“A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.” – George Eliot

“I started a joke which started the whole world crying.” – Bee Gees

COMMENT | Of all people, professional comedians should be the first people to empathise with Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin when his attempt to crack a joke, with his folkloric "Abah" (father) wielding the rotan (cane), fell flat.

They must have experienced nights when they threw out a zinger of a punchline at the dim dark faces and were greeted by silence, at best a couple of polite chuckles from friends in the audience trying to diminish the sudden leaden chill in the atmosphere. Thick skin layered from experience allows them to blunder on imperviously in swift search of recovery.

Instead, some of them have posted videos on caning and double standards. Comic inspiration, instead of empathy or sympathy. Irredeemably irreverent and iconoclastic.

In my first 16 years in theatre, I directed plays that dealt with serious themes – sexual ambiguity and a gay relationship, superstition and modernity in Africa, the abuse of women in India, slum-dwellers in South Africa, Kobo Abe’s surreal play of a family invading and taking over a man and his apartment (echoes of Bong Joon-Ho’s recent Parasite), et cetera.

During that period, I was asked why I didn’t do comedy, and my flippant half-true answer: comedy terrified me. With a serious play, you can take silence as absorption in the performance. With comedy, silence means you shrivel...