“War correspondents are some of the funniest people I know; funnier than any comedians,” says Henry Naylor, an award-winning playwright based in the UK. “In the darkest moments, human beings will find humour as a coping mechanism. Human beings are intrinsically absurd—we do stupid things whether we have an AK-47 in our hands or a pen. There’s always humour to be had in any situation.”
The comedian-playwright is going to be in Hyderabad to stage his play Afghanistan Is Not Funny on 10 December as part of the Manam Theatre Festival’s inaugural edition, on till 17 December. With its premiere at the Adelaide Fringe in early 2021, this part-memoir and “weird fusion of stand-up and drama with visual elements of photographs” was one of the winners of last year’s international fringe circuit.
The play—Naylor’s response to his visit to the Afghan war zone in 2002 to research for a comedy project and the subsequent Taliban takeover in 2021— has been described as a docu-play or a performance lecture. “I talk to the audience. It is kind of a stand-up but it is an emotional journey. There is an arc akin to a play’s. There are laughs in it, but the piece is more moving than funny, or so I have been told. It is storytelling but with a visual element and drama. I play around 20 different characters within the show,” he elaborates.
The seeds of the play were sown in 2002 when Naylor, then a sketch comedian working on a radio series, was getting increasingly fed up with the sanitised version of the media coverage of the war in Afghanistan. “There’s a level of tastelessness and indecency in not acknowledging peoples’ sacrifice in fighting a war. Also, if a war is being committed in the name of the public, we should be holding the politicians to account. I felt that if we were not shown the truth of what our governments were doing, the media wasn’t serving the public,” he says.
As a response, Naylor started writing a satire. And then, he and two-time Scottish Feature Photographer of the Year, Sam Maynard, found themselves in Afghanistan in order to seek out the facts for themselves. The resulting play, Finding Bin Laden, premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2003.
Two decades later, the Taliban came back to power in 2021 as US and NATO forces withdrew from Afghanistan. Once more, the artist was confronted with the failings of the media. “We pick up a story, talk about it intensely and then just drop it. The Ukraine war was the biggest story in the world last year and now, it barely gets a mention. That’s true of Afghanistan too. It was the biggest story in the world other than covid-19 two years ago and now no one talks about it,” says Naylor.
In Afghanistan Is Not Funny, there’s a lot going on as Naylor speaks to the audience about his experiences in the war zone from 20 years ago, against the backdrop of Maynard’s evocative photographs. Some of them are downright scary—like his meeting with the mujahideen or narrowly missing landmines.
“I wanted the show to remind the audiences of the people we left behind. It is also to remind myself of my responsibility as an artist,” says the playwright, whose visit to refugee camps and meetings with landmine victims changed something in him intrinsically. “There’s a phrase I use in the play which says ‘do your little bit of good wherever you are in the world’. I think as artists, we should be trying to make the world a better place. It may sound a bit glib but as artists, we can choose to write or perform anything, then why not use our energies to create something meaningful,” he says.
The tremendous response to the play has only affirmed Naylor’s conviction that people are interested in knowing about Afghanistan. “I think because the show is about war and the way the wealthy economies treat countries in the Middle East, it has a global relevance because humanity always seems to be at war at some point,” he says.
Afghanistan Is Not Funny will be staged on 10 December, at 4pm and 7.30pm, at District 150, Madhapur, Hyderabad.
Deepali Singh is a Mumbai-based art and culture writer
