At the height of the devastating American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln visited the war front at Fort Stevens to inspect, first-hand, the defences of the Unionist forces. The task of showing the President around fell on a young officer, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. – who would later go on to become a justice of the Supreme Court and an illustrious legal historian and philosopher.
But on that morning of July 1864, as young Holmes pointed out the enemy lines in the distance to his President, Lincoln stood up – all 6 feet 4 inches of him plus his stovepipe hat – to have a good look.
No sooner, seeing a clear target jutting out, a volley of fire sputtered from the enemy trenches. Holmes grabbed Lincoln in a flash and dragged him under cover, shouting “Get down, you fool!”
Holmes quickly realised what he had said, and to whom, and expected disciplinary action. But Lincoln said disarmingly, “Captain Holmes, I’m glad to see you know how to talk to a civilian.”
At different phases of human history, the world has seen tumultuous times that have thrown the rhythm of life to the wind, caused untold sorrow and suffering. Today, we are more connected than ever before, and so are feeling the impact of calamities taking place on the other side of our planet faster, and more than ever. And like everything jetting across the seas, disaster has also travelled fast, and far.
But even the gravest of situations have never been able to bully the human spirit. It has always displayed the gall to see death in the face, wink, and crack a joke. Some did it better than others. Abe Lincoln pulled them off with aplomb. His gabs crossed the Atlantic as, in reporting about which way the American civil war was going, London’s Saturday Review informed its readers, “One advantage the Americans have is the possession of a President who is not only the First Magistrate, but the Chief Joker of the Land.”
Much less is known about the humorous traits of Mahatma Gandhi throughout his struggles, both in South Africa and in India. Mostly regarded as a sombre, no-nonsense person, only those close to him, like Sarojini Naidu or Rajagopalachari, spoke about the funny bones of the Mahatma. Rajagopalachari called Gandhi, “A man of laughter.” Veteran Gandhian Shobhana Radhakrishna, who was born and grew up in Gandhi’s Sewagram, narrated this. When Gandhi was in South Africa, in 1910, the government there treated all non-Christian marriages as invalid. Gandhi mischievously told Kasturba, “This means, you are my mistress.”
Again, while going to attend the Round Table Conference in England, when a reporter asked, “Mr Gandhi, do you think you are properly dressed to meet the King?” The Mahatma had famously quipped, “Do not worry about my clothes. The King has enough clothes on for both of us.”
Humour bloomed in the most strenuous of places at the most unlikely hours. Jokes went round in the damp trenches of the Second World War, while solders cramped together in the ditches, firing and being fired at. Ridicule and irony often underpinned those jests. Here’s one: Hitler and Göring are standing atop the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on Berliners’ faces. So Göring says: “Why don’t you jump?”
Supposedly, the joke did not end there. A factory worker in Hitler’s Germany was reportedly executed for retelling it.
Okay, here’s another one from the WWII trench, presumably crammed with French solders: There are four people in a train compartment -- a German solder, an old lady, a young and beautiful French woman, and a young Frenchman. The train enters a tunnel, and no one can see anything. A kiss is heard, then a thumping slap. When the train comes out of the tunnel, the German solder has a horrible black eye.
“So unlucky,” thinks the German to himself. “The Frenchman gets the kiss and I get the blame.”
“Well done, my girl,” thinks the old lady. “You stood up to that brute.”
The young woman is puzzled. “Why would that German kiss that old lady?”
The Frenchman, meanwhile, says to himself, “I kiss the back of my hand, hit the German, and no one suspects me.”
In those destructive days and scary nights of the Second World War, humour helped to steam off frustration. Mockery became the garb to cover the blatancy of helplessness. A new breed of newspapers, called ‘trench newspapers’, sprouted in England. People found their poodle of laughter in the gentle derision of ‘Wipers Times’ -- the most popular trench newspaper of that time.
The entire world is right now going through a depressing phase. Amidst the scare and death and idiocy and bravery, humour is showing its quirky face. Mostly in social media. Is it an appropriate time for humour, some would ask. It’s one of those questions to which there is no right answer. But through all the arduous spells of human history, humour has always managed to cheat its time, cared two hoots about probity and careened its way, whistling. And the refrain of that whistle, well, can anyone put it more poignantly than Abraham Lincoln? “I laugh,” he told to a friend in the darkest of days, “because I must not cry.”
(The writer is a Bengaluru-based software entrepreneur and a freelance writer on travel, music and culture)