Of humiliating humor

There seems to be a new kind of humor on the rise - the art of degrading. As per the social conventions or societal norms of the past 2 decades, nothing is sacrilige or nothing is sacred. And this is subjected to the terms and conditions of who is offending and who gets offends, basis which the interpretation will vary. With social media, everyone with a phone and data connection is judge jury and executioner across every topic and every personality under the sun. It has been the case since last couple of decades, but with SM replacing Mainstream media as defacto news channel for many nowadays, the problems arising out of such uncensored adaptation or aping of western culture breeds to several powder keg situation in countries like India where libel laws are at best non-existent or un deployable or used less. The thing with comedians being, they can degrade, make fun of in their words, anyone and anything from god to godmen to conmen to politicians (and i repeat myself) to personalities to common people. And having found themselves on the wrong side of the receiving end of such shenanigans, they've now started with "roast" concept, again an imported crap from Western world, where you can demean, degrade, damage, dissect anything and everything about an individual, best part being with their consent and in front of them, and people laugh out loud at such public dressing down!!! The more explicit or insulting the roast is more the views and louder the laughter!!

When goundamani used to scold senthil using a variety of verbal abuse, mocking his physical appearance, body shaming was not known even as a word. When he was shouting abuses at politicians, it was seen as common man's anguish. But when Ashish Solanki has to censor Samay Rana's "dark jokes" on the guest in a program meant for Roasting, imagine the kind of content that is being purported as humor!! That particular video has more than 1.5 crore views within few weeks of launch tells a scary story!! Are we that depraved of fun things? Is humor so scarce that people pay or get paid to get humiliated in the name of humor? Can anyone go to anyone extreme to gain a few laughs? Making fun of ideologies politicians their gambits and goof ups - i am all for it and that represents thriving democracy. But dragging common people into that and making it as a societal norm and replacing decent jokes as dad jokes is something that is scary and makes me really worried about where we are heading!! Comedy is serious business, people say. But humour seems to be deadly nowadays!!