The ‘Serious Business of Comedy’: Indian Female Stand-Up Comedians and Their Political Roles

Although Indian stand-up comedy is generally perceived as a form of casual entertainment, it is deeply embedded in social realism and has the potential to serve as a medium of political satire and criticism. Owing to its popularity, comedy can be harnessed as a tool for advancing ideologies, expressing dissent, and opposing structures of power. To that end, Subin Paul has compared the Indian stand-up scene with Habermas’s classic model of the public sphere in which consensus is arrived at through dialogue and debate. This chapter borrows from Paul’s analysis to argue that comedy is, in fact, a ‘serious business’ that empowers female comedians to emerge as active political subjects who impact and shape current socio-political discourses. Despite the expansion of the public sphere into the digital space and the apparent freedom of speech afforded by media platforms, Indian stand-up comedians face new kinds of political surveillance in the forms of censorship, internet trolling, and backlash from opposing groups. In this regard, male comedians like Kunal Kamra or Munawar Faruqui have been generally hailed as the authorities on ‘political’ comedy, while existing scholarship on Indian stand-up comedy has studied female comedians only as a subset within the larger community of performers, with unique concerns pertaining to gendered experiences. Deviating from this strain, this chapter analyses acts by female comedians and their reception to answer three pertinent questions—how can we contextualise the ways in which the stage accords centrality to the marginalised position of women in comedy? How are female comedians situated in relation to issues of gender, power, and political authority? Lastly, what is the nature and manner of the female comic’s political engagement, and what hierarchies exist in determining the limits of their political expression?