When humour is outlawed, what's left? When humorists, satirists and clowns are not safe from dictatorial fury, who is? Mockers jailed, jokers scolded, caricaturists threatened, sometimes by words, sometimes by pre-dawn commando raids, without warrants, as if they were hunting armed terrorists. That's how 10 people were carried off by uniformed officers on Wednesday, a few of them guilty of running a satirical Facebook page spoofing the PM. Yesterday, the military court denied them bail.
In the age of memes, all the greats have been mocked, from Putin to Kim, from Mohammad to the Pope, from Beyonce to DiCaprio. All are fair game in the global project of political trivialisation. All are subjected to the democratic powers of photoshopping and GIFs. All, yes, but one. Our one and only.
Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy, as they say. Ask Voltaire. Ask Bassem Youssef, the Egyptian satirist hounded by former President Mohamed Morsi. Dictators hate jokes, because they feel defenceless in the echo of laughter. Or ask the guy behind the "We Love Gen Prayut" Facebook page with its funny posts, so funny, which means so real, so gloriously impudent that it pierces the soft heart of our lion. And that's his crime, the crime of laughter, because Thailand is in such a fragile state that humour is now a matter of national security that it requires swift detention of jokers. Or maybe it's just the humour directed at the man behind the podium that is deemed criminal.
Humour is an exercise in wit. It is also an exercise in fear -- you laugh because you don't want to cry. It is, sometimes, an exercise in equality, because all are equal when everyone can be reduced to the butt of a joke.
Everyone, my goodness, but one.
No, not Thaksin Shinawatra or his sister. They both have a meme-ready quality, perfect targets for quick-witted satirists, and both former PMs still claim large swaths of the internet's catalogue of political ridicule. Some in jest, others in curse (more of the latter). Especially Yingluck Shinawatra, who came to office during the frenzy of Facebook, and whose mannerism, speech pattern and frequent bloopers were endless fodder for lampooners. She was called names, some very ugly, sexist names, full of leering double entendre, and her photoshopped memes in all sorts of compromised setups can be found within a few clicks. How satisfying to laugh at the powerful -- and not get dragged off to some secret detention site in the middle of the night!
At his height, Thaksin was known for his stealth in subduing critics. He sued, he dished out veiled threats -- but thankfully not to those who made fun of him, nicknamed him, pulverised him with jokes, sometimes brutal jokes (there was a Thai movie starring an actor with Down syndrome, with an allusion to the PM's family). Thaksin was not generous, but maybe he was too busy with his egoistic schemes to pay attention to petty buffoonery. Elected or self-imposed, leaders are often the humourless type, driven by self-love and self-importance, which is why they fall prey so easily to comedians and pranksters.
But now laughter may no longer be our refuge. Won't the military at least spare us one shelter from the gathering cyclone of fear, of an uncertain future or secret ploys so secret that the plotters don't even know what they are? Now that they have warned against satire and spoof -- they have made arrests and vaguely explained that we all should now be careful with our jokes and irony -- it's clear that intolerance is at its peak as the critical referendum nears.
Of course, laughter is not always innocent, and comedy is not always white. Since the times of the ancient Greeks, humour has been a tool of subversion, a path to revolution, a spontaneous way of disarming those who're more readily armed. Chaplin mocked Hitler, Johnny Depp mocks Donald Trump and Sacha Baron Cohen mocked Gadhafi (and other ludicrous strongmen in uniform). Satire, high and low, is a non-violent course that allows you to uppercut those who stand above you. That's why from Egypt to Myanmar and Malaysia, satirists have been threatened, charged and sometimes jailed. And now the Thai state has joined the ranks of those who're so narrow-minded, so insecure that they've declared humour wrong. So wrong that it merits the jokers being scooped up in the dark and whisked to a secret location. So wrong they are denied bail.
When humour is outlawed, what's left? Bitterness, anger, fear. The alchemy of those three can produce unpredictable results, all of which could involve some form of explosion. The death of laughter is the death of humanity. Too bad that our humourless one will never understand.
Kong Rithdee is Life Editor, Bangkok Post.