Hindu groups that are protesting “The Love Guru” should relax, buy some popcorn and enjoy the movie. The fact is that it’s pretty innocuous at worst and actually a humorous, if wildly over-simplified version of some of the most popular teachings that have emerged from Hindu teachers and traditions. Where else can one find a popular film that shares Gandhi’s teaching that a world animated by the spirit of “an eye for an eye” will simply create a world of blind people?
No, the movie is neither a sophisticated rendering of a wise and ancient tradition, nor does it pretend to be one. But there is no more disrespect of the tradition here than there is when similar portrayals of Jewish, Christian, or Muslim faith are used to make us laugh. In fact, such portrayals assume that we know enough and care enough about the tradition being lampooned, that we can appreciate the humor. Such material only works when that is the case. So this is as much about the popular foothold that Hinduism has established in American pop culture as anything else. And that kind of popularity always makes the purists in any community nervous. But that’s their problem. And it’s not limited to Hindus.
Every religious and ethnic group in this country maintains “watchdog” groups that are constantly looking for how someone else is out to get them. And since we all tend to find what we are looking for, it’s no surprise that each of these groups portrays a world in which they are being victimized by the larger culture. If they didn’t, such organizations would have no reason to exist, so they keep finding the problem in order to justify their work.
Does that mean that we live in a world without Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, hostility to Christian faith, and Hindu-bashing? Of course not. These are all real issues and they must be addressed. But if we all learned to laugh at ourselves a little more even as we addressed those painful realities, we might not find ourselves living in a world in which people destroy churches because of cartoons, imprison teachers because they allow their students to name a teddy bear Muhammad, label as anti-Semitic any film that questions the actions of the State of Israel, or burn copies of The DaVinci Code because it is “an offense to God.”
There is no external line that demarcates the point at which “acceptable humor” becomes “offensive disrespect.” As the terms themselves indicate, these are issues that are determined not by the ones making the jokes, but by the ones about whom they are made. There are however guidelines that might be helpful to us all in becoming both more sensitive joke tellers and more tolerant audiences in the presence of other people’s jokes.
First, is the purpose of the joke to justify the thoughts and actions of those who are genuinely hostile to its practitioners? Second, does the joke offer any sense of the underlying value of the tradition or teaching being skewered? Third, if someone were to make a similar joke at the expense of our own tradition, would we find it acceptable?
Principles for those on the receiving end of such humor would include an honest assessment of the partial truth which makes the joke recognizably funny, the willingness to ask if the joke makes us uncomfortable by itself or because we feel generally insecure about the place of our faith in the larger culture, and asking how often we are able to laugh at ourselves and share that laughter with others.
Of course, following these principles will frustrate the culture warriors, or it could transform them to warriors for laughter in a world that could surely use more, especially in the name of religion.
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