Stand-Up Comedy as Escape

Abstract

Stand-up comedy in India has steadily gained the reputation of being “liberal” or “progressive”, where comedians use the emergent art form to speak out on social issues in favour of the marginalised. Given this branding of the art form, it is curious that comedians, in their performances, remain agnostic to caste relations in India. This chapter argues that, despite the apparent silence, caste structures, worldviews and identities are produced through Indian stand-up comedy. Specifically, this chapter examines the theme of “escape” that emerged in the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in the Mumbai stand-up comedy scene. Comedians, producers, and production workers see the art form as an escape from mass society and mainstream media, which they characterise as conservative and chauvinistic. At the same time, however, stand-up comedy relies on a host of mainstream media infrastructure, which comedians and producers can access precisely because of their social locations, which are defined by their upper-caste and class origins. This chapter untangles this contradiction—performers, producers, and production workers in the Mumbai stand-up comedy scene want to escape the very same social relations and structures that make stand-up comedy possible in the city. Stand-up comedy in Mumbai, as an industry, relies on the upper caste cache of producers and performers to mobilise media networks and capital in order to corner a niche market in India. Even though silent on caste, global Indian-ness relies on particular enclosures of places in Mumbai and dispossession of various sections of people in the city, which is also reflected in how the stand-up comedy industry uses urban space in Mumbai. Thus, this chapter shows that the desire to escape on the part of producers and performers in the Mumbai scene is a synthesis of simultaneously relying on caste exploitation and seeking to imagine an Indian-ness in which caste is made invisible.