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It was late in the evening when Nana bursts into Leyton and Olga’s house where we had our Christmas party. Dinner was over, but Nana was late as usual, as she had to go to so many different places. Nana, always noisy and giggly had a lot to tell about the latest political developments and of course, she brightened up the whole atmosphere with her stories and jokes. But it became different when she told a joke about the First Person’s physical handicap. Of course, initially a laughter followed, but after a while some people showed some great embarrassment. Someone reprimanded Nana, who suddenly felt like a member of the group of comedians who had tried to cash in on the same handicap on TV two months ago.
Nana, repentant, made up her mind to go to the President to apologize. A discussion followed, whether it was a good joke or not and the majority thought that it was not. What went wrong? Why are no good jokes circulating anymore? Why is it that we who had laughed indiscriminately about all the jokes on the New order, suddenly started to discuss about the rationale of a joke? Were the jokes more funny then? Or was it because they were told whisperingly, after looking around to make sure that no other persons would hear it, like important state secrets? Were we laughing because we thought that we had escaped being jailed?
Some of the jokes were so good, that we wondered who had made them. But nobody ever found out, they just appeared and then spread like wild-fire. In any case Indonesia was on the way to become the country with the best national jokes.
It was then that Mimi came up with the theory that the former first person made them up himself or had a professional to create them. Next to the jokes we had acronyms, abbreviations, that became converted to jokes, because they too were so innovative and funny. That lead her to think that the makers must have been professionals and not just idle people who did nothing but just got some inspiration. Take for instance “Toshiba”, an ordinary Japanese brand for electronics, but in during the New Order it was used as an acronym for the former first family’s three sons.
But why should they be invented to ridicule themselves? “No”, Mimi hypothesized: “If you analyze these jokes, they seldom ridiculed them, rather did they speak of their greatness. Take the joke in which the late former first lady asked her husband to follow her to heaven and to which he answered: ‘as soon as our daughter has built a highway to heaven’. As a first instance one would think of a derision, but this joke also tells of the ex-first daughter’s accomplishment in building highways.”
But then why were they invented? Mimi replied: “Joking about someone is to act out our aggression towards that person. Once the aggression is acted out by laughing, we do not have the need to act out openly and in reality again. A catharsis has taken place, just like during a session of psychoanalysis. That was why we were all ostensibly so complacent during that period. And the mastermind behind all the injustice during the New Order knew that in this manner the people could be controlled. Their anger was controlled and he did not have to fear for an uprising. A very smart utilization of psychological warfare, well cold war warfare maybe. The bad jokes during the period of reformation were probably also invented by ‘them’, for if you remember, they are truly deriding the people in power.”
Then Leyton asked: “If he was such a good psychologist, why couldn’t he control his children and his cronies?”
“Good question,” said Mimi, “there is only one explanation for that: to be able to create more jokes for the replacement of aggressions and with this method he could keep the potential enemies at bay.”
A big applause followed this ingenious explanation. The evening was further filled with raking up the old jokes and consequently there was laughter abound.
But poor Leyton and Olga, they couldn’t laugh as heartily as we did, for jokes are difficult to translate into foreign languages.
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