1.1 The Trajectory of Comedy
The Greek philosopher Plato was one of the very first scholars to take an academic interest in humour, in particular its role in intellectual and public life (The Republic, Book 10). As far back as thousands of years ago, we have always tried to understand humour and unpack how and why we find something funny or foolish. Humour, therefore, is a multifaceted concept, but though the experience of humour may be universal, its perceptions and how it is experienced does vary.
In the vast South Asian country of India with its diverse terrain, there are a multitude of different comedy traditions and regions with their recognised masters. Kishore Kumar and Sukumar Ray would probably have more resonance than George Carlin in Bengal, in the same way that Marathis recognise the contributions of P.L. Deshpande perhaps more so that P.G. Wodehouse and Punjabis respond to Jaspal Bhattiâs take on the everyman compared to Peter Kay or Jerry Seinfeld. Humour can also be time-specific; for example, the racism in the Carry On films and the use of brownface in comedies such as The Party (1968) and Short Circuit (1968) for the most part was perceived as funny at the time, but in hindsight these have not aged well when viewed through the changing filter of social consciousness of the 2010s. So, what a person finds funny does depend on a wide range of variables: background, location, age, viewing practices, and so on. To give another example, on the day that Indian comedian Tanmay Bhat was embroiled in controversy for swapping the Snapchat dog filter between two Indian iconic legendsâsinger Lata Mangeshkar and cricketer Sachin Tendulkarâin a mock argument, the well-known US animated comedy Family Guy aired an episode called âRoad to Indiaâ (2016) which was littered with offensive stereotypes. This did not garner any attention, possibly because of the small audience of this show, and those who did watch it were familiar with the showâs strategy of offending. Yet, running parallel to this television broadcast, the Snapchat controversy went viral in a short space of time. One question to emerge, then, is if this episode was streamed on the internet with its diverse choice of streaming platforms, would this have taken the offence to a different level? The power and potential of the internet and social media to make a clip go viral, given its global reach, is a modern-day cultural phenomenon, and undoubtedly the rise in media disruption as technology expands the choices for consumers and content creators is interesting to explore, especially if looking closely at what content is being produced and for whom. The media and society have always been closely interrelated and analysed through different approaches, the two broad ones being the role of the media as a constructer or shaper in influencing and affecting people, and the second approach of the media as a reflection or mirror of society. However, this is more often a curated set of representations rather than a mirror; as Stuart Hall (1982: 64) explains, â representation is a very different notion from reflection. It implies the active work of selecting and presenting, of structuring and shaping.â The development of increasingly sophisticated frameworks and technologies for communication by the printing press and broadcast media has gone through significant changes in the past few decades. Television and film have for a long time held the positions as the primary forms of entertainment, but with the rise of digital distribution platforms and social media outlets joining traditional broadcast channels and cable networks, there has been a sweeping change across many entertainment genres, particularly in the evolution of comedy with the expansion of social media networks.
If social networks were countries, then Facebook, with 1.86 billion users, would be substantially bigger than China . A report by the World Economic Forum (2016) noted that Facebook and Whatsapp, while not technically a social network, have some of the highest daily active users, a number which is very likely to increase. This statistic is just one sign of the immense influence of social media and other networks such as Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, as well as streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu, to name a few. On top of that, there is also a noticeable change in how audiences, specifically online, and fandoms talk about chosen celebrities or influencers. In the genre of comedy, we also see more evidence of how they discuss their spectrum of feelings, and debate what is funny and what is not, what is identified with and what is disidentified, what is acceptable and what is not. While this is intriguing from an audience studies perspective, a further question emerges: if the themes in the content are universal, then why are these not embraced universally? Simply put, laughter may be a universal language, but is comedy? Humour may be time-specific, but it is also culture-specific. Across different parts of the world, there are a variety of comedy trends, traditions, cultural nuances, ideas, and permutations that circulate across a multitude of cultures. Taking this as a point of departure, I became interested in learning how this is deployed in the global South, specifically India, as the circuits of comedy in this country has been fuelled by digital platforms and social media to such a degree that the laughscape in India is undergoing a significant change brought forth by a new wave of comedians paving their way into Indian popular culture. Internet comedy is in its nascent and exciting stage in India, but traditional outlets of comedy have a long-standing history through mimicry and cinema, as briefly explored further below.
Through approaching the internet iteration of comedy in India, this book has three aims. It will specifically be looking at online spaces situated on social media, such as comments posted on platforms like YouTube and Facebook, two of the most used platforms in India. It will also include extracts from a Facebook group chat with five users aged 18â25. Through an examination of this, one can explore the relationship between online comedic content and online consumers, and what this tells us about Indian society. Studies on comedy in India are surprisingly rare; as such, my primary aim is to contribute, in some small way, to towards the wider process of unwinding the eurocentrism that dominates comedy studies and social sciences. Another aim is to provide an insight for general readers who are interested in media, culture, and/or comedy, into a small part of the South Asian region. Third, the growth and development of new media is raising a new kind of awareness to both Indian social life and popular culture. The dearth of academic related literature on this protean media form also presents a valuable opportunity to question a bias in cultural studies on India, which is that by and large, critical writing on Indian popular culture has focused on the mammoth cultural signifier: Bollywood. The highly popular television serials comes in a close second, and in this regard this book can be located as timely and one of the first to address this critical knowledge gap in its analysis of the growing phenomenonâthat is, digital popular culture. Given the vast terrain of YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms, this book is no more than a modest attempt at bringing together issues and ideas central to new or millennial India. An underlying desire of this project is that it will generate further in-depth and interdisciplinary studies on a range of topics that characterise new India.
While the digital space has been hailed as utopian and democratic, in which markers of difference such as gender, race, and class are transcended (Poster 1997), some scholars posit that it has become the space that mirrors the anxieties and advancements of these markers, much like the media-as-mirror approach described earlier. A cursory glance at the comedy content from the YouTube creators, and social media sites on which users comment on these clips, is revelatory to some degree. Internet comedy in this context, whether through recorded stand-up or a performed satire or sketch, plays an important role in placing a spotlight on the attitudinal changes that are currently happening in India, especially amongst social media-savvy millennials who constitute a large part of the viewer base and for whom this form of content has become significantly more relatable than traditional television and film content (Goyal 2016). It could be theorised that internet comedy functions as a sort of epistemological challenge, if not subversion, of what Michel Foucault (1980) termed âregimes of truth.â The comedians who use this medium through various techniques such as parody, satire, stand-up, or video podcasts to interrogate their wider social environment are at the same time both constituting and a constituent of wider cultural transformations. By using YouTube as a public sphere (Milliken and OâDonnell 2008), this media format rejects the positions of privilege seen in other traditional media formats in which powers speak down and the audience becomes a passive viewer. Internet comedy becomes almost a public response through which a video is posted as a means of talking to and with, and where social media invites communal participation to the discourse. As such, the possibilities for comedy within this context seem endless.
This is in large part because, to reiterate an earlier point, a media disruption is taking place whereby modes of content creation (producing) and consumption (viewing) are changing. Across the board, the Indian screen is undergoing a transformation through the emergence of a new wave of online channels since 2008 (Baxi 2017). Moreover, the growth and development of digital platforms such as YouTube and Facebook and video-on-demand platforms such as Hotstar, Jio TV, and global content deliverers such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, is not only metamorphosing the traditional forms of media distribution and consumption, but is simultaneously raising a different kind of awareness of modern Indian society in the global sphere. The paucity of academic literature on this new entry into screen studies provides an opportunity to challenge this as well as the focus of contemporary critical writing on Indian screen studies on South Asian popular culture on Bollywood, the dominant mainstream cultural signifier in India. In view of the burgeoning popularity of these channels and social media across the South Asian subcontinent in general, the absence of an up-to-date analysis of the latter is somewhat incongruous. This study, then, is proposed as an au courant analysis, looking at the content and comments in the comedy genre in attempting to explore the new and ongoing phenomenon of the Indian internet.
1.2 The Circuits of Comedy
The current global image of India, the worldâs largest democracy and seventh largest economy (World Economic Forum 2016), is one which is full of celebrations and contradictions. On one hand, it is hailed as one of the fastest growing countries in the world and making cultural contributions on the world stage, such as Indiaâs space agencyâs mission to Mars. On the other, trenchant corruption, religious antagonisms, womenâs safety, and the suppression of expression have been at the forefront of Indiaâs global headlines in the past few years. Bollywood figureheads have done little to acknowledge and address these and other socio-political issues. Yet comedians, specifically those who are active online, frequently do include topical themes in their material, and on many occasions have foregrounded how Bollywood movies produce and reproduce hegemonic ideologies.
Comedy can serve as a critical lens through which to analyse and assess everyday life and to describe the absurdity of political realities, social policies, human behaviour, and institutional practices. In recent years, though there may be exceptions, many comedians have sought to confront social issues and consider multiple perspectives in ways that traditional media outlets have not necessarily matched. Across a range of social platforms, comedy is now consumed, experienced, and regurgitated in non-linear flows with swipes, taps, clicks, gestures, likes, and dislikes moving you between stories and channels. But at the core of locally produced content is a storyâwhether personal, cultural, or socialâand this has been reinvented not only for a new media world but for a post-colonial, millennial one that does not identify as a homogenised group but as part of a diverse audience of global users that come to hear, see, and make their voices heard. This was an identification that came across strongly in the Facebook group chat and it has also become clear that the positive reception to internet comedy, not only in India but across the Indian diaspora, indicates an engagement that shows no sign of abating. The proliferation of this new form of come...