Dark Humour and the Female Performance of Subversion in South-Asian Diasporic Cinema: Chadha’s Rich Deceiver, It’s A Wonderful Afterlife, and What Do You Call An Indian Woman Who’s Funny?

Abstract

This essay focuses on three films from Gurinder Chadha’s South-Asian diasporic oeuvre, Rich Deceiver (1995), It’s A Wonderful Afterlife (2010), and the documentary titled What Do You Call An Indian Woman Who’s Funny? (1994), in order to understand the brand of humour that is theorized and staged from the filmmaker’s diasporic context of hybridity and liminality. I will argue that the female characters in the first two films produce dark humour from a position of marginality – -gendered and class-based in the case of Ellie Freeman (Rich Deceiver), gendered and racialized (diasporic) in the case of Mrs. Sethi (It’s A Wonderful Afterlife) – which in turn allows these characters agency and control in a public space where humour is generally assumed to be the exclusive preserve of masculine authority. I will argue that the very figure of a woman performing/producing dark humour – especially in a racially-inflected diasporic context such as Chadha’s own – functions as a vehicle for the critique of normative social oppression, whether gender-, class-, or race-based, and therefore becomes an inherently empowering template and expository medium both for the female characters and for the genre of South Asian diasporic cinema.