Today, we're happy to bring you a guest post by Aju James, our third annual Grad Student Essay Prize Winner!
In this post, Aju gives an overview of his essay "Escape Through Laughter: Stand-up Comedy in Mumbai and Aspirations of India’s New Middle Class" and how it ties into his dissertation project on the ways in which stand-up comedy in Mumbai has become a site of struggle over national identity in the era of globalization.
Aju is a doctoral candidate in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University who researches how identities are constructed through the intersection of media flows and urban planning. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The truth that stand-up comedy is a serious business can be illustrated through two key points:
The sheer amount of money invested in the form around the world, and
The weight of the issues comics and their fans discuss, publicize, and affect including offense and appropriate public speech, the construction of social or group identities, and the narrative of historical experiences and trauma.
Understanding how and why stand-up comedy in India has become so serious has been the key purpose of my research over the past three years. The city of Mumbai, on the west coast of India, is the biggest hub for the art form in the nation, and so I spent three months in the city studying its stand-up comedy scene. During my research, I went to fifteen shows and interviewed twenty-one people who worked in various capacities in an effort to learn how people—specifically the demographic termed “new middle class” by scholars —in the Mumbai scene have positioned themselves in debates over what it means to be Indian in an era of globalization.
Stand-Up as "Escape"
In our discussions about how stand-up comedy is perceived by those inside and outside the scene, many of my interviewees talked about comedy in connection with their desire to “escape”—from parental and social expectations of success, the rigid roles ascribed by mundane patriarchy, or the tedious rhythm of corporate employment. These confessions surprised me, perhaps more than they should have. After all, stand-up comedians have often represented (or at least have built public personas around) an anti-establishment ethos, especially in the United States. Further, if you have watched clips of performances by comedians in the Mumbai scene, you would correctly guess that at least some of them are unhappy with the status quo.
These expressions of unhappiness take many forms. A prominent one is a variety of pop media critiques focused on Bollywood films and Mumbai’s television industry. These behemoth industries based in Mumbai continue to shape the “imaginaries” of India, as Rachel Dwyer argues about Bollywood. Given that stand-up comedians in the Mumbai scene like to dissect aspects of Indian societies for their material, it is inevitable that Bollywood and other media industries are on the cutting board.
Many of the people I interviewed expressed their preference for the stand-up scene over film and television. Kaavya, a writer for the erstwhile comedy group All India Bakchod (AIB), said that she decided to join the group because it represented a drastic shift from “traditional” comedy in films and television. She went on to explain that mainstream film and television were often sexist and casteist, to which stand-up comedians provided an antidote.
Regardless of the accuracy and validity of these critiques of film and television, they illustrate how people in the Mumbai stand-up scene actively position themselves within various “culture wars” in contemporary India. In this discourse that encompasses “tradition” and all manner of social institutions, the new middle class comedians and others in the Mumbai stand-up scene articulate their version of Indian-ness in terms of “escape” from traditions, practices, and institutions that they see as retrograde and anachronistic.
The Tension in 'Escape'
The desire to escape causes tension both because the institutions from which they seek to escape are powerful and because people in the stand-up scene are very much reliant on them. As Masoom, a comedian I interviewed, put it, “stand-up is still an odd form of entertainment in India.” For example, most comedians and production companies sell tickets through digital platforms that would not exist without movie theaters. Perhaps more importantly, the trend of using Bollywood as a reference point in comedy material illustrates the extent to which the scene relies on the “mainstream” for relevance and reach. Aakash, a producer, noted that comedians “initially latched on to Bollywood”, citing examples such as the roast show, “AIB Knockout”.
Throughout their existence, AIB was the biggest name in the scene, and they also regularly made content that used Bollywood as a reference point. One such video project, Bollywood Diva Song, starring Bollywood actor Kangana Ranaut, used the genre of the Bollywood film song to satirize the position of the female lead in the industry. Bhoomika, who worked on this project as an Assistant Director, revealed that the release of the video was scheduled to be in sync with Ranaut’s latest movie at the time, Simran. This example illustrates how any attempt to escape Bollywood and its comedy norms puts comics and their fans in a bind. Comics rely on the scaffolding of mainstream institutions like Bollywood in order to find success while simultaneously disavowing them.
College as a Comedy Entrance Point
Bollywood is not the only institution on which the scene is reliant. Notably, almost every person I interviewed said that they first came across stand-up comedy in college. They had all gone to some of the prominent colleges in and around Mumbai seeking a professional education. Their introduction to stand-up comedy (and really the growth of the scene itself) was made possible by the infrastructure available in these college campuses and the connections and networks they made there. At the same time, many members of the scene joined professional programs precisely because they wanted to pursue (or were cajoled into pursuing) careers in fields such as finance and IT that are part of the “mainstream” or “conventional” new middle class imagination of success. Attaining well-paying, steady employment is expected to lead to further mainstream goals, such as a nuclear family. Simultaneously, immersion in environments such as the university campus or financial firm require the cultivation of globally oriented, cosmopolitan world views which might at times be at odds with conventional middle class values. Achieving these conventional goals and developing cosmopolitan world views dovetail with the growth of the stand-up comedy scene, by providing access to capital to operate production companies or developing networks that can get a comedian a contract with Netflix.
Like Bollywood, professional education and careers are institutions that stand-up comedians seek to escape but at the same time rely on for the production of their art form. This bind is also sometimes weaponized by their right-wing critics, who characterize comedians as hypocrites because they profit from the “traditional” institutions that they decry. Thus, the binary of “tradition” versus “progress” seldom holds up in debates around constructing a national identity for a global age.
These contradictions are with comedians and other production workers within the scene as well. A distinct memory I have from my time in the field is of a group of comedians venting about the indignities of working in corporate ad productions, when one comedian described an act where his friend had to dress up as a refrigerator. “Brand work”, as those productions are known in the scene, have become a surefire, but not always pleasant, source of income for most Mumbai comedians. Even within the scene, they confront the same forces they sought to escape in their outside lives. In short, the social institutions that stand-up comedians seek to escape are the very same ones that make the Mumbai scene possible.
But the desire to escape lives on.
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