Chitra Gopalakrishnan in conversation with Ankit Raj Ojha about his latest edited volume Bare Bones Book of Humour (2026)

 

CG: Thank you, Ankit, for taking the time to talk to me about your latest book you have edited for Bare Bones, titled The Bare Bones Book of Humour (2026). Warm congratulations on collating this volume with twenty-four stories from across the world that are hilarious, quick-witted, and radiate pure exuberance.

 

In your introduction to this book that you call ‘A Series of Un-serious Events’, you talk about your conscious decision to pursue your doctorate on Kurt Vonnegut and immerse yourself in his tragicomic worldview, one that viewed the sober provocations of life through the prism of the irreverent, and that you found such vim and vitality in many other writers worldwide. As you carry the humour baton in this volume, tell us a bit about how the genre of ‘non-sense’ that flips sense, and one that is rooted in a sophisticated linguistic aesthetic, is as observant and penetrating than scholarly writings, if not more.

 

ARO: Thank you, Chitra, for reading the book and for this conversation. As for your question about ‘sophisticated non-sense’ and ‘scholarly’ writings, I’d say the keys here are accessibility and decipherability. Scholarly writings are extremely valuable but only as far as their reach and reception go. Many of us either cannot stay ‘serious’ through long texts or are just not wired that way. Non-sense is ‘penetrating’ in that it can reach and be received almost everywhere. And it can be as observant, too.

 

Take the jester figure in Renaissance theatre, ‘thinking’ humorists like Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut and Jonas Jonasson, or even somebody as deeply philosophical as Dostoevsky. Shakespeare’s dolts, Twain’s Huck Finn, Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout, Jonasson’s Hitman Anders, and Dostoevsky’s drunk, indecent Russians dish out the finest philosophies without even trying to.

 

And isn’t all philosophy but non-sense clad in a sophisticated linguistic aesthetic? To me, a Jaspal Bhatti is as observant, and perhaps more penetrating, than a liberal arts scholar.

 

 

CG: What made you cast your author net worldwide? Would you say that attention to this side of the literary spectrum is waning among writers in India? Though Mike Nagel in his foreword admits that this is a global phenomenon and ‘seriously funny literature’ is relegated to obscure shelves in book stores.

 

ARO: I just wanted to bring together different flavours of humour. Although India alone is an entire universe, I wanted the book to be more eclectic so it could offer something for every reader. The decision to go global also comes from my role as a founding editor at The Hooghly Review, where we have published folks from about 65 countries and have a dedicated humour section where we publish the most ingenious humour literature from all over the world, all year long.

 

Coming to the second part of your question, I’d say I agree with Mike Nagel. What Mike saw in that Barnes & Noble in his Texas town is what I see here in Indian bookstores. The books that make the front shelves are of course good, but there could always be not-too-shabby seats for literary humour too. A handful of birds alone don’t make a garden beautiful.

 

We have had the likes of Harishankar Parsai, Shrilal Shukla, Sharad Joshi, and more recently Ashok Pande, carrying the humour baton in Hindi. Recently I discovered English translations of two mind-blowing Telugu novellas by Viswanadha Satyanarayana. His works are fun, deep, and so sharp they could give our stand-up comics a run for their money. Among Indian English writers, I love Salman Rushdie and Manu Joseph for their wit. And in the English scene in the subcontinent, Shehan Karunatilaka and Mohammad Hanif are comic geniuses.

 

Indian readers have some of the world’s most diverse palates. We have here tons of literary festivals, book fairs, and perhaps the world’s largest used and pirated book networks. We produce writings in a record number of languages. It’s just that we don’t have, at least to my knowledge, a good many full-fledged practitioners of literary humour in the Indian English scene. Ruskin Bond is a national treasure and among my first literary loves. He is to us what P.G. Wodehouse is to England. And I’ve heard great things about Shovon Chowdhury, although I am yet to read his works. But there is no pantheon of literary humourists in Indian English literature like we have in other genres.

 

So, it’ll be great to have more humour writers in India. Wodehouse and Jonasson sell like hot cakes in our country. We clearly don't have a dearth of humour readers.

 

CG: Give us an idea of how you hunted and gathered your writers for this volume.

 

ARO: We put out a call for submissions on the Bare Bones website and shared the hell out of it on social media. I wanted an unsolicited anthology and my publisher gave me full control over the selections. I did accept some familiar names, but only because I thought the stories were great fits. I also had to say no to friends. Thank gods they didn’t take the rejections to heart.

 

I did ‘hunt and gather’ the foreword and the blurbs. I had specific people in mind who were kind enough to lend their words.

 

 

CG: In a volume like this where the writers are from different countries, how difficult or manageable is it to ensure that the pieces are relatable to all the readers, despite the nuances peculiar to that country?

 

ARO: I’m glad you asked this. I usually have more room to host experimental writings in The Hooghly Review, which is free and online, and therefore has readers everywhere. But with a print anthology, we are constrained by commerce. So, we cannot discount the palatability factor here.

 

The twenty-four stories in the book span eight countries. They have nuances peculiar to the writers’ cultures, influences, and other identities. A few are wildly singular. But every story has some universal element, and each, to me, is fully realised in the traditional sense. There’s an essay in there too, by Rahul Gaur. I was reminded of Harishankar Parsai while reading it. (In his review for Scroll.in, Abhik Ganguly says the essay reminds him of Jaspal Bhatti’s classic satires on Indian politics and society. I couldn’t agree more.) Mike Nagel’s foreword is another essay in a way. It’s Vintage Nagel–there’s a reason he is one of the best of his kind.

 

These two cool anomalies aside, it was my conscious decision to stick with the good old storytelling tradition. I wanted readers to leave sated and with a sense of closure. (Although a few stories, I now remember, have fun open endings.)

 

I have lost count of the number of times I have had to read these stories during the copy-editing process. That they would be immensely re-readable too, in addition to being super entertaining, is a happy accident.

 

 

CG: As we agree that humour is more than art-for-art’s-sake and opens one up to unlikely connections, through our ‘being’ rather than our ‘brains’, point us to how stories here force us to question everything around us, the mundane and the sacred, and even oneself.

 

ARO: Questioning is key to keeping things just and relevant. Writers are often accused of staying aloof and indifferent to the real world even while they are writing realist fiction. I am glad the stories I have curated have more than art-for-art’s-sake value, that the writers question themselves, others, and the main ‘man’ running things from up there.

 

It would be difficult to elaborate more on this question without giving away spoilers. So, I’ll just share teasers. In the book we have more than seven kinds of sin, faith and superstition, sex and masculinity, queer desire and social conformity, menstruation, social and individual quirks, state control, the social media virus, and death, to name a few things the writer’s critique in their stories.

 

 

CG: As humour rests on the fulcrum of the unprovable and the absurd, can you elaborate how it can lead us gently into the art of dissent, by following the contours of the whimsy spirit they are written in, in a twist-in-the-tale fun way, and not in a polemical manner?

 

ARO: I have always maintained that dissent in literary writing can be best expressed through humour and satire. Humour, by its very nature, is dependent on having something to laugh at. And when we laugh at a subject, we are, in some way, critiquing it. What sets works like Raag Darbari, Animal Farm, Catch-22, Cat’s Cradle, The Master and Margarita, etc. apart is the universality and timelessness of the writers’ approaches. The books may have been written with specific ends in mind. But the way they have endured, one can cast these writings to critique more than one target in more than one setting.

 

Compare this with some of the content being written today. I just finished watching the final season of The Boys. It is painful to see how a beloved series praised for its writing ended up being a mere parody of a head of state. Earlier, the series’ writers would tackle universal themes such as absolute power, God complex, identity crises, what makes a hero, and much more. The Boys used to be comicbook lore, the pinnacle of storytelling, the ultimate satire. But lately it seems that American filmmakers are in a competition to produce shallow caricatures of mad politicians. The digs, although timely, lack in depth and kill the shelf life of the writing.

 

This is not how humorists dissent. I love your expression, ‘following the contours of the whimsy spirit’. This is how some of the best humour writing operates. Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Mikhail Bulgakov, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Tom Sharpe, Tom Robbins, Christopher Moore... The greatest humour writers have been true to their art even when they could just be angry and rant away.

 

That said, there are some good satires in The Bare Bones Book of Humour, stories that dissent in a fun and intelligent way and not in a polemical manner. There is a story about state surveillance and missing condoms, another about a male god who gets his first period, a tale of a woman who has to face a series of scheming godmen, one where two brothers find and exploit loopholes in divinely ordained rules, and many more tales of dissent that are wise and witty and not shove-down-your-throat preachy.

 

 

CG: Would you also agree that while humour pokes fun at absolutism by stretching, squeezing and turning everything topsy turvy with its non-sequiturs and oddities, it is in the same breath a great source of community bonding, a place of shared laughter and spirit, that it has the potential for global affinity?

 

ARO: Absolutely. Humans bond when they agree on something. Like every other human emotion, humour gives us things to identify with. And finding someone amused by the same things is bound to make us click. We have been laughing at the same things for centuries despite our segregation by geography, rituals, class, gender, and other dividers. Social media, besides death, has emerged as the greatest leveller. It’s amazing how a meme can erase differences and make us all laugh the same.