The Perception of Diasporic Humour: Indian English on TV

Humour is a cognitive quality every human being innately owns, and since it is obviously equally distributed in society, everyone who is considered humourless is downgraded to a socially de-humanizing position. However, when the East laughs, and it does not very often happen on non-Western mainstream screens, it creates a new opening; an unusual place similar to what Bhabha defines an in-between territory. Humour and laughter on the face of Indian people in diaspora may become a political and social instrument in the hands of the migrants. This kind of humour, identified in this book as Diasporic Humour, de-stereotypes the practice of imagining communities, and instead of generating isolation by turning audiences into lonely, self-entertaining atoms, otherizes communities subverting the Western balance of power. The BBC TV series Goodness Gracious Me constitutes a particularly interesting paradigm since it is the result of a cultural blend between English and Indian ethnicities. The study shows that Diasporic Humour succeeds in reversing stereotypes by playing on two levels of humour: a surface level, based on universal or ethnic scripts, and a deeper level, resulting from the new blend of scripts between two very distant cultures. Within this framework of reference, the present reading of Goodness Gracious Me and its hilarious forms of multicultural narration aims to detect the existence of hybrid scripts, which, unlike Raskin’s definition of ethnic jokes, purport a unique combination between diasporic and English subjects, undermining the typical British sense of humour on which Goodness Gracious Me inevitably draws.