Dastardly, inhuman, numbing: the Charlie Hebdo killings have torn through our lives, reducing freedom of speech itself to a cartoon. Humour is always subversive, in Umberto Eco’s The Name Of The Rose, Benedictine monks reading books that taught them to laugh at orthodoxy, were killed. If you want to tell people the truth, said Oscar Wilde, make them laugh else they will kill you.

In desi popular culture humour’s divided broadly into two genres: the slapstick and the gently playful. The slapstick genre was represented by comedians like Rajindranath, Mehmood, Johnny Walker who fell about, walked into doors, slipped on banana peels in the Groucho Marx style. The gently playful genre was represented by the Amol Palekar, Hrishikesh Mukherjee style who created wholesome family fun. Sai Paranjape’s Chashme Baddoor and Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron were hilarious yet thought-provoking and revealed that the best humour is always affectionate rather than insulting or abusive. Similarly, it’s the light-heartedness of PK that brings on the chuckles.

Our traditions of cartooning whether Mario Miranda’s Miss Fonseca and Miss Nimbu Paani or R K Laxman’s Common Man also fall in the playful gentle genre, even Shankar’s takedowns of political figures in the 50s were mischievous rather than vicious. When Peter Sellers played an Indian or when TV series like the BBC’s Goodness Gracious Me made fun of Asian immigrants, many saw them as racist and stereotyping, but the emphasis was always on a wicked send-up rather than anything that inspired rage. Humour’s best as a battering ram against the powerful: the British magazine Private Eye was a pioneer in trenchant satire against politi-cians and Khushwant Singh’s satire was funniest when it was the most intimate.

The killing of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists was unacceptable, no one has any right to gun down a critic. Yet beyond the tragic deaths, perhaps it’s best when the cartoon remains a cartoon: a weapon of laughter and thought, not a weapon of war against religious beliefs. After all, a bellyful of laughter always dignifies both the prankster and his target.

In St Stephen’s College, Mohammad Amin, most droll of History professors, counselled freshers on the importance of the college’s hallowed Practical Joke Week. “We celebrate PJ week”, said Amin saab, “so that you learn that for a joke to be really good, it must always be practical.” Amin Saab would have condemned the killings with all his might, but he probably wouldn’t have approved of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons.