On Wit (cont.)

A photograph dating to 21 February 1948 caught Klement Gottwald, head of the Czech communist party, handing a fur hat to Vladimir Clementis, who helped orchestrate the coup that elevated Gottwald to Czech premier and eventually president. In the photo, the pair stand on a Baroque castle balcony, with Gottwald haranguing a Prague crowd just as the snows start to fall. And so he thinks to hand his hat to Clementis.

Shortly after his arrest and eventual execution in 1952 as a victim of inner party purges, Clementis would vanish without trace from the photo. Considering the photo and its vanishing parts in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera arrived at the following conclusion: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Which reminds me. Never let it be said that there is no historical power in the endless repetition of a joke.

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If you know you're dead meat, to borrow the phrase of the comedien, what loss in shooting from the hip?

The Moustache Brothers of Mandalay run a tight business making sport of insulting the junta, firing off one-liners from an open wooden storefront that doubles as stageset, family dining room, green ogre's stamping pad, costume closet and alaphabet soup of Burmese concerns stenciled onto wooden signposts.

(ICC. Stop. Opium. Stop. China. Stop. Pause for a traditional dance, in a whirl of pink silk by Moustache Brother Spokesman's prized possession -- his "cover girl," he says in a lascivious refrain, holding up an ancient Italian version of Lonely Planet Guide to Burma with his wife, a few decades younger, gracing the cover in full traditional make-up.)

If a tree falls and no-one is there to hear it...
If only a tourist hears your political satire, wherefore its purpose?

Oh clever junta. They say Sen. Gen. Than Shwe plays his cards so close one forgets that he is a master of pyschological warfare. Isolate and conquer? Daw Suu rots alone in house arrest, far removed from the people she claims to represent. In past years, only her doctor and a food delivery man were permitted regular contact. The Moustache Brothers pose and strut in the shadows to a shadow of their audience. The decree against them comes in the wake of a string of arrests and staggered prison sentences following their provocative all-night performance in Suu Kyi's villa garden when last she was released.

Which doesn't mean they pack no punch.

Does futility measure as a utilitarian numbers game, or is there a qualitative significance in the mere act of playing to a wall? Is there symbolic importance in the smallest gestures of dissent? To borrow an idea I once heard expressed by composer Daniel Barenboim-- invest in a symbol because in the end a symbol matters. Like a dunce relegated with tall cap to a corner, Burma's most famous band of satiricists are forbidden from talking to Burmese. And so they play nightly to a sporadic trickle of tourists. Until the wife grows matronly and the face turns to a prune, and the husband wizens and grays, and the jokes grow stale and automatic.


But short of cutting off his tongue, you'd be hard put to silence the court fool. Asavvy friend in Rangoon had me know that my new Moustache friends dared to talk back to Burma through the forbidden channels of Radio Free Asia in a new regular Wednesday broadcast.

I made my way to Moustache land, a sui generis island of local slapstick theatrics and a regular on the Burmese tourist circuit, the night I arrived in Mandalay. I stumbled through backroads, picking my way in the dark and thickly hot air to a part of town the Lonely Planet Guide called Burma's West End.

I had about given myself up for dead, lost in a self-pitying wallow of foreigner's post-colonial nostalgia, about ready to curse the natives who were swearing me off in giggles and cackles iwith knowing and incomprehensible mockery, when my rescue appeared in the form of a howl of cheers.

There it was, under my nose, far more richly adorned than the paper Victorian theaters I'd long ago learned to love from a childhood steeped in the mysticm of the stage. There they sat, this subversive troupe, legs splays on the wooden floorboards, fingers scooping rice into their mouths with ravenous energy , waiting for the tourists who that night amounted to the grand total of -- me.

"We wait ten minutes. If four more come, we perform," said the family troupe spokesman. "If not, we talk."
And so we talked, or he talked, and I listened to a self-aware clutter of Wodehousian English mingled with a touch of Teuton by way of spaghetti Western. Two nights later I attempted another visit. Two Germans and to Brits sat waiting for the show. Judging from the glazed expressions, the jokes rang hollow.

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