Why so Serious?

Jester’s privilege refers to the ability and right of a jester to talk, mock, or say anything without being punished. This is loosely based on the idea that whatever they say has a comedic purpose and does not seems to matter. And for that reason they should not be taken seriously.

Telling jokes has never been so hard than today. While i think it is true that people are getting easily offended, it is also true that it seems comedian is to be taken more seriously these days.

Daniel Sloss opened up his Ted Talk by telling a story about his drunken emotionally unstable mom who was trying to abandon him when he was just a child to get a little laugh from the audience. He later admit that the story was fabricated. He said it is a little unfair when a stand up comedian made a joke about rape and murder then get repercussions but when it’s happening inside a movie, it is a twist, it is realistic. The director or actor very rarely had to suffer a similar consequence. It is just a story he said.

That was back in 2012 and it doesn’t get any better for comedian today. But does this stance of a joke being “just a story” still hold true for people? To be honest living in Indonesia, i doubt this. In 2020 as a result of Novel Baswedan’s Acidic Water case, the perpetrators was sentenced with only one year imprisonment because the said action was carried out “unintentionally”. Bintang Emon’s criticism video was the one that general public shared massively. From then on, Bintang Emon become one of the comedian who was associated with the image of being smart and critical and he was often get troubled because of that.

This types of satirical comedy to poke fun on the government isn’t anything but new. Warkop did it, Ngelaba did it, Haji Bolot did it. However not until the rise of Prita Mulyasari Vs Omni Hospital cases, more people began to realize that it is not a joke that you can actually get jailed when mishandling criticism. Being satirical then might be the last things people can do to criticize and still can get away with it by saying “it’s just a joke”. Hence Satirical Comedy being kind of real criticism and Comedian was viewed as modern philosopher. (Not in here, only in Wakanda)

But shifting satirical jokes into kind of real criticisms has a consequence of turning a joker into commenter. Even if comedian claimed that what they said are just jokes, many consider them not or at the very least inappropriate. In 2019 Pandji Pragiwaksono got into trouble with the cat lovers community for saying that he hated stray cat in one of his stand-up comedy show. Imagine watching a comedy and thinking that what happened inside of it was not a joke. Or maybe it’s not, maybe Parto as Dalang in OVJ is actually angry when the wayang went stray from the main story, maybe those thieves who were being tricked by Kevin in Home Alone ended up in hospitals with few broken bones for real. Silly me, of course it is not, it’s just a joke.

However this isn’t me blaming public for not being able to take a joke. It is of course nobody’s right to decide what should or should not upset people. But opposite side it is getting harder to tell if a comedian are being serious or just joking. When you are becoming active members of political party, becoming member of legislative, or acting as spoke-person for governor candidate, it becomes really hard to tell that if this was one of your comedic endeavor or you are not joking or both.

Now it is blurry who started first. Is it the rise of UU ITE who made general public turn to satire to voice their opinion then later turn to satirical comedy? Or is it that comedian are starting to take a more serious stance about nation’s problem that made general public rely on them to voice their opinion then they turn their comedic routine and tweets to series of real critics so that we can no longer differ them.

This cases doesn’t necessarily happened for everyone, general public or comedian. There are people who can certainly take jokes and there are comedian who are just joking all the time. But i am not sure if comedy will be ever just “only funny” again.