Pillar | Missing: India’s comic sense

In 2021, I saw comedian Varun Grover performance in New Delhi. As usual, there were audiences in the palm of his hand. In about 10 minutes, Grover said (in Hindi), “Please understand the chronology. First, I tell the joke, then you laugh and finally, I go to jail.” Laughter was silenced, not because people did not understand it, but because they understood it a little very well.

The room tension was because back, comedian Munwar Farooqui’s legal troubles were in the headlines. Across January and February, he spent more than a month in jail for allegedly making aggressive jokes about Hindu deities, an allegation for which a chopped of evidence was never born.

Munwar Farooqui

It is the same four years below with Indian comedy. At the time of writing this column, Kunal Kamra was slapped against her with the second, third and fourth FIRs this week, after the comedian’s Deputy CM Ainath Shinde, Cabinet Minister Nirmala Sitarman, after allegedly derogatory comments about the cabinet minister Nirmala Sitarman, et al. Comments were made in terms of Kamra’s 45-minute stand-up special. Naya Bharat On YouTube, which has been viewed more than 11 million times since its release on 23 March. Kamra’s Mumbai Studios was also brutally granted by supporters of Shinde’s Shiv Sena faction.

Kunal Kamra

Comedian persecute

In India, comedy is still away from being a vehicle for social change. And one of the main reasons is that if it comes to harassing the comedians at both the gradual Indian governments-state and central levels-when it comes to harassing the comedians. A decade ago, in 2015, All India Bakhar (AIB) uploaded a video, where he, Karan Johar, ‘Bhuna Hua’ actors with Bollywood celebrities like Arjun Kapoor and Ranveer Singh.

The entire political ecosystem cried porn and several FIRs were lodged against the comedian. AIB finally removed the video from its YouTube page. Since then, comedians such as Sanjay Rajaura have faced the most legal action in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Like 2016, when actor and comedian Kiku Sharda was arrested after a religious leader and convicted in the TV show, Gurmeet Ram Rahim was convicted. Comedy Nights with Kapil,

Sanjay Rajaura

Veer Das performed her Two India Set at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center in 2021, he faced a total of seven police complaints against him in various parts of the country-in the complaint, the complainant was the vice-president of the ruling Bharatiya Janta Bharatiya Janta Party (name, sadness, Aditya Jha). DAS also faced cases for “objectionable content” after its Netflix TV series HasmukhAbout a small town comedian who becomes a serial killer. Kamra is a previous contempt case against him in the 2020 Supreme Court.

Veer Das

Recently, of course, Comedian Ads Raina and Podcaster Ranbir Allahabadia (aka Beerbis) were the subjects of the FIR filed after Raina’s Powld YouTube series allegedly after objectionable jokes. India became latent,

Personally, I see it to a large extent as a cultural issue where standard India vs are very different for the rest of the world. We are an obedience-based culture focused on collective needs, not an dissatisfaction-based culture where individual rights are paramount. And because of this, I never see individual external comedians affecting the important interaction in India – the kind of conversation leads to real change.

Samay Raina

System designed to reward compliance

Recently, I was answering a question about former English cricketer Steve Hormison about the cultural difference between Asian and non-Asian cricketers. He replied that it was very difficult for young players to have MAVRERICS and Niyam-Breaker in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh et al as they come through a system designed to reward compliance and punish dissatisfaction.

In my view, Harmison had hit something important for discourse, and his point can also be extracted in the comedic field. Why would you try to criticize one of the youth, up-end-and-come-up Indian stand-up comedians, caste and religion-based discrimination, or gender wage differences, or other problems in our society? If anything, they will be encouraged to swing at other peak to complete the majority of the majority and insecurity.

Can you imagine being a comedian that regularly performs in corporate programs in India? Half of the people who hire you don’t want anything else, but jokes about cooking their wives, or jokes about that feminism “has gone far”, or jokes about how you can’t make women cackols due to “Vok Culture”. There are people in the other half of your customer who do not really want you to joke about anything. They want the equivalent of white noise, the words are so enedements and informal that they mix with the atmosphere like lift music.

This is not to say that real changes cannot be triggered by the comedian. In the US, the entire legal framework for Mass-Media Censorship was caused by a legal case: FCC (Federal Communications Commission) vs. Pacific Foundation, 1978, US Supreme Court ended in a landmark 5-4 judgment by the US Supreme Court which maintained the rights of the federal government to regulate the content on the broadcast airways. The case is only due to comedian George Carlin Seven dirty words Monologue, in which he listed some of the oath words, could not be spoken on TV or radio regardless of reference.

Carlin was removing the monologue of his predecessor Lenny Lenny Bruce in 1966, where Bruce re -closed the words arrested in the past. A conservative activist filed a case against Radio Pacific to broadcast the Carlin segment, which eventually brought about this outstanding decision, which was rich in both legal and public policy arguments.

Whether you may agree with the decision of the US Supreme Court, but you cannot deny the rigor of practice and intellectual affair. I will not only urge Indian comedians and politicians to read the decision, but will read the arguments that were earlier. These are conversations that we should now have, when the internet has changed forever, how the public consumes information and opinion.

I wish, we would actually file FIR and barbaric studio in comparison to reading and creating informed arguments.

Writers and journalists are working on their first book of non-story.