The Tragedy of Comedy: Staging Gender in South India

Abstract

The Tragedy of Comedy: Staging Gender in South India Susan Seizer, Stigmas of Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South India. Duke University Press, April 2005. There is one enigmatic moment in Keith Basso's classic ethnographic essay, Portraits of Whiteman: Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols among Western Apache. As Basso lucidly explains, Western Apache joking about Whiteman works by creating Whiteman as a symbol of all that Western Apache is not, and thus effecting a humorous temporary inversion of proper social order while allowing Western Apaches to shore up their own social values and community cohesiveness. Joking-in form of impersonating overly talkative and inquisitive Whiteman-affords a temporary release by means of which Western Apaches can put a human face on power that subordinates them and dramatize their encounters with that power. But at end of eighty lucid pages, Basso suggests that, even armed with all this interpretation, there is something about humor that evades explanation. Lest we get caught up in endless analysis of these jokes, he writes, we should remember that the whole thing has been in fun. But, paradoxically, not really. Hello, my friend, how you doing?(Basso 1979, 82). No matter how many times I read Basso's book, this ending always haunts me long after I've closed book. First, because its uncertainty contrasts with certainty of Basso's preceding interpretations. Basso seems to be saying that extent to which something is funny is directly related to extent to which it is completely serious; that funniest jokes are those that threaten most to slip out of joking frame that contains them. This ending counters neatness of inversion model, according to which jokes are merely temporary inversions of social order, that Basso uses throughout book. And second, Basso's ending is striking because it marks point where interpretation gives way to repetition of joke itself, to its dramatic form. This is where Basso seems to hint at inadequacy of his symbolic approach for explaining why it is that these jokes take form of impersonations, why they are staged as little dramas, what kind of enjoyment Western Apache men get out of playing Whiteman, and how characters they play in jokes relate to their real-life roles. In other words, there is a whole realm of experience and fun that Basso's focus on meaning of these jokes, rather than their dramatic form and context, sidesteps. His ending, it seems to me, points to difference between treating these jokes as a cultural text and treating them as performance. Both of these issues-the blurring of joke with real life and importance of dramatic form-are at heart of Suzan Seizer's ethnographic study of popular South Indian theatrical form called Special Drama. In Stigmas of Tamil Stage, Seizer presents a remarkably nuanced account of relationships between onstage actions of Special Drama actors and actresses and dilemmas and difficulties of their offstage lives. In doing so, she offers insight into relationship between staging, dramatic form, and meaning. In Special Drama, staging can position performers and interpellate viewers, depending on their gender, quite differently. For, as we learn quite early in book, while artists who perform Special Drama are a community united by stigma they bear as low-class actors and actresses, this community is cleaved by gender (349). Stigma attaches to performers of Special Drama because they perform bawdy comedy, but this stigma falls most heavily on actresses because of gender norms of Tamil society. Actresses, in performing publicly, in interacting with unknown men publicly, transgress norms for respectable Tamil women. Their lives confound boundaries between public and private, between home and world, which anchor gender norms in Tamil Nadu, as well as in much of South Asia. …