A subversive humour

Kunal Kamra’s recent standup act Naya Bharat has raised a furore. In this show he has brought public institutions, politicians, millionaires, and oppressive systems like patriarchy under the scrutiny of a sharp and excoriating humour. The dissemination of Kamra’s show on social media platforms has elicited anger from politicians who have been stripped off of their paddings of power, toppled off their high pedestals, and subjected to the irreverence of subversive laughter. The enraged politicians have responded by using the instruments of the State as well as the rowdy force of their goons. Thus, the studio in which Kamra’s show was recorded has been vandalised, and an FIR has been registered against him by the Mumbai police for allegedly insulting Deputy CM Eknath Shinde during his performance. Maharashtra’s Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has demanded a public apology from Kamra for having, as he claims, “spread lies” and for attempting to defame Shinde. Shiv Sena MP Naresh Mhaske has warned Kamra against moving freely in Maharashtra. The brute power of the State machinery has been turned on Kamra by those who wield it for trivialising their authority and belittling their armoury of privilege with the lightness of laughter. 

Although public focus now is on Kamra’s alleged defamation of Shinde, many other icons of power and influence have also been satirised by Kamra in this show. The spotlight on Shinde has helped to put these others in the shadows. To understand the iconoclastic humour of Kamra, we have to view the entire spectrum of power that has been subjected to his vitriolic humour.

What Kamra’s show, and the reaction to it, reveals is the flimsy foundations of our democratic polity. Underlying the structures of a supposedly egalitarian and modern political system is a feudal order with its hierarchies of power and status and its nexus of economic, political and social privileges. Kamra’s show exposes the treacherous conniving and manipulations of power mongers, the self-consecration of the political despot as a deity to be worshipped and obeyed, and the vulgarly ostentatious display of wealth by the very rich. Kamra names these people and presents them to us through the x-ray of satire and the irreverent laughter, thus shocking us out of our normal deference to them. Kamra’s humour holds the shock value of an unimaginable indifference to the repressive authority of power in its many manifestations. It tears into the culture of fawning deference and fearful cowering down to all that has been established as venerable under the threat of the law. Through a subversive dismantling of the holy cows of our times, Kamra’s show elicits the laughter of relief and release from its audience and frustrated rage from its targets. It delegitimises the public contract of silence and submission demanded of ordinary citizens to an extraordinarily powerful and exploitative cohort of the socially, economically and politically powerful elite in our society.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson defines the comic as ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’. Kamra’s humour can be explained through this definition. Power is maintained and perpetuated through manufacturing a plethora of icons that sanitise, magnify, and glorify it. These icons are the congealed masks of power. The scurrilous laughter of Kamra’s comedy dissolves these icons with its acidic wit. It displays these icons as the rigidification of a public posture that conceals the fluid and flexible manipulativeness of the very rich and the very powerful. The lies through which the politician consecrates himself into divinity, the slimy virtuous cant through which the rich conceal and justify their avaricious exploitative ways, and the rigid normalities of gender inequality that make invisible its routine oppressions. These are the targets of Kamra’s humour. Kamra’s humour is also directed against us, his audience, against our submission to the regimes within which we are disciplined and cowed into obedience. His humour throws into relief the beliefs and values into which we are indoctrinated, which make us hate and love in terribly destructive and violent ways.

We laugh at Kamra’s jokes because they release us from the oppressive hold of a silence that is imposed on us by political might and ideological persuasiveness. They free us from the manufactured truths, disseminated by ruling regimes, that regiment our lives and make it mechanical. Kamra’s humour displays an extraordinarily brave and iconoclastic defiance of the limits on social living that are normalised for us by the nexus of power. It is the laughter of release and relief. Kamra’s jokes release us from the congealed fears and beliefs within which we have been forced to exist. It teaches us how to appropriate the subversive fluidity of critical thinking in order to contest our mechanisation into the docility of subjected subjects. By displaying the Constitution, Kamra reminds us that such a contestation can be initiated and carried out by deploying the democratic possibilities inbuilt into our political system.

(The writer is a professor at the Department of English, Mangalore University)