the world’s funniest joke? A worldwide contest was held some years ago. The winning entry was eminently forgettable. Favourites in the genre are entirely subjective.

Groucho Marx was once asked which of his jokes produced the biggest laughs. He cited two. A guest at one of Groucho’s parties prepares to leave and comes up to the great man and says, “I’d like to say goodbye to your wife.” “Who wouldn’t,” replies Groucho. Harpo tells Groucho: “The garbage man is here.” “Tell him we don’t want any today,” answers Groucho.

The man who has a genuine sense of humour among politicians is Atal Behari Vajpayee. He not only makes jokes but is eager to hear them. In the early ’80s when I was editing Debonair, he told me with a wink: “Your magazine is very good but I have to keep it under my pillow.”

A good one I read recently concerns President Lyndon B. Johnson caught up in the anti-Vietnam agitation in America. A protester outside the White House carried a placard which read: “LBJ pull out, like your daddy should have done.”