Resisting Power (while Laughing): Stylistic and Pragmatic Approaches to Indian Stand-up Comedy

This contribution intends to discuss the overlapping of power, resistance, and culture by looking at the world of humour and stand-up comedy (Attardo 1994; Chiaro 1992, 2010a, 2010b; Ross 1998) in the Indian context, as important sociocultural sites of public discourse and opposition to mainstream ideologies (Miller 2020; Paul 2017; Sarkar and Siraj 2022), focusing on Vir Das’s verbal humour. In India, the phenomenon of standup comedy is chiefly an urban, English-language cultural product, but it is spreading and acquiring visibility, even at a global level. It constitutes a means through which power may be contested, appropriated, and abrogated regarding sensitive social, religious, and political aspects (Simpson and Mayr 2010). Given the complexity of the Indian social arena, one in which humour can generate marked division and spark fierce turmoil when it addresses sensitive themes such as religion, politics and ethnic belonging, often artistes must elaborate subtle puns, jokes and references that can function as forms of face-threatening acts against the traditional parameters of politeness (Kachru and Smith 2008). By employing a mixed methodology, informed by critical stylistics, communication science and postcolonial studies (Black 2006; Ramone 2011), I set out to offer some preliminary considerations on the features and effects of the language of Indian humour, investigating extracts from Vir Das’s Losing it, a 2018 Netflix special comedy show in which the artiste takes into account a range of divisive and controversial themes to problematise the idea of power and its aftermaths. The aim is to shed light on the subversive, thoughtprovoking and social essence of laughter as a valuable practice against ideologies, inequalities, and discriminations.