A comedy roast sparks an Indian firestorm

It seems that even innocuous acts will prompt someone somewhere in India to take offence. But rarely has the country shown a sense of humour failure as comprehensive as its recent response to one bawdy foreign import: A “roast” delivered by a group of stand-up comics in Mumbai.

“In our own juvenile, idiotic way, we wanted to push the envelope of comedy in this country. But then the envelope pushed back,” the comedians wrote in an open letter last week, belatedly trying to defuse the scandal over their performance at a celebrity-packed charity gathering in December, when they mocked Bollywood stars Arjun Kapoor and Ranveer Singh.

The roast genre, in which a public figure is ridiculed as his or her friends watch, is popular in America. But the format was largely unknown in India until the four-man All India Bakchod (AIB) troupe — the final word being a Hindi expletive, politely translated as “moron” — adopted it, and then uploaded highlights to YouTube last month. Their clip showed “India’s edgiest comedy collective” attacking its quarry in crudely scatological terms. Aspersions were cast, too, on the sexuality of a well-known male director, alongside unsubtle hints about assignations involving Bollywood starlets who happened to be in the auditorium.

All concerned seemed to take their ribbing in good part, but as the hit count raced towards eight million, obscenity complaints tumbled in from religious groups, prompting investigation threats by politicians and the police. The tabloid-friendly mix of celebrity and profanity dominated local papers for days.

Eventually, AIB buckled. “To everyone who’s called us seditious pornographers while plotting the downfall of ‘Indian values and civilisation as we know it’, we would like to reiterate that we are only a bunch of comedians,” the group wrote in last week’s letter, justifying the decision to yank the video from its YouTube channel. “Unfunny, crass or whatever you want to call them, they’re still only jokes.”

HUGE DIVIDE IN WHAT IS FUNNY

Jokes or not, it is tempting to view the resulting outrage as part of a wider tussle between Indian umbrage and free expression. AIB’s scandal reached its zenith in the week that a musician was forced to bleep out the word “Bombay” from another YouTube video, for fear of offending groups who favour the city’s formal name of Mumbai.

Similar spats have bubbled up of late, over everything from explicit Tamil literature to kissing in public. Anxious liberals, whether fairly or not, fear such episodes are evidence of a newly censorious public culture, linked to the election last year of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

However, the scandal tells a more specific story, too, about the relatively recent arrival of Western-style stand-up comedy. India has a rich comic tradition, albeit one that tends towards gentle slapstick or mimicry in mainstream film and television. The biting observational humour common in Britain and America was relatively rare until a branch of London’s Comedy Store opened in a ritzy mall in Mumbai back in 2010.

Having at first planned to fly in famous foreign comics, the venue realised Indian audiences preferred local jokes and nurtured a new generation of aspirant domestic performers.

“It was this amazing space, the first place you could do that kind of comedy,” said Mr Anuvab Pal, a successful stand-up, who started out at the venue. “All of the AIB guys met there; it was like a dating agency and finishing school for us.”

Groups such as AIB took off, developing a style of comedy that was at once coarse and provocative. However, while their jokes found favour among the relatively small English-speaking urban elite, they proved combustible when mixed with the elixir of Bollywood and let loose on a wider public online.

“There is still this huge divide between the India that comes to a comedy club in Mumbai and the mainstream of the country outside,” said Mr Pal.

“If the roast had been contained in that auditorium, it would have been just fine, but when you send it out to eight million people on YouTube, you’ll clash with that mainstream India ... and we still don’t seem to know how to deal with that, let alone to laugh about it.” THE FINANCIAL TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Crabtree is the Mumbai bureau chief at the Financial Times.