[Nasional-e] Afghans are dying for a laugh

[Ambon]

                                       Afghans are dying for a laugh

After six years off the air, television is back in Kabul. Friday night
offers special delights.  Rory McCarthy  discovers why

Kabul television these days is an acquired taste. Peak viewing is on a
Friday night, at the end of the weekly holiday when most people are at home
desperate to savour the delights that their new-found freedom has to
offer.The build-up to the evening's main television event is a little slow.
A succession of male singers appears on the screen. Each has his hair long
and thickly oiled, and most are dressed in broad-collared, open-necked
checked shirts and leather jackets as they croon Farsi and Pashtu love
ballads or songs about Afghanistan in the spring. There is little disguising
the fact that these are tapes salvaged from Kabul's golden age in the 1970s.
Those were the days when many women wore miniskirts, and couples walked hand
in hand through the streets.
Then the Soviets invaded, the mojahedin emerged and Afghanistan tumbled into
two decades of civil war culminating in the relentless repression by the
Taliban. They promptly banned television, along with music, dancing, kite
flying, miniskirts and a raft of other entertainment deemed "un-Islamic".
Islam still plays a fundamental role in Kabul life, but after an intense
30-minute Islamic essay on the failings of man the main event arrives at
9pm, a chaotic quiz and satirical comedy called the Riddle Show that marks
the first return of humour to Afghan television in six years.
The set is another white-on-pink relic of 30 years ago. An inverted question
mark hangs at the back over the heads of the two quizmasters, who are firing
questions at two young students. This is the general knowledge round. What
happened at the Bonn conference in December 2001? Hamid Karzai was selected
to lead Afghanistan, one answers correctly. We move on at dizzying pace to
a slick-haired crooner singing a song made famous by Afghanistan's late,
great musical hero, the singer Ahmadzai. The crowd, largely made up of young
students and their teachers, many of them women, is in raptures.
There are more rounds of questions, mime performances for the contestants
and peculiar prizes. Eventually both emerge winners and leave with gifts of
large plastic water jugs. Next up is a four-man comedy routine, and soon the
crowd is roaring again as the sketch descends into slapstick banter.
The Riddle Show, perhaps the most original piece of programming on Kabul
television, is the work of the director Mohammad Usman Azimi. From his desk
in a narrow, blue office in the half-destroyed ruins of the television
station he has created the one show that captures the excitement and
frustrations of the new Kabul.
He has dozens of young Afghans queuing at his door desperate to be
presenters, and crowds outside begging for tickets for the next performance.
"There's no point us showing people ordinary things in their lives; they
just won't bother watching. So we turn everything into a comedy, and it's
become very popular," he says.
For 20 years Azimi worked at Kabul Television until the Taliban seized the
capital in September 1996. The television department was closed down and he
was transferred to Radio Sharia, which broadcast little more than hardline
religious sermons and the latest edicts from the Ministry for the Prevention
of Vice and Promo tion of Virtue. "None of us were interested in working
then," he says.
Now he is in charge of 19 television shows, many of them broadcasts for
children. "Writing the comedy is the hardest by far. It is much harder to
get the actors to do it the way we want."
Afghan humour is often farcical and bleak, not surprising after so many
years of war and hunger when daily deprivation, serious injury and death
became commonplace. Azimi's own inspiration comes from watching surviving
videos of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy.
But his show faces fierce competition. Within days of the collapse of the
Taliban, Kabul's entrepreneurs began producing improvised satellite dishes m
ade out of sheet metal from tin cans. Now they litter houses and high-rises
across the city, and most people with the money to buy a television can also
afford to tune in to dozens of satellite channels.
Foreign television may be popular, but it lacks the Kabul touch. Azimi is
trying to get Afghans to laugh at their own situation. "My favourite sketch
was about the traffic lights in Kabul. We had someone who needed to take a
friend to the hospital, but we had him stopping at so many traffic lights on
the way that he never got there. In the end his friend died."
The humour is as dark as ever, but it rings true. Kabul's streets were
deserted this time last year. Now they are crowded and chaotic.
Azimi insists that no subject is taboo for satire in the new Afghanistan,
including drug smuggling, which is now rife. "We can make jokes about
anything now," he says. Well, almost anything. "We just don't make jokes
about politics. Or religion.
"Afghans have been fighting for 23 years and they really need comedy now.
They haven't been given much chance to laugh," he says.

The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0130, page 23