It’s Saturday night, I am at the plush Gin Palace celebrating a friend’s birthday. As I drink my (extra dry) dirty martini, I look around and see all kinds of funny people. It’s amazing how after few drinks everyone is funny. Some are genuinely funny, some are funny even without realizing that they are being funny and some who try hard at being funny. But my personal favourite are the ‘pseudo’ funny people. Yes the ones who pretend to laugh at others jokes, I have seen so many of them, wives often do it for their husbands, the less popular friend does it for the more popular friend and then a social wannabe does it for the group leader. All this to watch and observe is bizarrely funny!

Humour if you ask me is an attractive trait of a personality - scrappy, timely or idiosyncratic, it holds attention and entertains. We all need comic intervention in our lives so that we can appreciate our lives even more. I like funny people and more than that I celebrate good humour. Funny people have an uncanny ability to attract people and keep them hooked. Take the Fake Ipl Player blog for instance, stinging but delicious, the humour here is sending its followers in raptures (me included). Look at the pseudonyms it has come up with ‘Appam Chutiya’ – wicked! Then there is the humour with the intellectual kicks - Tina Fey (30 Rock), Steve Carell (The Office), Ricky Gervais (Extras). Their humour is subtle, satirical and seditious but has a punch that will tickle your gut.

Now at this party there was a mixed crowd, the most popular where the rumbustious ones who were getting down and dirty (humour wise of course) and there were few who frowned every time a raunchy joke was cracked. It was like they were from the 60’s living in 2009. For them modernization by definition is merely just a virtue not a reality. God help them and save me from meeting more people like these. I for one enjoy romp humour, I am a diehard fan of the Judd Apatow clan - Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, and Jason Segel. When I first saw ‘Forty year old Virgin’ & ‘Knocked up’, I was taken aback by its brutal honesty but at the same time I laughed my guts out.

Humour deserves a boarder space and an objective response not a prejudiced or a guarded reaction. Surely the level of humour one can take is purely subjective, then how can one have an objective response. Well don’t take yourself too seriously and don’t take someone else’s sense of humour personally. Enjoy what you can, ignore what you think is irrelevant and object when you feel disconcerted. Let emotions drive humour not logic's, convictions or politically correct stuff and see the fun you have. Of course there will be few with a dry sense of humour, no not the dry martini kind but the Hahn Super dry beer kind, no kick, no fizz just beer (or just a joke). In such instances it’s more fun not to react than to have any reaction. If you enjoy the theatrics of a Lalu Prasad Yadav or a Rakhi Sawant you can enjoy romp humour. It’s all about the fun, how you take it, how you dish it and how you share it makes all the difference. They say variety is the spice of life, than comedy is that spicy bit of life’s variety. I would say enjoy it!

I have a laugh for breakfast, for lunch, over drinks and for dinner. That’s what keeps me going. I am glad that I have the ability to laugh at myself and laugh with others. Humour is a part of my life and hey I like funny people.