We live in times of increasing censorship in media and of free speech. Where Munawar Faruqui, a stand-up comedian gets arrested in 2021 and subsequently jailed for a joke he did not even utter at a café in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. He returns to the limelight however by winning two reality television shows, Lock Upp (Alt Balaji) in 2022 and the infamous, Big Boss 17 (Colors) in 2023. The enduring image of a smiling Faruqui with his hands up in victory amidst a sea of his fans in Dongri, Mumbai attests to his popularity and celebrity despite the controversy that made him lose his livelihood of being a stand-up comedian in India. Another stand-up, Kunal Kamra who has been heavily censored, joked in his latest YouTube show in March 2024 about giving up comedy altogether. When the worst seems possible, the only relief can be comedy and satire. Thus, it is pertinent and invigorating to understand and engage critically with the medium of stand-up comedy in India and around the world through the edited volume by Rashi Bhargava and Richa Chilana – Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy: Speaking Truth to Power (published by Routledge in 2023). 

Bhargava and Chilana in their introduction explain stand-up comedy as a performance in which the performer establishes a connection with the audience by breaking the fourth wall. Further, in for example observational comedy, performers make use of local knowledge to elicit laughter and possibly raise consciousness about societal injustice. Thus, they argue that stand-up comedy has an inherent political potential, which however is problematized due to its relationship with largely urban and elite audiences tied into the context of a neoliberal entertainment structure of production, distribution and reception. According to them, it is a communicative and collaborative act which demands a “deeper analysis of the relationship between politics, humour, identity and subversion” (2). The book is divided into three sections and twelve chapters that traverse diverse geographical areas highlighting various identities and intersectionality. Contemporary stand-up comedy is largely influenced by British and American comedy and in the first section, chapters by Mohamed Bassou and Rebecca Krefting, Nina Setyaningsih and Anisa Larassati and Heidari-Shahreza trace the history of stand-up in their respective contexts of Turkey and Indonesia through the role of traditional forms of humour. Along with Jonathan Ervine, Aju James, Rachel Blackburn, Nina Setyaningsih and Anisa Larassati, they engage with the relationship of contemporary stand-up comedy with issues of race, caste and ethnicity in France, Mumbai, the U.S and Indonesia respectively. In the second section, Mohammad Ali Heidari-Shahreza (Iran), Christian Berger and Madhavi Shivaprasad (India) address gendered experiences within stand-up comedy and in the third section, chapters by Antti Lindfors, Marianna Keisalo, Margherita Dore and Chris Kramer adopt a framework of linguistic anthropology, semiotics and ableism to understand the form of stand-up comedy.

Bhargava and Chilana argue that all stand-up performances are political, even though they may not appear to be and they make the connection between these performances and what was known as political satire before, especially in observational comedy. According to them, the contemporary practices of stand-up comedy are capable of critiquing dominant structures – statist, social and cultural. Some performers make a distinction between either being overtly political or ‘safe’ where they may only touch upon the mundane and everyday (6). This makes Aju James’ chapter on caste and media infrastructure in Mumbai particularly relevant with respect to the stand-up comedy scene in the city. Based on his ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai, the chapter sheds light on caste issues being largely absent from the purview of several performers in the city. Caste is invisibilised, often emerging as caste-based humour in the form of slurs or insults instead of as a social issue. Stand-up comedy becomes a part of the larger media infrastructure (cinema, television etc.) that is central to the city with its own established caste structure and hierarchy. And this, as James explains is due to the demographic of the performers, producers and writers being largely upper-caste. He observes that the performers enter the comedy profession as an escape from their society, mainstream media and corporate life but it is ironic that their success depends on the same mainstream media infrastructure that the city offers in the form of corporate sponsorship, venues, ticketing platforms and increasingly streaming (92). He highlights how being from privileged upper caste backgrounds, performers in Mumbai seek to create ‘cosmopolitan’ content and represent a certain “Indian-ness in global flows of media” (100). Since performers today increasingly travel to various countries for shows that appeal primarily to the diaspora, it is relevant to ask whether the performers James interviewed belonged to the city or moved here from other parts of the country. It can be observed that several stand-up performers move to Mumbai from various parts of India since the promise of the media infrastructure in the city creates aspirations for ‘success’, both domestic and international. Further, a few anti-caste stand-up comedians have emerged recently in the city which would be relevant to address[i].

Madhavi Shivaprasad in her chapter on female comedians in India addresses the issue of women not getting acknowledgement for performing “legitimate political comedy” (150). Through her analysis of three female comedians – Aditi Mittal, Agrima Joshua and Sumaira Sheikh, she argues that they assert a form of cultural citizenship via their performances which are closely linked to their experiences of gender and sexuality. She highlights how women are not only dealing with patriarchal biases in the industry and outside of it but also threats of sexual violence, especially online. The performances of these women as she states are “complex negotiations with themselves, their individual experiences as well as the audiences” (154). Shivaprasad makes a compelling analysis of the three performers who come from different backgrounds, Mittal an upper-caste Hindu, Joshua is a Christian from Lucknow who situates her identity in her performances, Sheikh a Muslim who does not allude to her religion unlike some of her peers as Shivaprasad notes like Urooj Ashfaq or Kaneez Surka. She argues however that their performances do not get classified as “political” because they do not “talk about politicians and electoral politics the way the men do” (161). Her chapter is an important intervention in how women’s experiences are crucial to the political nature of stand-up comedy as well as how they are creating a space for themselves in this medium. Krefting argues that charged humour identifies social issues and is a call for viewers to question stereotypes about minorities and their communities (152). Stand-up comedy has the potential to circumvent censorship through satire. This volume is an important contribution to addressing the potential of the form to speak truth to power and also the pitfalls that govern this neoliberal form. That is the pressure to create a public identity and presence through both offline and online media, the financial and commercial needs of the job such as brand endorsements and corporate shows that may override its subversive potential.

[i] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/feb/22/whos-laughing-now-the-dalit-comedians-punching-up-against-indias-caste-system, accessed on 15 April 2024.

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Harmanpreet Kaur is an Assistant Professor at the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai.