SABAHAT ZAKARIYA EXPLAINED
Rameen Syed Journalist
Humor is considered as a funny and lighter medium to highlight the dark realities of a society. But most of the humor in Pakistan revolves around gender disparity like husbands joking about second marriage in-front of their wives, relatives making fun of men who help their wives in households, friends cracking jokes to men fearing (actually respecting) their wives etc., but here is a question, what exactly is wrong about it? And the answer is EVERYTHING.
Such humor often ends on sentences like, “it was just a joke, take it easy, it was just for fun”.
Pakistani V-logger and Journalist Sabahat Zakariya in one of her videos talks about sexist humor. One of the examples she gave was, “We often observe that friends tease groom by calling him a martyr as he is getting married and it is equivalent to death because presumably your life ends with marriage.” Now if we do a postmortem of this particular joke, it paints an evil picture of a wife who is controlling, does not respect their husband’s personal space, and will cage her husband forever.
She also pointed towards the gender biasness of this humor. She says, “One should ponder upon the fact that these sexist jokes originates from men and are directed towards women, all the time! What if women gets creative in making such jokes towards men, can you imagine the consequences of that? What would happen if wives express their desire to get married for the second time, joke about it in-front of their husbands, just for ‘fun’? Imagine a drawing room where women are laughing and cracking jokes about their second marriage in-front of their men, talking about what attributes they desire in their second husbands. Imagine that they also invite men sitting in the same drawing room to participate in that conversation and tell them what they think about it. If even the scenario is unimaginable, it surely is not to be taken as fun if it is based on gender discrimination.”
She also talked about the role of media in normalizing sexist humor. She urged the audience to have a glance in our entertainment media industry, from Umar Shareef to Moin Akhtar, from Punjabi stage dramas to political satire shows like Mazaaq raat, as they will find sexist jokes being used very efficiently and they hold kind of an important position in Humorous content because apparently women are an easy target of sexist humor.
Best form of humor, sabahat zakariya says is self-deprecating humor which tend to target one’s own weaknesses rather than other people’s vulnerabilities, essays of Patras Bukhari is an amazing collection and example of such humor.
“Humor requires a lot of thinking before getting cracked. One should be aware that it is okay to crack jokes about the people or that section of a society which is empowered, occupies important positions and are already a strong class of the society. It is not okay to direct humor to that social class of the society which is already very weak, oppressed and doesn’t get a lot of opportunities and appreciation. This phenomena is known as punching up and punching down respectively in English language. To punch up, you need a lot of courage and skills, but to punch down, you just need to be an ordinary, unskillful and a coward person”, she concluded.
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