If you jabbed the Marcos dictatorship with jokes, read on. This is about what London's "Telegraph" calls "arguably the bravest stand-up comics in the world today:" the "Moustache Brothers" who, despite repeated jailing and their fears, take on the paranoid Burmese junta.

"U Par Par Lay goes to India to have his toothache treated," reports New York Times "Don't you have dentists in Myanmar?" the Indian dentist wonders. "Oh, yes, we do, doctor," the Burmese replies. "But in Myanmar, we're not allowed to open our mouths."

Isn't that the gag about two Filipino dogs who lined up for US visas? "Martial law has been good to you," the scrawny mutt tells the plump mongrel. "Why do you want to leave?" The reply: "I want to bark."

Like the Philippines under Marcos, Burma is a country where the wrong joke can get you a beating or jail. Par Par Lay is, in fact, the "Moustache Brothers" No.1. With Lu Zaw, Moustache Brother No. 3 Three, Par was jailed for six years. Why? At the 1996 independence day show they cracked anti-government jokes before detained Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and diplomats.

The generals scrubbed the Brothers from the list of state-licensed artists. They can perform only in English and before foreign tourists. Nonetheless, they've pressed on with biting parodies of the junta. Example: A junta general died and became a big fish .As a tsunami rolls toward Myanmar to wreck it, the fish surfaces and admonishes the wave: "Stop! I have already done that there."

Telling jokes against "Big Brother" are 'tiny revolutions', author George Orwell once noted. Pogo and Togo poked fun, on the stage, at Japanese occupiers - until the kempetai padlocked their show. Remember the Pinoy, taken ill, while passing Imelda Marcos' Film Center? As he vomits, a passerby whispers into his ear: "Pare. I share your opinion.

Agence France Presse reported that the junta released Par Par Lay and 31 other dissidents last week The comedian had been arrested yet again - this time for applauding Buddhist monks who demonstrated against the junta late September..

The releases are to doll up the junta's tattered image before UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari, arrives in Yangon for his second visit. Gambari will press for "more democratic measures, UN chief Ban Ki-moon stressed.

"We are artists: we believe in ordinary people, not in the government," Lu Maw explained. "We need light, but in Myanmar, light on and off. Not enough electricity. No water supply. School - money, money, money! Ordinary people no money. So we joke.

People need a good joke. But the government don't like us because we joke."

University of California (Berkley) professor Alan Dundes notes that "among serious students of humor, it's commonly known that the most piquant political jokes are found wherever totalitarian dictatorships flourish." Indeed, as the psychotic "Cultural Revolution" wound down, for example, Chinese students would yell: "Down with the Gang of Four" while holding up five fingers. The fifth referred to Mao Zedong.

Political jokes tend to wither when freedom allows free speech. In Poland, gags dried up when the Solidarsnoc movement ushered in freedom. Democratic countries "can't compete with jokes about Hitler, Stalin, or, say, Ferdinand Marcos," Dundes adds.

Few slashed with more effective humor than the late Jaime Cardinal Sin against Marcos' rigged elections, among other issues. On his return from the Vatican conclave that elected Pope John Paull II, Sin told Comelec's Leonardo Perez: "Leonie - if you had overseen the Conclave, I would have been elected Pope."

Burmese agents sit on front benches of the shows as the Brothers poke fun at the generals who've run down resource-rich country into poverty. The cops even chip in when they pass the hat around.

But the recent crackdown on the monks by soldiers was "no good for jokes". Lu Maw noted "People are sad," he said. "Man kill man, you go to hell. This Buddhist belief. Now they are killing monks! They go beyond hell."

We too had after-life jokes. One told of martial law enforcer Juan Ponce Enrile buried to his waist in hell. He grouses because Ferdinand Marcos has fire lapping only at his feet.

"Shhhhhh," Marcos tells Enrile. "I'm standing on Imelda's shoulders."

"Political humor is a response to conditions typical of dictatorial regimes", says University of Massachusetts' Oriol Pi-Sunyer who studied Spanish political humor under the Franco dictatorship. Jokes are acts of defiance the world over, add Steven Lukes of Baliol College at Oxford , and Hebrew University's Itzhak Galnoor in their book: "No Laughing Matter." "The time to worry is when the jokes stop."

"Yes, we are afraid," admits Lu Maw. "But we keep on going. We just joke. This is our job, our family tradition…Out thereare spies, listening, watching. We are dead meat already," referring to continued junta repression.

The Moustache Brothers "are the ultimate example of the old theatrical maxim 'the show must go on' notes Sunday Telegraph. "(They) are the country's only political satire show. And even as Burma 's generals bore down on all dissent, "arguably the world's bravest stand-up comics, were still making fun of them".

We Filipinos owe these brave comedians support. Because we now find that here jokes may no longer be enough. More of us must resort to "writs of amparo."

(E-mail: juan_mercado@boholchronicle.com)