Before Burmese stand-up comedian Zarganar was thrown in jail, his stage routine was peppered with references to motorcycles. Allusions to this apparently innocuous mode of transport would have his audience tittering nervously at the inside joke. Like Zarganar, they knew he was referring to a form of torture favoured by Burma's generals. The "motorcycle"� of Burma's infamous prisons forces inmates to balance, for hours on end, on the balls of their feet "“ often with nails placed beneath their soles "“ and to make a buzzing sound. Burmese humour is no laughing matter.
Zarganar, a former dentist whose stage name means "tweezers"�, certainly never succeeded in amusing the generals who prefer to call the country they run so badly Myanmar. His criticism of the junta's tragically slow response to last year's cyclone Nargis, which killed some 140,000 people and destroyed 800,000 homes, landed him a 59-year jail sentence, later commuted to 35 years.
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