Trevor Noah: when words are worse than war

His joke about India and Pakistan caused more online outrage than the conflict itself.

Over the past month, long-standing tension between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has reared its ugly head again. First Pakistani Islamists bombed Indian paramilitaries, the deadliest attack in three decades. Then, for the first time in 50 years, India launched air strikes on Pakistan’s territory. Pakistan then shot down an Indian plane and captured its pilot. Until prime minister Imran Khan released the pilot as a peace gesture, winding down tensions, observers feared a full-blown war between the two nuclear states.

But in New York, 7,000 miles west of Kashmir, something far worse, far more dangerous, or at least far more tweetable, happened. Comedian Trevor Noah made a joke about the conflict on the The Daily Show. A war between India and Pakistan would be the ‘most entertaining’ and ‘longest war of all time’, he joked, as the Indian soldiers would rush on to the battlefield and break out into a Bollywood-style song-and-dance number.

Tweeters across the globe denounced the joke as racist, insensitive, ‘vile and despicable’. By Noah’s own admission, he has not shied away from tackling difficult subjects in the past, including the death of his mother, who was shot in the head by his abusive stepfather. It is a shame, then, that he has since apologised for causing offence. Often the best comedy results from comedians finding the line and pushing it further.

But whatever you think of Noah’s India-Pakistan joke – funny, racist or just clichéd – he later made an important observation. He tweeted that his joke ‘trended’ more on social media, in the West at least, than the actual India-Pakistan crisis. For Noah, this showed that ‘people are more offended by the jokes comedians make about an issue than the issue itself’.

On this, Noah could not be more right. In our age of political correctness, often the most ferocious and unhinged outrage is directed at those who use the ‘wrong’ words, make ‘offensive’ jokes or produce ‘degenerate’ artworks.

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