The willing martyr of comedy
In the grand circus of Indian democracy, where the trapeze artists of power swing between sanctimony and savagery, Kunal Kamra, literally armed with a mic and a metaphoric mirror, has chosen to fall, missing the net. The mic is for him. The mirror is for us.
His offence this time? A line delivered with the almost callous candour of a street poet: “I am ready to lose everything but not ready to lose my spine like Eknath Shinde did when he betrayed Uddhav Thackeray and became Maharashtra deputy CM.” The word ‘betrayal’ undid the evening. As a result, writers like me get to repeat the charge.
This writer included, the spine in our existential and political transactions is often missing. The fear of offending—I live in this fear in every word I write. Contemporary civilisation is little more than the nagging fear that someone, somewhere has taken offence at my writing. The fear was installed in our lives by liberals and wokes, but increasingly resorted to by the right wing.
Shinde is powerful enough to ignore the jibe. Instead, his people vandalised the venue in Mumbai, where the scene of the tragi-comedy occurred—as if the place, not the person, was responsible for the loud guffaws, knowing smirks.
Coming to think of it, it was not even a great joke. It was just a kind of truth that guides Indian politics. Recall the casual frequency with which elected representatives change their colours and parties.
And so, the erstwhile—undivided—Shiv Sena, now a relic of its former sons-of-the-soil self of the early 1960s, didn’t appreciate the humour. Instead, they laid the venue to waste. One supposes it is by destruction of property that one reaches out to touch the personality.
If we can’t laugh, if a person can’t be held responsible for the act, at least the place he delivered his sermon from would be altered. The state government has a FIR slapped on Kamra, too
Kamra is no stranger to this tango. He once taunted a famous fellow passenger, Arnab Goswami, at 30,000 feet above ground level, and sent up others. Each time, the script repeats: outrage, threats, invocation of the law. These are precisely the reactions Kamra wants, because all these are a form of appreciation for a comedian.
But Kamra is more ambitious than most comedians. He wants to be a martyr. The only Indian comedian who would gladly die to make you laugh.
The opposite of comedy is not tragedy. It is silence. In silence, comedy perishes. The kind of destruction that Shinde’s followers unleashed is a vindication of what Kamra said. With this latest instalment of violence, Shinde has guaranteed the return of a larger crowd for Kamra and his friends the next time they crack a joke at the expense of right-wing leaders.
On top of the violence that the Sainiks unleashed, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, sniffing a chance to flex its hypertrophied muscles, swung hammers at “illegal sheds” outside the club, as if broken mortar could bury a quip in retrospect.
Reportedly, over 500 calls—some offering to carve him into confetti—jammed Kamra’s phone, turning him into a kind of Christ of humour. A man who would mock you even if it killed him. Kamra wants to be the clown among the jokers, a kite among hawks.
Still, what is it about a comedian? Laughter, though fluffy, is the stuff of surgical steel. A joke scalps to the bone of things very swiftly. “I am ready to lose everything but not…” The joke cut through the armour of Shinde, the man who split the Sena in 2022, toppling Uddhav Thackeray to have a go at the CM’s chair.
Kamra’s words echo a betrayal still raw in the Maharashtra government’s gut. The Sena’s response—vandalism, death threats, a whining demand for contrition—betrays the wound’s depth. The irony’s rich enough to gag on. Uddhav Thackeray, once the Sena’s roaring lion, now purrs in Kamra’s corner. “A traitor is a traitor,” he intones, savouring the chance to claw at Shinde’s flank. Aaditya Thackeray dubs it “100 percent truth,” as if comedy craves a notary’s stamp of approval.
This is not all about free speech, though Kamra drapes himself in its frayed banner. It is about Kamra wanting attention big time as well. He would like to be crowned the Clown of India. This is a dangerous status to aspire to in a country divided between the Left elite and their genteel bleeding-heart ways, and the peanut-crunching, humourless Right.
True to his nature, Kamra has doubled down. “Perhaps my next venue will be Elphinstone Bridge,” he says, invoking the span as shaky as the state’s tolerance. It’s a kind of gallows humour befitting the farce of Indian politics, where right after an election, MLAs and MPs are kidnapped and confined to resorts by their leaders so that they cannot be bribed into changing sides. This alone makes Indian politics a joke.
This country is a joke because it cannot take one—a place where a jester’s teeth meet the mob’s hammer, where the dissent of laughter is treason and silence a virtue. Shinde will weather this joke, his throne intact, his foes battered. Nevertheless, Kamra’s mirror flashes in the sun, reflecting a nation too afraid to face itself head-on. As a nation, we prefer decorum over truth. That, dear reader, is the punchline no one’s laughing at.
C P Surendran | Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)