AIB come roaring back…it’s serious, and funny!

After the roasting they got for the AIB Roast, the funnymen have come right back with a post on their Facebook page, explaining the reasons for pulling the offending video out of circulation.

Their take is serious, as it is funny. We bring you select excerpts from their epistle, in their own words.

1. Let’s just all take a deep breath. They’re just jokes. Unfunny, crass or whatever you want to call them, they’re still just jokes. The AIB Knockout video has been taken down. While we’d love to claim that it’s because so many people watched it that it broke YouTube, the truth’s a little sadder.

2. First things first; no one person or force forced us to take this video down. This is not something that’s happened because of a 3 am phonecall or a morcha at our front door or a gunman on a grassy knoll. Under the circumstances, this is us being pragmatic.

3. AIB Knockout was an attempt..to bring the roast format to a country where celebrities aren’t often known to laugh at themselves. And if we’re honest, it was a phenomenally entertaining evening. It was just liberating to be able to say those things, things that people have thought in one form or another privately for years.

4. The video came with a clear disclaimer with several age and content warnings. No one was forced to watch it, we didn’t buy airtime on every single TV channel on Earth to broadcast it. YouTube videos do not magically auto-play in front of you. And yet the videos got over 8 million views.

5. With the Knockout, in our own juvenile, idiotic way, we wanted to push the envelope of comedy in this country. But then the envelope pushed back. We can live with abuse, hate, anger, fury, rage, ignorance, bigotry and perhaps even bullying. But we don’t want anybody to get hurt because of us.

6. We were pleasantly surprised that people in power who we have made fun of in the past, including people from both the so-called right wing and left-wing, went out of their way to convey support to us.

7. Friends in the media have told us to stay our course, pledging their support for our right to say anything, no matter how ridiculous. Thank you to anyone who has stated in the last few days that we have the right to say what we want, not as comedians but more importantly as citizens of this country.

8. There’s a larger cultural conversation going on here, where we’re at the very edges of what it’s okay to say. And it’s a conversation we need to have now because the world we live in is entirely too complicated to be run by silences.

9. We are also cooperating with the authorities and hope to resume normal service soon. We’d like some sort of cheerful resolution to this so we can focus on more important national issues, like the upcoming Cricket World Cup.

PS: Best of luck Virat Kohli. Sorry for the jokes. We heart emoticon you.

PPS: It’s a good thing nobody’s downloaded the file and put it on a torrent website or anything.

(Note: The AIB post has been edited for length).

For the complete text of the post please go to the their Facebook page: http://on.fb.me/1KbpGjc