How sexism pokes its nose into the matter of humour too

What a woman laughs at, when and how she laughs, how many times she laughs... Sexism pokes its nose into the matter of humour too. Comedy has His and Her cubicles; constant repeats with guffaws heard from one, nervous titters from the other.

Men joke and women laugh - a traditional hetero trope. For the other way round would mean two buddies in a sexless banter; once a man starts to laugh, the woman is not hot. On dates and even in long boring marriages, women are expected to concede defeat as a comic. To find a man who makes you laugh is one of the things on a woman’s list; to find a woman who finds him funny is on his. Humour is foreplay man to woman; woman to man it walks a platonic path. A comedian once said that an attractive man in the audience was not good news: ‘By the end of my gig he's going to find me repulsive, at least as a sexual being.’

A woman who is funny usually runs into a competitive man, with the latter trying to wrest the comedy crown from her head; first subtly, then aggressively. Somewhat like sex then, women have to fake it here too. Go ha ha while sighing over the lame jokes that are a polite woman’s lot. Then there is the alarming slide into risqué wit, a male way of checking her out for matters less funny (to him; to her perhaps bed is the funniest part).

Not ladylike to laugh loudly. To laugh too much, too often, too long. Those whose business it was to manage young girls, to grow them into responsible housewives, went after the wide-eyed wondrous gaze that women in soap ads still sport. So women learnt to laugh behind their palms, into fists disguised as coughs. Their laughs were called giggles, as if laugh was too manly. Babies chortled, women giggled, men laughed – that was the hierarchy of it.

Open hearty laughs in books were reserved for matriarchs. Young damsels looking to be rescued by dashing suitors could relax facial muscles only to stretch lips modestly in gratitude. The dragon has just been slain, so there were eyes to blink and hands to wring. This was not time to remember a joke she had once heard. Which is why the Russian fairy tale about the princess who never smiled is still popular. The grim girl whose father said he would give her hand in marriage to whoever made her laugh. There was something so innately feminine about the princess who would laugh only with the right man, a kind of double virginity.

From the cheeky grin of Nimisha Sajayan’s younger self in the new Malayalam film Malik, which may have disappeared eventually due to the unnecessary slenderness of her husband (played by a size-zero Fahadh Faasil), to the staccato giggles that escape Lady Amelia Castro in the Spanish TV series The Cook of Castamar tagged with an after-laugh, female mirth has come a long way on the screen.