The following is an excerpt from the book Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy: Speaking Truth to Power, published by Routledge.
Humour is valued when it is perceived as cerebral or intellectually stimulating, something that is difficult to grasp and allows those who are humour literate to take pride in their intellectual prowess. However, when it comes to subaltern laughter, the erasure of the socially disempowered from the status of the comic, and thus the agent of humour, is part of a persistent historical narrative and a master game plan that has come to define the construct of the rational (and funny) man. Humour from below is seen as lowbrow and is equated with pure, unadulterated emotion such as the kind women, children and vulnerable sections of the society display.
The refusal to see the marginalised as agents of humour instead of being the butt of ridicule, and “register the social power of subaltern laughter,” by dismissing their humour as mere relief is a bias that can be seen in philosophical and popular understandings of humour (Cynthia Willet and Julie A. Willet). Although the “diversity quota” (Aditi Mittal) of neoliberal markets makes room for a diverse set of voices, it does not recognise the political nature of comedy by women or “chick comedy” which foregrounds questions of identity and sexuality.
‘Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy: Speaking Truth to Power,’ edited By Rashi Bhargava and Richa Chilana, Routledge, 2023.
Rebecca Krefting in her book All Joking Aside: American humour and its discontents has argued that all forms of humour locate itself in a particular social, cultural, political context. However, “charged humour” does it self consciously with the intention to create a more equitable world by challenging its divisions and cultural exclusion.
In contemporary discourse, politics transcends the confines of statist, governmental structures, institutions and processes and incorporates within it individual and collective experiences, relationships and political subjectivities in the everyday. It highlights the existence of power dynamics within societal relationships both at the micro and at the macro level and the various factors that have a bearing on it. Stand up as a genre has made a significant contribution in bringing politics out of its narrow confines of academic, scholarly, intellectual and activist spheres and helping it reach a wider set of people. But this has been possible only because of the emergence of a new moment in politics as underscored by Sophie Quirk. As a communicative and collaborative art form, it can be said to address the gap between lived experience and power equations, ideology and representations in a society.
Some of the contemporary female stand up comics across the world are challenging dominant views to question conventional hierarchies. We can specifically look at female comedians in different regional settings be it the US (Ali Wong and Taylor Tomlinson), India (Kaneez Surka, Sumukhi Suresh), Australia (Hannah Gadsby and Zoe Coombs Marr), Italy (Marsha De Salvatore) or Iran (Shaghayegh Dehghan and Elika Abdolrazzaghi) who through their acts have deconstructed gendered notions of humour as well as patriarchal structures, worldviews and ideologies.
A stand-up performance is a people’s art, performed for the people. It is predicated on the performer’s connection with the audience by breaking the fourth wall, unlike many other modes of artistic expression where the performer feigns oblivion of the presence of the audience (Ian Brodie). The stand up comedian performing her biography through her performance might enable creation of community, celebration of creativity, orality/aurality and performativity in addition to critiquing structural (racist, sexist, ethnic, class, caste), gendered, cishet and (hetero-)sexual politics.
Usually the biography of a performer is established through her/his interviews, publicity material and more recently in their tweets and other kinds of social media presence which allows them to share their opinions in their acts and which may not fully be directed to entertain the audience. There is a performance of the self outside their “performative moments” which can be called their “non-comedic performance” (Ian Brodie). The socio-cultural situatedness of the content of stand up comedy and the comic persona flows into the realm of interpretation by the audience (face-to-face and mediated, both). Thus, it is not only the comic that establishes a subject position but also the audience who react to her/his jokes and may take hegemonic ideas, positions and narratives head on. Their laughter can be dangerous and jokes can oust misinformation, propaganda and rhetoric. One can say, the audience is not a passive receiver but an active agent and has the power to challenge the hegemonic and the dominant. Thus even if a comic performance may not necessarily lead to any drastic change, it can definitely be instrumental in busting myths, representations and ideologies and alter the way people think about the dominant and the marginalised both from within and outside.
The question, then, is – is this kind of performance lucrative for the comic or does it always ‘land’? For instance, there are quite a few charged female comics who are successful but when it comes to long term success such as being headliners in comedy clubs, film, tv etc, it has mostly been men. While talking about the debate generated by Christopher Hitchens’ “Why Women Aren’t Funny” Krefting says that it ignored a seminal issue about the economy of artistic production and consumption and how we as individuals are taught to value certain things over others, made to identify with those in power and that identification promises material and cultural capital. Herein lies the reason why charged humour isn’t economically viable.
Authorial intention is another possible lens through which we can further examine humour. There are times when the intention of a stand-up comic might not translate in the form of the audience reaction he/she was working towards. In such a case, the audience, especially the ones at the margins may make attempts and find ways to reclaim their subject positions vis-a-vis the stand up comic. The contemporary digital space does allow for such a process to unfold. For instance in a recent incident, a fan who identifies as non-binary called out Vir Das for his joke on the transgender community and stated, “you (Vir Das) of all people know punching up is how comedy works and yet you chose to punch down, if only as a set up.” To this, Das took full responsibility and responded,
I did a joke on the new ten on ten episode that my friends in the trans community felt hurt by. I see why. My intent in the moment, was to say Trans people have courage the Govt messed up. It had the opposite effect and trivialised your struggle. Articulating my intent effectively is my responsibility, not yours.
This conversation, whose screenshot was shared by Vir Das on his Instagram handle indicates how digital space creates a space for dialogic communication and offers a glimpse into authorial intention or how sometimes the intent might not translate into the act or the personal life of the stand-up comic. In another instance, Aditi Mittal offers a caustic critique of sexism by talking unabashedly of bra shopping, menstruation etc. in Things They Wouldn’t Let Me Say, while on the other hand she was herself accused of sexual harassment by another comic. When the #MeToo movement laid bare the deep, dark secrets of the stand-up world, three comedy collectives in India, All India Bakchod (AIB), Schitzengiggles Comedy (SnG) and East India Comedy (EIC) either fell apart or saw the loss of some of the founding figures. How do we then look at their “subversive humour” or the reinvented relationship between the performer and the audience in this heavily mediatised world?
Although contemporary stand-up comics are seen as parrhesiastes or Horatian in their attempt to offer pleasurable instruction, the cathartic laughter of the audience also makes us wonder if catharsis is all it offers or is there something else that changes ever so slightly when we hear the ‘truth tellers’,
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house… the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor that is planted deep within each of us,and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships. (Audre Lorde)
We believe that the joy, communion, sense of belonging and solidarity, empathy, humility, possibilities of (limited) transformation and laughing in the face of the powers that are and powers that be, that the form promises and delivers to the laughmakers and their audience is worth noting, investigating and celebrating. But how far and how deeply have the ‘master’s tools’ infiltrated stand-up comedy that punches up especially when most of them speak from a position of power and privilege is a question that we need to constantly ask and attempt to answer.
Rashi Bhargava is assistant professor at North Eastern Hill University. Richa Chilana is assistant professor at University of Petroleum and Energy Studies. The two are also editors of Politics of Recognition and Representation in Indian Stand-Up Comedy.
