Poetry and Punching up in Pakistan

A fundraiser; a poem; a blog finally posted; and an interview with Shehzad Ghias. All at once.

The fundraiser for Theatre Wallay was a lot of fun…thanks to everyone who participated! And if you would like to contribute after the fact, here’s the GoFundMe link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/save-the-farm-tw?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=m_pd+share-sheet&fbclid=IwAR0ZADZ3oJQBbcbI7wpeC6Ku_nlrw_v-GWJeQOqz-MvA8RTgbFt288yEf-8

Dennis’ uncle Jim Curley was inspired by the workshop and wrote this poem. It’s beautiful:

Pakistan (by Jim Curley)

How can this be?
I attend a friend’s benefit program
for Theatre Walley in Islamabad, 
the capital of Pakistan. 
Of course,  it is on Zoom, 
as I haven’t traveled 
more than 150 miles 
from home all year.

It’s improv I’m after, so I 
Shuck the shorts and the message T-shirt 
that says  “I am the son of an immigrant,” 
as Trump is. I fancy up my gear.
I don a virtual tux and bowler hat,
like Laurel and Hardy, and
blow up a balloon. 
Catching a breeze and 
clutching the string tightly, 
I’m three feet off the ground, 
walk on air, then hover,

Improv comedy has a 
certain silliness about it.
Red Skelton’s shy “God bless,” 
always implied. 
A Good Humor truck that  
breaks down walls and 
brings people together. 
The Great Equalizer.
Subversive Smiles.
Acts of Kindness 
worthy of their own execution.
And I ask, 
How can this be?
A gift of one human to another;
freely given, gratefully accepted

I went back to Islamabad last December (before the quarantine; another life) to be a presenter at the Fulbright Pakistan alumni conference. Thanks to USEFP for hosting me. I wrote this after listening to Shehzad Ghias’ inspiring talk. Last month he agreed to talk with me on Zoom (he was in Karachi; I was in Minneapolis. Dennis Curley did the technical editing!). Here’s the blog from December:

It’s a chilly morning in Islamabad after a rainy weekend and a near-freezing night. Strange to be in the Fulbright House with space heaters in every corner and the gas elements on the stove burning just to keep the kitchen warm. The previous times I was here the goal was to find a cool place. Reminds me of California winters when the shake roofs would be covered with frost and the mountains were visible. I’m a Minnesotan now. I can’t stop talking about the weather.

Oh, and it’s wonderful to be back in Pakistan. The very gracious people at the United States Educational Foundation for Pakistan (USEFP) invited me here to give a talk and a workshop at the Fulbright Alumni Conference. I also got to coach the other (amazing) speakers on presentation skills, and so I was lucky enough to watch their talks on policy and politics and art and culture take shape. One of the speakers, a Pakistani comedian named Shehzad Ghias, did a stand-up set in Urdu and English and invited me up for three short improv scenes. My talk was about saying “yes” to bold declarations (more on that later), and so I had to/got to put my money where my mouth is (“avoid cliches,” I advised the speakers. Oh, well).

The improv scenes were mercifully short but had some punch; it’s hard to address colonialism and its ripple effects in a two-minute improv game unless you take the broader view and ask yourself why the lone white American is up on stage when there were 25 other local speakers whose humor and gravitas (and multilingualism) might more justly represent Pakistan. Our scenes did address geographical encroachment and unexamined privilege and the obtuse English speakers who get frustrated when the rest of the world doesn’t speak OUR language. Let’s just say that I’ve been funnier, but also that I tried not to fight back and defend my position, which is really about the least I could do. Hold your applause.

Shehzad Ghias’ stand-up set was funny, and it was a good prelude for his gripping talk entitled “The Toxicity in our Digital City.” He looked at ways the media has controlled our consumption of comedy, and his dissection of humor was cutting (pun intended) and absolutely necessary in our current global climate. He asked—commanded, really—the audience to “punch up” with their humor, to focus the satire and the jokes on those with power, those who HAVE power over others, those endowed by the status quo with money and muscle and the keys to the kingdom.

We talk about this a lot in The Theater of Public Policy in Minneapolis and I’ve always been proud that we can take on controversial topics and ideological speakers and not make fun of others who hold views on either side of the political spectrum. And when we do take aim we target the powerful and the power structures that make life harder on those without. Shehzad Ghias’ examples of punching up/punching down illustrated this approach to comedy. I’m paraphrasing, but he said it’s too easy to laugh at, for example, the transgender person who is begging for money on the street. That’s punching down. The person is already vulnerable and doesn’t have the means to defend himself or herself. But when we make fun of the societal belief that sexual minorities are worthy of our scorn simply because they are different, then we take some of the muscle out of the rulers’ brutality. We punch up. And, as Shehzad Ghias noted, we probably won’t defeat Goliath, but “we will bloody his nose.”

Good point. When I talked with him about the “punching down” that our current leaders do, I said, sanctimoniously, “and, of course, that’s not comedy.” Shehzad stopped me and said that there’s a particular danger in being the arbiter of taste as well. He’s right, of course. What’s comic to one person isn’t comic to another, but (speaking for myself) I don’t think the humor coming out of our leadership is funny. I wrote an angry paragraph about the constant punching down done at our leader’s rallies and the applause it garners from his supporters, but by the time I was done I felt sick and redundant. In the spirit of Orwellian word-salad, I’ll pay brief homage to these blood-thirsty events with some of the words I used in my (now) deleted screed: “mocked,” “mimicking,” “cruelty,” “obscene,” “cheap,” “small,” and “breathtaking.” Throw these words into any summary of a red-hat rally and add a proper noun and a sneering adjective. That’ll do.

How do we engage with this stench and not become asphyxiated ourselves? Or ignore the way rage can be fueled by the thing we hate in ourselves? I think about some of the stuff I used to laugh at. I think about some of the stuff I laugh at now that, in ten years (god willing, etc), will make my face burn. A little bit of shame can be medicinal when we’re being sick. Shezhad’s talk got under my skin.

Why don’t I get invited to more parties? Huh. I have loved being here. The Pakistani alums were outspoken and inviting. The age range of the participants who took my first workshop was from 10 to 85, and there were fifty more people in between those numbers. I got to do amother two-hour presentation/workshop on improvisation and anxiety management (i.e. “irony”). I listened to talks about women’s emerging portrayals in Pakistani art; fermentation fuel systems that mirror digestive processes (some good fodder for funny there, but also really hopeful as a response to oil dependency); I was told by a much-respected academic that the best way to improvise was to be a “total a-hole” (“oh?”); I tried to figure out the time difference between here and home and kept calling my family before their alarms rang. I’ve eaten well, been protected, gotten to spend time with familiar faces in a country that fascinates me. I had dinner at the director’s house last night and listened to stories about expat life and had potatoes with yogurt (they were good) and I can see the Margalla Hills from my bedroom window just like I could see the San Bernardino mountains at home. The drivers keep trying to teach me Urdu and laugh at anything I say. I am so, so lucky.

And creeping around this good fortune is the constant awareness that, for all the good our country does (thank you, Fulbright, truly; thank you USEFP; thank you Fiona Hill and colleagues) it is being being compromised by someone who can’t take a joke and, in turn, takes that out on people he was elected to serve.

This is just my opinion.

As for my talk (“Yes, and…” Islamabad: the Power of the Improvisational Mindset”), it was well-received. The premise is that we, as improvisers, can make bold declarations that give energy to our scenes and sustenance to our scene partners. I talked about the improv I did here in 2018 and how everyone I worked with met me with openness and good will. I talked about creating resilient, dynamic, strategic peace one person at a time. I tried not to wander out of the camera frame. Some success. Much happiness.

Here’s the talk with Shehzad Ghias about improvisation. July 2020: