Comedy Studies

2022, VOL. 13, NO. 1, 41–55

https://doi.org/10.1080/2040610X.2022.2040781

Exploring Indian stand-up comedy through the lens of

ideology, identity and gender: a discourse analysis
Inzamul Sarkar and Ayesha Siraj
Department of Linguistics, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Despite being a diverse, vibrant and multifaceted phenomenon, Stand-up comedy;
relatively little academic attention has been paid in analysing bilingual; code-switching;
Indian stand-up comedy. This paper attempts to address this imbal- discourse; gender;
ance by offering pathways in the analysis of stand-up comedy. ideology; India
Employing examples from the performances of the comedians and
adopting discourse analysis methodology, this paper focuses on
the issues like language ideology, identity and gender embedded-
ness in Indian Stand-up comedy. We have argued that the comedy
employs several performative techniques such as linguistic code
switching and calculative pauses to create humor. Through our
work, we have demonstrated how ideology and identity construc-
tions are simultaneously reinforced and subverted within the same
comic moment. Finally, the extracted portion of recorded perfor-
mances shows that the whole event unfolds as an informal, nat-
urally developing encounter between audience and comedian.

1. Introduction
Comedy is a unique genre for analysis for its tendency to play with taken-for-granted
cultural discourses and meanings. Stand-up, more specifically, is a useful arena of
analysis because of its unique form consisting of a narrative storyteller, a wide range
of possible social issues are covered here.
Stand-up comedy is becoming a part of Indian popular culture, at least among
certain educated, urban audiences, and English-language stand-up comedy is partic-
ularly popular in the metropolitan cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, and New Delhi.
Stand-up comedy is defined as ‘an encounter between a single, standing performer
behaving comically and or saying funny things directly to an audience, unsupported
by very much in the way of costume, prop setting, or dramatic vehicle’ (Mintz
1985, p. 71).
The first and foremost purpose of Stand-up comedy is entertainment and the
audience, who has paid money for the show, accordingly expects to be rewarded for
the financial effort. It is thus the foremost duty of the comedian to evoke positive
reactions from the audience and the audience’s reaction right after the joke confirms

CONTACT Inzamul Sarkar inzamulsarkar26@gmail.com Department of Linguistics, Aligarh Muslim University,

Aligarh, India.
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
42 I. SARKAR AND A. SIRAJ

whether a comedian is successful in creating intimacy and establishing a connection

between them and the audience. But still, people hardly recognise Stand-up comedy
as a registered career in India, and it is equally difficult for comedians to convince
their parents for such a professional life.

Extract-1

Recently some aunt asked me what do you do for a living?

and I was like I am a comedian (,)

and she was like “həe bəcce esa nahĩ bolte”(AL)(AC)

[Oh kids! (God forbid) Don’t say such thing]

I swear mẽ unkɪ nəzrõ me itnɪ burɪ təɾɑh se giɾɪ (,)

[I have fallen so badly from his expectation level]

mʊɟhe tetənəs kɑ shɔt ləɡɑnɑ pədʰ ɡəjɑ (AL)(AC)

[I had to take tetanus injection]

itnɑ bʊɾɑ hɑl hai jɑɾ (,) ɔɾ dɛdɪ ko mene ɑbʰɪ kənvins kijɑ hi tʰɑ

[guys, such a bad condition. And, I almost convinced my daddy.]

that it is a respectable profession right(!) right (?)

[Recorded Performance, Neeti Palta, 2018]

Laughter was elicited at two points in the above segment: after ‘həe bəcce esa
nahĩ bolte’ where she immediately made code-switching to Hindi. In fact, Neeti used
code-switching in all her videos, and it was one of her recipes to impart humor in
her comedy. The last statement in the segment implicitly referred to the stereotypical
understanding that being a comedian is a sort of stigma in the dominant society.
While pause and sarcasm spawned laughter in the first point, the second burst of
laughter at the end of the segment was because of the comparison; to prove the
severity of the insult, she compared it with a tetanus injection.
This study begins with brief histories of stand-up comedy in India. The conceptual
framework for the study is explained next; the concept of the public sphere helps us
in understanding the emergence and workings of live comedy in India. The study then
undertakes a discourse analysis of Indian Stand-up comedians’ YouTube comedy clips.
The digital space is not alone involved in promoting this genre, even corporate
sectors often book comedians to perform for connecting with their younger employ-
ees—however, in these settings, the content is filtered and sanitised.

2. Rise of stand-up comedy in India

One clear way to understand the exteriority of Indian stand-up comedy is through
its historical development. Early evidence of the history of humour has been found
 Comedy Studies 43

in Natyashastra, a comprehensive body of texts authored by the sage Bharata, cov-

ering the theory of drama dated between 200 BC and 200 AD. The Natyashastra
contains detailed descriptions of how laughter can be elicited, and it continues to
serve as inspiration for many contemporary Indian theatre (Kumar 2012).
In India, humour was not only confined to written Media. During colonial times, Indian
theatre became a medium of political resistance by especially targeting ethnicity, gender
and caste discrimination (Bhatia 2004). Even after Independence, Drama continued to
offer an effective way of spreading resistance amongst the maximum population.
Humour, as a genre, has changed the form of resistance through art and enter-
tainment over a period of time both in terms of content and its delivery across
platforms. Earlier, it was hardly imaginable that a single person on a stage making
the audience laugh could constitute a genre of popular culture. In India after recog-
nising the potentiality of humour actors in the film industry, the actors like Johnny
Walker, Mehmood Ali, Rajendra Nath obtained widespread recognition. As a result,
mimicry and comic actors became popular props in Indian film industry. When the
comedy show titled ‘Kabaddi’ of Johny Lever in the 1980s first broadcasted in the
television, it became a new form of entertainment and later on these kinds of
television-based comedy shows became popular and appreciated by the larger audi-
ence (Tale Cup, 2015). However, there is a significant difference between Hindi comedy
and Indian Stand-up comedy, although at present, both of them influenced each
other to a certain extent.
It seems to have emerged as the most popular source and form of humour per-
formance in the country. It is exclusively designed for young self-styled ‘middle-class’,
holding little interest for English speaking elite or non-English speaking working class.
Earlier, India had stand-ups, and even today there is TV-based stand-up, just like the
US. What India never had was uncensored stand-up, in a traditional western setting.
From Hasya Kavi Sammelan in the initial phases of comedy where it revolves around
the struggles of the common man to live stand-ups where the storyline is completely
shifted from innocent to double-meaning jokes, humour goes a long way.

3. Methodology
This research is based on analysing 15 Stand-up comedy performances by Indian
comedians in India to both Indian and non-Indian audiences. All comic performances
included in this study are performed by 25 to 38 years old male and female come-
dians. The performances included in this data source dated from 2015 to 2019. Our
form of analysis takes from a popular methodology adopted in media studies, known
as discourse analysis. This study focuses on the use of humorous approaches to
address the themes like ideology, bilingual creativity and women representation in
Indian Stand-up. Our analysis is also interpretative and ideological in nature. It con-
nects the selected contents to a wider network of resistance and investigates how
stand-up rhetoric effectively challenges hegemonic power and dominance. Details
about the performances are illustrated in the Appendix Section. All shows were
downloaded from YouTube and Prime Videos; and then the software Elan (Open
Source Software) was used for manually transcribing and analyzing the data.
44 I. SARKAR AND A. SIRAJ

4. Ideology in Indian stand-up comedy

Humour, itself, is a function of ideological orientations—what audiences find funny
depends on their ideological beliefs on what is funny. In stand-up comedy, the
performance of jokes is embedded with and grounded in ideologies. Indian
Stand-up comedy consists of acts which reinforce the particular ideology that
defines the spatio-cultural context of the performance or which supplant the
ideology that envelopes the routines so as to mediate new realities and
perspectives.
Another micro linguistic concept that we identified is the use of garden path phe-
nomenon in Indian Stand-up comedy. Dynel (2012) explains the garden path phe-
nomenon as deceiving the audience into arriving at a readily available interpretation
which has to be ultimately cancelled. According to Dynel’s analysis, the joke must
have a covert ambiguity in the premise, which would be resolved in the punch line.
This covert ambiguity can be semantic or pragmatic in nature.

Extract-2

you are A gay, a agay!

Like, a gay dude in India can’t just be gay(,)

He is … A gay, A gay(AL)

Like he is an object like a chair. or a woman

I am kidding, I do these small jokes in between(,)

Chairs are way more useful than women. (AL)(AC)

[Recorded Performance, Ashish Shakya, 2015]

In the joke, Ashish Shakya talked about one of the most controversial issues in
India, Homosexuality. In the lead-up of the joke, he made it clear that he was going
to talk on the issue from a rational perspective. He made it explicit that ‘chair’ and
‘woman’ both are treated as objects in India. However, the punchline which still
portrayed the woman as an object, the audience then realised that Ashish Shakya’s
intention was to humorously criticise the Indian orthodox ideas. Shakya adopted irony
and had the covert intention of criticizing the common perception while he overtly
indicated that ‘Chairs are way more useful than women’.
Humour primarily works with the discovery and contrasting assumptions. Such
contrasting assumptions could be realised linguistically through strategies of allusion,
exaggeration, mimicry and punning. It is also possible to attain it pragmatically by
manipulating shared contextual beliefs—for instance, contradicting background beliefs.
We demonstrate this with the excerpt below:
Extract-3

meɾɪ mɑ̃ me se niklɪ cənɖɑ (AL)

[my mother transformed into Chandika]

tʰɪk hɑɪ nɑ(,) vo bʰɪ to mɑ̃ hi hɑɪ nə (P)(AA)

 Comedy Studies 45

[She too is a mother, right?]

vese bʰɪ je mɑ̃ bete kɑ ɾiʃtɑ haɪ

[as it is, it is a mother-son relationship]

ese ɔkvəɾɖ mət ho (AL)(CL)

[don’t feel awkward]

mʊsəlmɑn hɛ to cəndikɑ kese niklegɪ (AL) (CL)

[Don’t be confused thinking, how a Muslim’s mother transformed into Chandika?]

je mɑ̃ bete kɑ ɾiʃtɑ hɑɪ ise sekjʊləɾ hi rehne do (AL)(CL)

[Let this mother and son relationship remain secular]

[Recorded Performance, Zakir Khan, 2018]

The above extract, taken from Amazon Prime Video Kaksh Gyarvi by a Muslim
Indian male comic in 2018, reflects the dynamic ability of stand-up comedy
to function as both enabler and resistance to social ills. This scholarship
over-determines the linguistic and discursive properties of comedy and
under-theorises the relationship between performances, the environments in which
they occur, and the interactive processes that both shape, and are shaped by this
dynamic encounter.
Utterance in the above extract like ‘Don’t be confused thinking, how a Muslim’s
mother transformed into Chandika?’ is used to express the ‘harmlessness’ of what has
been presupposed to be unusual or strange to the Indian audience. Because the use
of jokes involves adopting a playful mind frame.

4.1. Political ideology and humour

Here, political ideology does not imply ideological attachment with certain Indian
political parties like Bharatiya Janata Party or Indian National Congress. Our use of
the term refers to the ordinary people’s perception about the political class in India.
We can divide political humour into two groups: humour by politicians and humour
about politicians. In the first case, the term indicates how politicians employ humour
for attacking the opposition and gain support from the common masses. In the
second case, it refers to humour in which people make jokes and satires about the
political class. Studies of Tagangaeva (2013) and Popa (2011) argued how citizens use
jokes as valves for expressing their passive resistance to governments. To construct
and crack such jokes, the audience is supposed to have shared knowledge about the
political figures and events. Extract below is an ideal example which indicates the
populist ideology about the Indian political class.
Extract-4

About Indian Election, world media bohut fascinated hota hai,

[world media is very fascinated about Indian Election]

46 I. SARKAR AND A. SIRAJ

Oho kjɑ bɑt hɑɪ, dance of democracy(AL)

[Oho, what a dance of democracy!]

ɟese bohət sɔfistiketiɖ sɑ kilɑsikəl ɖɑns cəl ɾəhɑ hɑɪ (AL)

[like some sophisticated classical dance is going on]

jəhɑ̃ ɑke dekʰeŋe nəŋɑ nɑc ho ɾəhɑ hɑɪ (AL)(AC)

[After coming here, they see the strip dancing]

[Recorded Performance, Varun Grover, 2019]

When the comedian Varun Grover told the above extracted joke, that was the
moment when Indians were waiting to see who would be its next prime minister.
The world media took interest in the historic election—not just because it’s the
largest democratic exercise ever, but also because it’s the world’s most expensive.
According to a report by the Center for Media Studies, as much as 600 billion
(nearly $9 billion) was spent in Indian Lok Sabha Election of 2019. By the word
‘nanga nach’ (strip dance) he is symbolizing the popular view about Indian politics
that it is corrupt.
There are also some popular comedians like Zakir Khan, Kenny Sebastian, Aditi
Mittal who never use political jokes. Even there is an entire video of Kenny Sebastian
in YouTube with the title ‘Why I Don’t Do Jokes About Politics in India - Stand Up
Comedy | Kenny Sebastian’. In this video he answered the question: why doesn’t he
joke about politics? He said, ‘because I am scared, that’s why. It’s not like I Can’t get
punchlines on political jokes. It’s because I don’t want to get punched on my face’. In his
signature comic style, Sebastian says: It’s sad. When you’re in a democracy and you feel
scared. It’s sad, you know.

4.2. Ideologies of ethnic humour

Another distinctive feature of Indian Stand-up comedy is to target various ethnic
groups during the performance. Ethnic humour makes fun of groups by focusing
their socio-cultural identity through their behaviour, traditions, habits and any other
trait (Haghishi, et al. 2014). Generally, it is expected that comedians will only target
the groups that are not theirs; however, Indian comedians are found to mock their
own ethnic groups.
Studies of ethnic humour particularly have demonstrated that comedy can influ-
ence racial relations and understandings in several ways: (1) It can engage on
reflection and investigation of existing ethnic systems or experiences (Watkins 1994);
(2) it can promote social resistance or strengthen collective identities (Lynch 2002);
and (3) it can serve to reinforce existing sociocultural norms and stereotypes, and
normalise and validate racialized social experiences (Park et al. 2006).
Ethnic humour can be better understood through multi-ethnic setting of India.
According to Indian Census Data of 2011 India has 121 languages which are spoken
across ethnic groups. The accounts shared by comedians and audience members
 Comedy Studies 47

demonstrate the potential for ideological humour-contingent on presentation styles

and audience experiences—to foster ethnic solidarity or complicate racial-behavioral
associations through repeated encounters with comedians who either indirectly chal-
lenge or actively critique familiar types.

Extract-5

Punjabis embody that spirit right (?)

Dance like there’s no one watching(,)

laugh like there’s no one listening and drive like

Behenchod there’s no one on the road. (AC) (AL) (CL)

[motherfucker]

[Recorded Performance, Neeti Palta, 2017]

Extract-6

I am absolutely fine with Bhosdike (AL)

I have a problem with a word that comes before it (,)BHAAG(,)

We Bengalis are late back creatures (AL)(AC)

We don’t run, running doesn’t work for us, this thing is for all the famous Bengalis(P)

You know Rabindranath Tagore, famous writer(,) famous poet(,) did he run?(AL)

[Recorded Performance, Abhijit Ganguly, 2015]

Extract-7

And I belong to very civilized community also(P)

ɟɑʈ hʊ mẽ [I am jaat] (AL)(AC)

[Recorded Performance, Anubhav Singh Bassi, 2019]

To understand these jokes that target three different Indian ethnic groups, Punjabi,
Bengali and Jat, in the extracts, some contextual assumptions are pertinent. We can
easily guess that the allegations are imposed in these extracts to the concerned
ethnic communities. Rather than figuring out the truth conditioning, these stereotypes
are used in the jokes.
It is not so straightforward that the potential offensiveness of jokes was directly
tied to the racial distance or attachment between the comedians and the jokes.
Rather, because the funniness of jokes is often so closely linked in their offensiveness,
the audience must engage in active interpretation to determine whether a joke is
offensive, funny or both. In the above extracts, the comedians have chosen very
sensitive topics of ethnicity and by declaring that they belong to the same community
they are socially legitimizing their stand which in some sense gave them the right
to crack a joke about it.
48 I. SARKAR AND A. SIRAJ

5. Bilingual creativity
In analyzing the bilingual creativity of Indian Stand-up comedy, we find certain lin-
guistic idiosyncrasies which are evident in specific categories like Code-switching,
syntactic variation, cultural reference and garden path sentence. The importance of
investigating bilingual creativity in everyday speech and within different varieties of
English are also being reiterated by researchers such as Kachru (1983), Jones (2010),
and Bolton (2010). Despite the fact that creativity is a feature of everyday language
(Maybin and Swann 2007). These categorization processes are more concerned with
Indian context where strategically English language leads to subtle socio-psychological
and attitudinal effects.

5.1. Code-switching
Code-switching and Code-Mixing have theoretically been described in a number of
ways. It has been labeled to express both the ‘imperfect bilingual’ (Bloomfield 1927)
and the ‘ideal bilingual’ (Weinreich 1968). The former indicates the lack of competence
while the later considered the appropriateness of switching from one language to
another according to the speech situation. In the case of Indian Stand-up comedy,
they are considered as a weapon to ensure linguistic identity and culture.
Indian Stand-up comedians often switch between Hindi and English; Hinglish, in
a more efficient way. In the present scenario, most of the comedians have mixed up
English and Hindi in their content because this denotes the way they are, in reality,
and comedy works well when you are yourself on stage. For example,
Extract-8

əcʰa I’ll be using some hindi and some English because you know basically(,)

in ɖijɑ mẽ mətləb həmɑɾɪ iŋliʃ ese hi hɑɪ bəs (,)(AL) (CL)

[In India, our english is just like this]

[Recorded Performance, Rajneesh Kapoor, 2017]

In a traditional culture like India, switching to the ‘other’ language is a strategic
mechanism for introducing euphemisms. Such code-switching is used so often that
Indians have even blurred knowledge of certain thematic vocabulary. The Hindi expres-
sion for ‘screaming orgasm’ is unknown to most Hindi speakers (Miller 2020). Instead,
English is used as code for the verbalised expression of ideas considered very crude,
particularly while talking about sexuality.
Despite the high level of linguistic fluency in English the mentioned comedians
enjoy, certain syntactic patterns tend to occur again and again in their performances
that are either due to the substrate-superstrate interaction influence between the
two very distinct syntactic systems of Hindi and English, or to the comic’s deliberate
attempt to go up and down the acrolect-basilect continuum to achieve desired lin-
guistic effects. However, the conscious awareness of such features allowed Indian
Stand-up comics to employ them as linguistic devices in conjunction with other
 Comedy Studies 49

linguistic devices, such as pronunciation shifts and code-switching, to create greater

linguistic appeal.

Extract-9

Where are you going? (!) You are not going at all

[Recorded Performance, Zakir Khan, 2018]

Such examples indicated that the Indian comedians could identify Hindi English
syntactic features and manipulate them at will. However, the ability to deliberately
identifying and changing the syntactic features of a variety of English might be cor-
relational to one’s degree of linguistic fluency: the more fluent a person is, the better
s/he is at identifying syntactic features of that variety.

5.2. North Indian gaali and elite English counterparts

Usage of desi North-Indian ‘gaalis’ proved more successful than their ‘elite’, English
counterparts in eliciting a laugh from the audience. The crowd of urban elites is very
much interested in looking back fondly at their ‘subalternity’ which they recognise in
most other spaces as a source of discomfort and even embarrassment.
Extract-10

əb do diɡɾɪ hɑɪ(,) lekin əb tʰənɖ ho ɡəjɪ hɑɪ (,) əb ese kəɾ ɾəhɪ hɑɪ jʊ̃ (!)

[Now its 2 degree, but now it is cold, and now she doing like this]

Mene dekʰɑ (,) səməɟʰ ɡəjɑ mẽ(,) mene kəhɑ, what happened?

[I looked at her and understood] [then I said]

kəhi, "isn’t it cold?"

[said]

mene kəha "kjʊ̃ nəhɪ̃ (!) je lele merɑ ɟɛkəʈ"

[I said, “why not, take my jacket]

mẽ sɑbse bolnɑ cəhtɑ hʊ̃, esa hɑɪ ke

[I want to say, the thing is like]

məɽd ko dəɾd nəhɪ hotɑ, hoɡɑ (P)(AL)

[may be the the men not feel pain]

lekin tʰənd ləɡtɪ hɛ behenchod(CL)(AL)(AC)

[But, I do feel fucking cold]

[Recorded Performance, Zakir Khan, 2016]

A narrative strategy has been used while delivering the extracted joke. Still, a
detailed investigation reveals that there are some instances where there is a
50 I. SARKAR AND A. SIRAJ

conversation held between the comedian and a created character (in this case, the
girlfriend of the comedian). This joke also includes a mini dialogue done by the two
characters of the story.
If we look at the extract, it is easier to understand that punchline has been delivered
along with a typical north Indian gaali at the end, and the comedian received appre-
ciation with clapping. The comedian used two characteristics, his own character and
his girlfriend. Here, he is making a graphical representation of their conversation.

6. Gender-based expectations
As Stand-Up Comedy becomes more diverse, discussing gender requires a more
nuanced approach going beyond a simple binary. According to some studies men
are considered to be more humorous as compared to women (Brodzinsky and Rubien
1976). On the contrary other studies didn’t agree with this fact (Hull, Tosun, and Vaid
2017) whereas, in various studies men found to be the funniest sex irrespective of
their creative content (Mickes et al. 2012; Hooper, Sharpe, and Roberts 2016) Particularly
in India, women’s Stand-up comedy remains an underexplored area of scholarly inquiry.
Online platforms are bringing about a way to tell women’s stories that are not con-
ceptualized and approved by men. The Internet became an important vehicle for
female comedians to be heard even when their humour crossed the limits of con-
ventional acceptability.

Extract-11

I have come to realise that saying the words ‘sanitary napkin’ in public is like standing in a
Hogwarts common room and saying Voldemort (AL)

[Recorded Performance, Aditi Mittal, 2016]

By referencing images and associations which she knows her audience is familiar
with, here ‘Hogwarts school of Harry Potter’ bridges the distance between herself as
comedian and the audience as her listeners. In order to express the intensity of the
topic, the comedian compared the sanitary napkins with the forbidden act of publicly
speaking the name Voldemort. She also positions herself as a comic authority since
the audience knows the cultural references she discusses, they can recognise the
cleverness of her inversions, and it is her re-visioning of the ‘sanitary napkin’ which
elevates her comedy performance more appealing.
Female comedians are being under-represented and heavily content policed, hardly
limited to India. The reason for female comedians picking the sexual content is that
for them the question to draw the line with the male colleagues can be complicated.
Male comics often joke about the Indian bureaucracy, culture of political correctness,
or excessive amounts of shopping by their girlfriends. In contrast, for female come-
dians this is one amongst the few platforms they need to be vocal even if it’s for a
few minutes without the fear of the consequences. Aditi Mittal in her stand-ups,
discusses anything and everything from women’s private life to public sufferings. She
often throws sexually explicit material—something most comedians recognise will
earn them easy rapport with an audience.
 Comedy Studies 51

Extract-12

And because I was diversity quota candidate(,)

They would come to me and be like

Hey vagina, say something (AL)(AC)

And so the article would feature like seven dick-heads (AL)

And me one fucker in the background (AL)(AC)

[Recorded Performance, Aditi Mittal, 2019]

Appearing too feminine or overly self-deprecatory on the other hand, would lower
the status of the female performer below the audience and could cause the audience
to no longer take the female comedian seriously, but avoiding self-deprecation and
other such tactics could come off as too aggressive and would be too far off from
the idealised female stereotype, thus scaring the audience. According to Holmes and
Schnurr (2014:166), we are always aware of the gender of our interlocutors, and,
unconsciously, we tend to act according to the gendered norms and stereotypes that
society has imposed.
Extract-13

And you know excitement me log when you are younger you were as a comic

we used to be excited I remember male comic

and I both put out our videos on youtube okay!

tʰoɾɪ deɾ bɑd kɔmɛnts cɛk kije ɛnd hɪ iz lɑik kjɑ jɑɾ(,)

[After a while we have checked the comments on our videos and he was like]

səbne meɾɪ kɔmɛdɪ ko ɡɑlɪ dɪ

[everyone abused my comedy] (P)

mene kɑhɑ je to bəɾɑ bʊɾɑ hʊɑ jɑɾ

[I said that it is too bad what happened to us ]

so I went on with my comments and I was like

kjɑ jɑɾ səbne meɾe lʊks ko bʊɾɑ bolɑ (P)

[Everyone commented on my bad looks]

Genuinely.

[Recorded Performance, Neeti Palta, 2018]

In a profession like Stand-Up Comedy where speech is the performance, women
have been praised for their physical appearances on stage instead of their contents.
In the above extract, Neeti was articulating that women have to take comparatively
tougher route as compare to men to gain a entry into this competitive business or
52 I. SARKAR AND A. SIRAJ

to perform in front of audience with the preconceived notion that women lack a
funny bone or they aren’t funny at all and this might be the reason why most female
comedians came up with the content loaded with their own experiences of being a
women in a world dominated by a men.

Extract-14

I was negotiating on a phone call with a corporate for a

show and the part of the conversation that my father overheard were (P)

kɔnse hotel (,)(AL)(AC) kitnɪ deɾ ke lijẽ (,)(AL)

[which hotel?] [For how long?]

kitne mileŋe(,)(AL) yeah it gets that bad (P)

[How much will I get?]

[Recorded Performance, Neeti Palta, 2018]

In the above extract, the last three lines sound like, the comedian is involved in
prostitution, where it is again the woman who is being consumed as a commodity.
Through the performance of the comedian, she represents both self and culture,
constructing her individual and social identities. Women comedians often construct
themselves as victims. The power of powerlessness is used as a tool for raising their
own voice in Indian stand-up comedy.

Extract-15

So I have to call the Uber driver (,)

and I have to confess ke nəvɪ mʊmbəi ɟɑnɑ hɑɪ (?)

and then he’ll decide ke ɟɑnɑ hɛ ke nəhɪ̃ (AL)

[whether to go or not]

and they always respond in one of two ways okay (,)

like the first way is very enthusiastic (,)

Like, ‘hɑ̃ mɛɖəm ɟɑjeɡɑ nɑ mɛɖ#x00259;m, ɔfkɔrs ɟɑeɡɑ, həmɑɾɑ to kɑm hɑɪ ɟɑnɑ(AL)

[Yes Madam, I’ll go for sure, this is our job after all]

And I’m like you’re too enthusiastic, ap meɾɑ ɾep kəɾne wɑle ho (AL)(AC)

[You are going to rape me]

[Recorded Performance, Urooj Ashfaq, 2019]

In recent years there has been increase in the use of rape humour in Indian
Stand-up comedy. In the above extract, a woman comedian Urooj expressed in the
punchline ‘you’re too enthusiastic, ap mera rape karne wale ho’ (English: you are going
 Comedy Studies 53

to rape me) and it draws attention to and create public discourse around rape culture.
The absurdity of the sexual hierarchy and its continuity in India can be easily guessed
through the extract. She uses humour’s inherent ambiguity to convey two messages
simultaneously: The literal meaning of such a joke would be understood as ‘a joke
about rape’, and another message in its subtext, which can be inferred from the joke
and that may be inconsistent with the literal meaning but clearly implies that ‘rape
is a social evil’.

7. Conclusions
Analysing our extracted Stand-up comedy performances, we have attempted to present
Indian Stand-up comedy in the form of discourse analysis. During the last few decades,
the impact of globalization has profoundly affected the Indian social and cultural
atmosphere. This article significantly advances our understanding of the underlying
mechanisms of Indian stand-up comedy. We began this study by examining the con-
cept of ideology. We have argued that ideology-based Stand-up comedies are used
as a tool of expressing resistance and claiming the rights of the people in India. The
second section investigates the significance of bilingual creativity in Indian-Stand-up
comedy. Therefore, a number of research questions were posed for investigation. The
first question asked, what are the forms and functions of bilingual creativity in Indian
stand-up comedy? Findings show that the different forms of bilingual creativity in
this data can be broadly classified into two categories: code-switching and syntactic
variations. Indian comedians employ these linguistic devices to express their indige-
nous identity and cultural conceptualizations. The Third Section investigates the rep-
resentation and expectations of women in Indian Stand-up comedy. We believe that
the Stand-up platform provides a new way to tell women’s stories that are not usually
conceptualized and approved by men. The study can also be categorised as a case
study that explains tendencies or orientations of Indian culture in communicating
humour. Just because every era gets the popular cultural forms that it deserves,
stand-up comedy is an image of our time.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Inzamul Sarkar is a PhD research scholar of Sociolinguistics in the Department of Linguistics
at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is a recipient of the University Gold Medal in
Post-Graduation from Aligarh Muslim University. Currently, he is working in the area of
Sociolinguistic Ethnography with a focus on Urdu in Madrasa Education of West Bengal. His
research interests include Humour studies, Indexicality of Urdu and Ideological realism of
Minorities in India.
Ayesha Siraj is a PhD research scholar of Sociolinguistics in the department of Linguistics at
Aligarh Muslim University, India. She is working on Pronominal Variation and Ideology in Indian
languages, particularly among Hindi-Urdu speakers. Her research interest also includes Humour
Studies, Sociolinguistic Ethnography and Discourse Analysis.
54 I. SARKAR AND A. SIRAJ

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Appendix

Transcription conventions
[] → Used for translating Hindi into English
(,) → A pause less than 3 seconds
(!) → Accents, it indicates emphasis. When it is more than one, it indicates a stronger degree
of emphasis
(?) → Raising intonation
(P) → Significant pause, a pause more than three seconds
(AC)→ Audience claps
(AL)→ Audience laughs
(AA) → Audience Appreciation
(CL) →Comedian laughs

Video notes
Abhijit Ganguly. 2015. "Bengali in Hindi | Stand-Up Comedy by Abhijit Ganguly." YouTube, March
15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhg1EhRAa6c
Aditi Mittal. 2019. “Why women have a sense of humor”| Stand-Up Comedy by Aditi Mittal.”
YouTube, March 27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXSA0ZQr_c4
Anubhav Singh Bassi. 2019. “Cheating | Stand-Up Comedy by Anubhav Singh Bassi.” YouTube,
April 19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQA68Oqr1qE&t=110s
BeingIndian. 2015. “Tanmay Bhat ǁ Varun Grover ǁ Vir Das - I AM OFFENDED|.” YouTube, Feb 15.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swozBbWMzNQ
Neeti Palta. 2017. “Big Fat Indian Weddings | Stand-Up Comedy by Neeti Palta.” YouTube, Feb
17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o_GAZMnmuM&t=66s
Neeti Palta. 2018. “The Marvelous Ms. Neeti Palta.” Amazon Prime India| YouTube, Dec, 18. https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lngQxGRMq4&t=87s
Rajneesh Kapoor. 2017. “I Love Indian English | Stand-Up Comedy by Rajneesh Kapoor.” YouTube,
June 17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vBnrj0J1lA
Urooj Ashfaq. 2019 “Uber Driver & Grandmother | Stand Up Comedy by Urooj Ashfaq.” YouTube,
Sep 24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzJhTb564iA
Varun Grover. 2019. “Indian Elections - Stand-up Comedy by Varun Grover.” YouTube, Sep 17.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy0T-M-4too
Zakir Khan. 2016. “Zakir Khan - When I met a Delhi Girl | AIB Diwas.” YouTube, May 6, 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIl8vsWrD8o&t=270s
Zakir Khan. 2018. "Zakir Khan: Kaksha Gyarvi." Amazon Prime Video, November 23. https://www.
primevideo.com/detail/0M6LFM5QDZP65YXU2TISC9FMR1/ref=atv_hm_hom_c_8pZiqd_2_1
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