Laughing in Bangla

When I remember this story, it makes me laugh every time. I had just arrived in Bangladesh for the first time, having won a scholarship to study Bangla. The teacher began his first lesson with a question: "Do you know what a kak is?"

To him, it sounded, I suppose, like a benign vocabulary guessing game. The word he'd chosen, though, happens to sound like a startlingly foul-mouthed English word. A roomful of American students stared in disbelief, and then, when he unveiled an image of a crow, we laughed so hard we couldn't breathe. Our teacher stood by, patient, accommodating, sweet – and utterly out of touch with what was so funny.

Three years on, it's easy to think of that moment as representative of the whole country. It's not that Bangladeshis are clueless – actually, they're often extremely clever. But the more I know of Bangladesh, the more I wonder where the humour is and what its absence means for the country.

My own country, America, takes humour seriously. In fact, the current era is a kind of golden age of comedy. There's the Onion, a satirical newspaper and TV channel that punches holes in daily life's absurdity. There's Jon Stewart, who mocks each day's political happenings on the Daily Show. There's Stephen Colbert, who like Stewart is one of America's most popular entertainers. On the Colbert Report, he blows apart the nonsense of the right-wing blowhards who scream and shout on America's misinformation-crammed cable news shows by pretending to be one.

Comedy isn't just an American thing, of course. England is just as full of political satire (perhaps even more than America). Developing economies aren't excluded, either. In the midst of the Arab Spring, one of Egypt's most important political voices was a comedy news hour called al Bernameg ("The Show"). The show did such an effective job mocking the people in power that the host, Bassem Youssef, eventually got jailed by the Egyptian government and put on the Time 100 List.

It's hard to imagine anyone living in America on and off for three years without hearing of the Colbert Report or the Daily Show. But if there's a similar show in Bangladesh, then after three years, I've never heard of it. Questioned about what I might have missed, a Bangladeshi friend could only shrug.

TV is not the only outlet for humour, of course. But the odd lack of funniness among people is notable, too. At a protest in the year 2000 that drew people from all over the Western hemisphere, people seemed to agree: any situation deserving of such dissent also deserved intense mockery. I recall seeing and hearing jokes in three languages. (Some were too dirty to describe here.) In that same era, there was a protest group that focused on an age-old comedy gag: hitting politicians in the face with pies.

It's not just Westerners. Mere weeks into a visit to the Occupied West Bank in 2002, Palestinians' mischievous humour was unmistakable. "Sophia!" one colleague said with a smile as I walked into a meeting late, "Hurry up or you will make me late for my suicide bombing!"

But among Bangladeshi friends and colleagues, such things seem rare. Beyond a few cartoon images of heads in nooses, none of the protest movements of the last year or two wielded much ridicule or satire. Individuals are quite the same. Even a colleague of mine who is so smart and creative that he has a slight otherworldly quality can rarely see humour in things. When I made a blog post compiling photos of Khaleda Zia falling asleep at her own speeches, this fellow merely grumped that it was unethical to copy images from Google. Odd. Very odd.

But if Bangladesh isn't laughing, then rest assured that the US and UK have misgivings about their own humour.

Last year, British writer Jonathan Coe wrote an essay discussing London Mayor Boris Johnson, who, Coe says, sidetracks the public from his destructive political exploits by wilfully becoming the butt of jokes."When it's much easier and more pleasurable to laugh about a political issue than to think about it, Johnson's apparently self-deprecating honesty and lack of concern for his own dignity are bound to make him a hit," he writes.

In 2012, an American commentator made the same point. In an article for wise-ass magazine the Baffler, Steve Almond discussed American political comedians Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Neither is truly interested in subverting abusive power, author Steve Almond claims. Rather, Stewart often serves a shill for the exact political nonsense he claims to mock. Colbert kissed up to the US military even as news emerged about grave human rights violations soldiers committed in Iraq. The function of both is to remove the discomfort many Americans feel with increasing inequality, political corruption, and a war in which our soldiers were the bad guys from the start.

"It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage," Almond's essay reads, sounding like Karl Marx decrying religion.

While less brimming with vitriol, Coe says much the same. "Laughter is not just ineffectual as a form of protest," he writes. "It actually replaces protest." His title, "Sinking Giggling into the Sea," hints that too much distraction from serious issues may be ruinous.

If the comedy in the US and UK distracts from necessary ethical concern, no one could accuse Bangladesh of doing the same. Here, conflict is entrenched, violent, and entirely serious. No one is mocking it or themselves.

But if America's comedy golden age defuses tension to excess, then Bangladesh's self-seriousness errs by imposing unrelenting stress. Sometimes, replacing Bangladesh's deadly conflicts with aimless laughter sounds like a pretty nice idea.

A happy medium does exist. In fact, as Coe writes, the original purpose of political comedy was to allay enough fear for Britons to cease avoiding the more difficult issues of their day. At the right dose, comic relief can be incredibly useful.

Take climate change, for instance. Global concern is growing about looming disaster, and Bangladesh is often noted as particularly vulnerable. To preserve life and limb, Bangladesh must pay attention to onrushing change. Yet the country pays the issue little mind.

"The reaction among Bangladeshi government officials has been to tell me that I must be wrong," a climate scientist recently told the New York Times. "That's completely understandable, but it also means they have no hope of preparing themselves."

A hearty dose of fear-defusing satire is necessary for Americans to face this issue. Bangladesh might be much the same.

After all, if you stay out of touch with what's so funny, the nation might sink ungiggling into the sea.

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M. Sophia Newman, MPH, is a public health researcher specialising in mental health.