Sunday, November 04, 2007 Mercado: Only the brave By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
IF you jabbed the Marcos dictatorship with jokes, read on. This is about what London’s “Telegraph” calls “arguably the bravest stand-up comics in the world today”: the "Moustache Brothers" who, despite repeated jailing, take on the paranoid Burmese junta.
“U Par Par Lay goes to India to have his toothache treated,” reports New York Times. “Don’t you have dentists in Myanmar?” the Indian dentist wonders. “Oh, yes, we do, doctor,” the Burmese replies. “But in Myanmar, we’re not allowed to open our mouths.”
Isn’t that the same gag about two Filipino dogs who lined up for US visas? “Martial law has been good to you,” the scrawny mutt tells the plump mongrel. “Why do you want to leave?” The reply: “I want to bark.”
Like the Philippines under Marcos, Burma is a country where the wrong joke can land you in jail. Par is, in fact, the "Moustache Brothers" No.1.
With Lu Maw, Moustache Brother No. 3, Par was jailed for six years. At the 1996 Independence Day show, they cracked anti-government jokes before detained Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and diplomats.
The generals scrubbed the Brothers from the list of state-licensed artists. Nonetheless, they’ve pressed on with biting parodies of the junta.
Example: A junta general died and became a big fish. As a tsunami rolls toward Myanmar to wreck it, the fish surfaces and admonishes the wave: “Stop! I have already done that there.”
Telling jokes against “Big Brother” are “tiny revolutions,” author George Orwell once noted. Pogo and Togo poked fun, on the stage, at Japanese occupiers---until the kempetai padlocked their show.
Remember the Pinoy vomiting while passing Imelda Marcos’ Film Center? “Pare. I share your opinion,” a passerby whispers into his ear.
Agence France Presse reported the junta released Par and 31 other dissidents last week. The comedian had been arrested again--–this time for applauding Buddhist monks who demonstrated against the generals.
The releases are to doll up the junta’s tattered image before UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari revisits Yangon. Gambari will press for "more democratic measures,” UN chief Ban Ki-moon stressed.
“We are artists: we believe in ordinary people, not in the government,” Lu Maw explained. “We need light, but in Myanmar, light on and off. Not enough electricity. No water supply. School--—money, money, money! Ordinary people no money. So we joke. People need a good joke. But the government don’t like us because we joke.”
University of California (Berkley) professor Alan Dundes notes that “among serious students of humor, it’s commonly known that the most piquant political jokes are found wherever totalitarian dictatorships flourish.”
They wither when freedom allows free speech. Democratic countries “can’t compete with jokes about Hitler, Stalin, or, say, Ferdinand Marcos,” Dundes adds.
Few slashed with more effective humor than the late Jaime Cardinal Sin against Marcos’ rigged elections, etc. On his return from the Vatican conclave that elected Pope John Paul II, Sin told Comelec’s Leonardo Perez: “Leonie--–if you had overseen the Conclave, I would have been elected Pope.”
“Yes, we are afraid,” admits Lu Maw. “But we keep going. We joke. This is our job, our family tradition…Out there are spies…We are dead meat already.”
The Brothers “are the ultimate example of the old theatrical maxim ‘the show must go on’” notes Sunday Telegraph. (They) are the country's only political satire show.
And even as Burma's generals bore down on all dissent, “arguably the world's bravest stand-up comics were still making fun of them.”
We owe these men our support. Because here jokes may no longer be enough. More of us must resort to “writs of amparo.”
