Humour goes for a toss in UK
from
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1206560,curpg-1.cms
Have you heard the one about the British Muslim woman who didn't want to die a virgin? It wasn't the sex, she just didn't want to get to Paradise and have to shag a suicide bomber.
And there's the one about the British Asian young man who finds that rising post-7/7 prejudices against brown people have made a marked difference to his life as a London commuter. Earlier, he never used to be able to get a seat on the train. Now, he gets the whole carriage. Sometimes the whole network.
And then there's that other one about the young, bearded, Asian male who gets onto a London train, wearing a well zipped-up, heavy jacket that's clearly dangerously inappropriate for the British summer. While nervous passengers - poised for flight or a fight-unto-death with a suspected suicide bomber - look askance, he slowly moves his hands to the central zip fastening. Dramatically, he tears both folds of the jacket back, thus revealing to commuters cowering as they wait for a bomb to detonate, a T-shirt bearing this legend: "Don't freak, I'm a Sikh".
The English sense of humour is a funny business. Especially, after the July 7 wave of multiple suicide bomb blasts on London's transport network, perpetrated mainly by Anglo-Pakistanis bearing rucksacks. The comedic howl became even more of a laugh after the abortive suicide bomb attacks on July 21, perpetrated once again by four coloured men with rucksacks. Only this time, they were of African, not Asian descent, which probably explains why they couldn't make anything work, not even their bombs.
That was a joke by the way. The incident of the ho-ho T-shirt-wearing Sikh Londoner actually happened. The British Muslim woman who doesn't want to die a virgin is a gag from the laugh-arsenal of the rib-splittingly funny British Pakistani stand-up comedienne Shazia Mirza. And the young British Asian who finds wary train passengers giving him a wide berth and thus a seat, indeed the whole network, is the outpouring of second-generation immigrant stand-up comic Paul Chowdry.