Making fun of ISIS monsters
After letting ISIS hog the public imagination with their monstrous beheadings, people are hitting back with spoofs.
VIKRAM JOHRI feels relief (Pix: The spoof cover of Vogue magazine).
I have no compunction in declaring that I am a wuss. I have not seen a single ISIS beheading so far. I don’t want to. I cannot bring myself to see someone chopping the head off someone else with a dull knife. I know my predicament is not a spot on those who went through the ordeal, but I do not have the stomach for it.
The ISIS story is notable for a number of reasons. In spite of the West’s commitment to oust the group, ISIS continues to exercise a stranglehold in Iraq and Syria, not to mention the popular imagination. It comes out with its slickly shot videos every now and then, targeting one group or the other, as it reiterates its quest to take over the world.
As a consumer of news, you feel entirely emasculated. When 9/11 happened, you knew that America went after al-Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan. When 26/11 happened, you had the satisfaction of seeing Ajmal Kasab hanged. But with ISIS, the ground offensive against the group gets dissolved in the battery of videos that it broadcasts with sickening regularity.
So, it comes as a relief to finally have spoof videos. A Saturday Night Live sketch starring Dakota Johnson has her being dropped off by her father to a pickup point. We don’t initially know where the daughter is headed except this is one of those big, life-shifting moments, as the father pleads with her to stay back and consider local options, which Johnson’s character laughs off with a cocky “Jokester”.
Then the punch arrives. The people come to take Johnson are a bunch of gun-wielding men in combat uniform who, we learn, are ISIS fighters. The father looks at them and says tearfully: “Take care of her.” The leader of the group returns the father’s gesture equally mawkishly and mumbles by way of goodbye: “Death to America.”
It’s crazy hilarious, and not just because it brilliantly punctures the film of invincibility that the ISIS has studiously built around itself. The scene plays to typical Hollywood tropes, of a child coming of age, a parent unwilling to let go, and a mentor hand-holding the adolescent with the promise that she will be looked after.
It thus manages to poke fun both at ISIS cadre and the rising numbers of western imports to the ISIS ranks, and in so doing, strips the group of the diabolical strength it has captured in the global imagination.
There are other spoofs that can be seen online. One of the better ones shows a purported blooper reel in which an actor playing Jihadi John stands next to a victim and intones threats to America.
He is reading from a script and cannot get basic words like “circumstances” right. While Jihadi John struggles with his pronunciation, the victim runs away, only to be recaptured. The video is shot like a film, with “takes” and “makeup touchup”. It manages to contrast the casual brutality of the group with the incompetence of the cadre in a way that is not only funny but morally satisfying.
The spoofs themselves can take on political colour. One shows ISIS men killing any Muslim who approaches a park. The premise is laugh-out-loud. The men who turn up for a walk have done nothing wrong. If anything, they are perhaps more religious than the ISIS fighters. (One of the walkers professes ignorance when asked about a red-light area since he doesn’t watch the news. TV is haraam, after all.) The fighters kill anyone and everyone for a lark and fight over who gets to kill a Christian since that bestows more blessings. (The Christian joins in the fight.) In the end, an Israeli walks up but the fighters let him pass, saying “Welcome!” That is when you realise that the spoof is made by Palestinians.
To be sure, this brand of humour is not to everyone’s taste. After the Saturday Night Live sketch was broadcast, critics lambasted the producers of the show for bad taste. One person said on Twitter that the sketch was disrespectful towards “military moms whose kids are in the fight”. Another said “some things are not joke material” and that the sketch was “really, REALLY bad”.
But that’s missing the point entirely. The debate since the Charlie Hebdo massacre has focused too much on what can and cannot pass muster when it comes to spoofing sensitive issues.
But the point of a spoof is precisely to rip off the halo of respectability or of menace that attaches itself to icons of any stripe. To the lay viewer fed a steady diet of gruesome ISIS footage, nothing can be more comforting than a video in which the cadre are caricatured as bumbling fools.
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