Joke for chilli eaters…
Sim Kwang Yang
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So now, it’s official. The government will take action against malaysiakini for their April Fool’s prank because they “tell lies”, according to the ominous announcement by one junior minister in Parliament recently.
By now my friends involved in this Internet publication should be running desperately for cover. The reporter and the editor responsible for this allegedly heinous crime should now be packing their toothbrushes, and saying goodbye to their loved ones, anticipating an uncertain period of incarceration under any one of our many laws tailored for the purpose of fixing irreverent journalists. Meanwhile, subscribers to malaysiakini shiver in their boots; will their identity be uncovered in this witch-hunt of a dragnet?
Of course, the scene at the new malaysiakini office will be one of hysteria and chaos, as their skeleton staff members race against time to pack away their precious computers and servers. Another raid, another confiscation by the you-know-who, and they can kiss their costly equipment goodbye.
The whole affair sounds like a page taken out of a typical novel by Franz Kafka. (Some budding writer in Malaysia should really write a novel of the absurd with malaysiakini people as their anti-hero.) On the other hand, another writer with the mental bend of a Dostoevsky may give the story a darker nihilistic tone on the inevitability and inaneness of evil working in the world. There would be great confusion about where the evil lies.
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Now my curiosity is irked. I have read about April Fool hoaxes played by the media all over the world, and yet I know nothing about the origin of this custom. A cursory search on the Internet yielded some interesting facts.
The origins of the April Fool’s Day are now lost, although various theories have been put forth. It has something to do with the celebration related to the vernal equinox, which occurs on March 21. Prior to the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar in 1564, April 1st was celebrated as the New Year Day by cultures as far apart as Ancient Rome and India. After the Gregorian Reform, New Year was moved back to January 1st.
Fair game
The tradition of playing practical jokes on April Fool’s Day is also widespread and of unknown origin. Some have suggested that it has something to do with the move of the date for New Year celebration from April 1st to January 1st. Apparently some people either forgot the change of date or were resentful of the change, so that people were invited to non-existent parties and given funny gifts.
Originally the jokes concentrated on individuals, like sending someone to fetch a pigeon’s milk. In the 20th century, it has since become common for the media to perpetrate jokes on the entire population. Even normally serious news media consider April Fool hoaxes fair game, and the advent of the Internet has only exploded the scope for such good-natured pranks. Sporting them can become a national pastime for that one day in a year.
This website lists the 100 top April Fool hoaxes of all time. The top prize goes to a hoax propagated by the usually staid BBC in 1957, called The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest.
In a broadcast on the news programme Panorama, it was announced that, thanks to a very mild winter, and the total elimination of the much dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. The news announcement was accompanied by footage of Swiss farmers pulling down strands of spaghetti from trees.
Huge number of viewers were taken in. Many telephoned the BBC, wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. To this the BBC replied diplomatically that they had “to place a twig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.
A more mischievous hoax was created by the London Times in 1996. They reported on April Fool’s Day that negotiations were underway to divide Belgium in half. The Dutch speaking North would be absorbed into Holland, and the French speaking south would join France. The editorial lamented that the fun would go from the parlour game: name five famous Belgians.
The report almost fooled the then British foreign Minister Tristan Garel-Jones, who almost went to a non-existent TV interview to discuss the ‘important’ development. The Belgian embassy in London also received numerous telephone enquiries from journalists and expat Belgians seeking confirmation of the news. A rival paper criticised the prank, and declared that, “The Times’ effort could be defined as funny only if you find the notion of Belgium funny”.
Malaysian humour
Obviously, April Fool hoaxes would be funny if people at the butt end of the practical jokes have a particular sense of humour, that of not taking oneself too seriously, to the extent of laughing at oneself once in a while. It would require self-confidence, maturity, sophistication, and a relative ability to contain one’s insecurity.
For the April Fool’s prank to become a kind of harmless but amusing convention on the major media, you will need a whole population who have been steeped in this traditional propensity of enjoying a bit of fun sometimes. You will need political leaders to join in the fun.
Unfortunately, Malaysian humour in the main has been defined by the coarse slap-stick kind so dominant on our home grown comedies polluting our national TV. The kind of humour rampant in Hong Kong media import is hardly any better. With this concept of ‘face so deeply entrenched in our culture, laughing at ourselves is a hard thing to do.
Above all, Malaysian politics is all about ‘face’, appearances, perceptions, and facades, and seldom about substance and essence that really matter. Politicians and dignitaries are so set on having ‘face’, that they expect almost religious-like reverence and devotion from the society at large. That is why we have so many titles, and so many people chasing them, to the extent of buying them for a fee.
In a country where leaders must never be made to look ridiculous, political satire in the mainstream media is absent. Despite his brilliance, Lat has always steered away from dangerous grounds. If they have their way, legislators would pass a law outlawing anybody from laughing at their emperors and nobilities, irrespective of the kind of new clothes that they wear.
Now we can understand the over-reaction on the part of some government leaders to the April Fool hoax perpetrated by malaysiakini. Here, the joke is considered as not merely in good or bad taste, but also as something which is politically incorrect. And in Malaysia, what is politically incorrect must be given moral and legal labels. Hence, the minister’s condemnation of malaysiakini as ‘telling lies’ and having ‘malicious intent’.
Too close to home
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You have to feel compassion for a nation where a government minister cannot tell the difference between an April Fool’s joke and a lie. If Tony Blair (right), or anyone of his ministers, had accused the Guardian or the Times ‘liars’ for playing a prank on their nation on April Fool’s Day, he would probably have earned the contempt of most citizens in their realm. In the first place, politicians with that kind of dubious human quality would not have been voted into high office anyway.
There is another thing to be learned from this fiasco about politics in Malaysia.
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If the April Fool’s joke had been about Lim Kit Siang (left) hitting the RM15 million lottery jackpot, or Farish A Noor marrying one of the royal princesses, or the landing of aliens in the middle of Bukit Bintang in a flying saucer, I am quite certain that malaysiakini would not have been accused of ‘telling lies’.
Unfortunately for the ministers, malaysiakini was a little too close to home with their April Fool’s joke, striking at the jugular vein of the entire government credibility in combating corruption. Unlike other hoaxes played by other media in other parts of the world, the malaysiakini joke was one with a very serious intent, i.e., that of a social commentary on the failed promises by a new prime minister to weed out the most debilitating cancer that eats away our moral fabric and our financial resources.
The irony here is that the joke not only did not propagate a lie, but through a process of creating an inverse mirror image, exposes the veiled truth that matters about Malaysian politics: it is public knowledge that corruption is rampant in high places in Malaysia.
Here, malaysiakini has achieved success far beyond their expectation perhaps. The over-reaction of government ministers to this little prank has given malaysiakini even greater credibility as the virtual medium that dares to ruffle official feather at the very core of power. It means that their tactic has worked beautifully. Those who have eaten chilli have been bitten to the quick on their tongue.
All that needs to be done is for malaysiakini people to be charged in court, and they would be given a field day opening the rotting wounds that people in high places would rather see hidden and perfumed.
