Humour, now, is serious business. It can get you booked, jailed, harassed, silenced, or worst of all, a Twitter takedown notice. This aura of fear around humour has, big surprise, not stopped humour from being funny. It looks like people are still going to laugh at a person slipping on a banana peel, at another person saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and at yet another person saying disjointed words and hugging another person in imitation of a more famous man. The Bare Bones Book of Humour, edited by Ankit Raj Ojha, Bare Bones, 2026.A compilation of funny stories by Ankit Raj Ojha doffs its hat to the human propensity to laugh at one another and oneself. The Bare Bones Book of Humour has 24 offerings from eight countries, giving us an idea of 24 different varieties of humour. Some aim to affect a deeper understanding of humans as cultural and social beings, but most exist to get a laugh out of the reader, and inspire nothing more or less than a few moments of levity. For most of the book – except perhaps in the one story where god gets a period – the settings are normal, everyday and almost mundane. What happens in the course of the stories is also normal, everyday and almost mundane. But the gemlike quality of most of the book lies in the fact that it does not take itself seriously at all. And so you are compelled to subscribe to its benign vision and not take yourself too seriously while you are reading it either. The writers, who responded to a call for stories for the volume, comprise a wide array of individuals including journalists, academics, comedians, editors, poets and techies. More importantly, while most are from India and write of very Indian situations, the book is peppered with pieces by writers from across the world, which offer a kind of diversity one realises is necessary even in humour. Some stories start nowhere and go nowhere, offering just a very tiny vignette of a situation in a rather funny way. Malaysian writer Shih-Li Kow, for instance, simply describes an activity park from the point of view of one of its workers. The stories that are most memorable are the ones that align most with life, displaying how bizarre everyday injustices are. Nneoma F. Kenure’s two-and-a-half page meditation on how she navigates the presence of a (possibly harmless but you can never be too sure) man working in her bathroom doubles as powerful commentary on the way women try to stay safe in a world of men. Aparna Kalra’s story on a live-in couple just trying to abide by all the laws prescribed in a post-Uniform Civil Code Uttarakhand is also powerful simply because it does not even need to stray too far from what is in fact life there for men and women who live together. Alas, even Kalra could not have imagined a real-life headline that came up recently on the UCC – police in Uttarakhand want to implement it but have been unable to in the past year because they are waiting on a software update.Ojha’s own story, on a teenage braggadocio the likes of whom are distributed across schools and make for very good stories in adulthood, is one of the longer ones, but most stories in the volume are short, positively tiny – making them crisp glimpses into absurdity. And so it is that an underling tries to cope with her boss’s heartbreak, a woman tries to marry a Nigerian prince and fails, a couple ignores letters of warning on their haywire front yard, a man tries to stop a developer from killing his view with a large building, and a few condiments in the daal cooked by the boss’s wife begin to move just before dinner. Humour is an act of bravery, no matter how naturally placed in situations. There is always the risk that the reader won’t laugh, that the intended audience will find it facile, that the premise will simply not be funny. The Bare Bones Book of Humour takes the risk and emerges on the other side – victorious, happy and laughing at itself all along.