A Different Humour: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of the Nature of Participation of Select Indian Female Stand-Up Comedians on YouTube
A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Award of the Degree of
Master of Philosophy in English
by Sonali Sahoo Reg. No 1730031
Under the Supervision of Rolla Das Assistant Professor
Department of English
CHRIST (Deemed to be University) BENGALURU, INDIA
December 2018
Approval of Dissertation
Dissertation entitled A Different Humour: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of the
Nature of Participation of Select Indian Female Comedians on YouTube by Sonali Sahoo,
Reg. No 1730031 is approved for the award of the degree of Master of Philosophy in English.
Supervisor: ______
Chairman: ______
General Research Coordinator: ______
Date: ……………………..
Place: Bengaluru
ii
DECLARATION
I Sonali Sahoo hereby declare that the dissertation entitled A Different Humour: A
Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of the Nature of Participation of Select Indian Female
Comedians on YouTube by Sonali Sahoo is a record of original research work undertaken by me for the award of the degree of Master of Philosophy in English. I have completed this study under the supervision of Dr Rolla Das, Department of English.
I also declare that this dissertation has not been submitted for the award of any degree, diploma, associateship, fellowship, or other titles. I hereby confirm the originality of the work and that there is no plagiarism in any part of the dissertation.
Place: Bengaluru Date: ………………… Sonali Sahoo Reg No 173031 Department of English CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru
iii
CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that the dissertation submitted by Sonali Sahoo (Reg. No 1730031) entitled
“A Different Humour: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of the Nature of Participation of Select Indian Female Comedians on YouTube” is a record of research work done by her during the academic year 2017-2018 under my/our supervision in partial fulfilment for the award of Master of Philosophy in English.
This dissertation has not been submitted for the award of any degree, diploma, associateship, fellowship, or another title. I hereby confirm the originality of the work and that there is no plagiarism in any part of the dissertation.
Place: Bengaluru Date: …………………
Dr Rolla Das Assistant Professor Department of English CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru
Head of the Department Department of English CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to thank the Vice-Chancellor, Dr Fr Thomas C Mathew, Dean, Humanities and
Social Sciences, Dr John Joseph Kennedy, the HOD, Department of English, Dr Abhaya N.B., and the course coordinator, Dr Kishore Selva Babu for their support.
I express my gratitude towards my supervisor Dr Rolla Das for mentoring me through these eighteen months. I am extremely grateful to her for having taken extra effort in teaching me the nuances of research and academic writing. Ma’am, who has excellent skills for research, has not only taught me but also helped immensely to acquire the required skill-set for being a scholar in the past months. This dissertation could not have turned out the way it has, had it not been for your timely evaluation, suggestions and motivation, ma’am. For putting up with me at odd hours of the day and being an extraordinary teacher, I owe this to you, ma’am. My parents have been the pillar of my strength. I cannot thank them enough for believing and motivating me incessantly. Mom and Dad, thank you. I would also like to thank my elder brother for helping me move into the city, boosting my morale and being there for me, whenever I missed being home. I dedicate this to you, family.
I would like to thank my friends, fellow scholars for showing immense support and encouragement. I would also like to thank my roommate for adjusting to my odd schedule and taking care of me. Finally, cheers to all the people I have met during my stay here, and for being good to me.
v
ABSTRACT
In recent times, Stand-up Comedy space in India has been registering itself as an alternative public sphere. As comedy has always been understood to be a masculine domain in any given society, it becomes imperative to examine if this aspect of the ‘implied’ public sphere of the
Stand-up Comedy space changes the dimension of comedy. This dissertation studied the nature of participation of both the male and female stand-up comics on YouTube using descriptive surveys which reported the default nature of the stand-up comedy space in India. Furthermore, the thesis studied the implications of the performances by select few female comics with specific reference to the audience reception of their comedic routines. In addition, this dissertation studied how female stand-up comics negotiate their citizenship and gender in a stand-up comedy space in
India. Thematic and Critical Discourse Analysis were used to examine the theme, style, and nature of humour pervasive throughout their comedic routines. The style of humour presentation by the select female comics included subversion which was articulated in varied ways, often by marking it explicitly through themes, narratives and humour, and in other times, using it covertly.
The thesis explored the dimensions of “unladylike” or “unfunny” which were used as markers to identify their routines by both themselves and their YouTube audience/commentators, the thesis also attempted to explain how these comedians found a balance between ‘doing gender’ and
‘undoing gender’ in these comedy spaces. The thesis concluded with an argument that the stand- up comedy space as negotiated by the select comics provides us a glimpse of an emergent feminist public sphere.
Keywords: Stand-up Comedy, Subversion, Unladylike, Public Sphere, Feminist
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page i Approval of Dissertation ii Declaration iii Certificate iv Acknowledgement v Abstract vi Contents vii List of Tables viii 1. Chapter 1 Funny Women 1-32 1.1 Introducing the Thesis 1 1.2 Review of Literature 2 1.2.1 Humour 2-4 1.2.2 Stand-up Comedy 5-6 1.2.3 Stand-up Comedy as a Public Sphere 6-8 1.2.4 Gender in Humour and Stand-up Comedy 8-9 1.2.5 Laughter and Power 9-11 1.2.6 Stand-up in India 11-14 1.2.7 Stand-up in India on YouTube 14-15 1.2.8 Gender Differences in Stand-up in India on YouTube 15-17 1.3 Research Questions, Objectives, and Methodology 17-18 1.4 Methods 18-20 1.5 Theoretical Framework 20-24 1.6 Locating the Significance of the Study 24-25 Work Cited 26-32 2. Chapter 2 Am I not Funny? – An Analysis of Gender Representation of Women in Stand- 33-59 Up Comedy Space on YouTube 2.1 Introduction 33 2.1.1 Stand-up Comedy: Definition and Variables 34-36 2.2 Nature of Participation on YouTube 36-57 Work Cited 58-59 3. Chapter 3 Unruly Women: Mitigating Gender and Humour in Stand-up Comedy Spaces 60-100 3.1 Introduction 60-61 3.2 The Semiotics of the Routines 61-68 3.3 Undoing Gender 68-71 3.4 Texts, Discourses and Public Sphere 71-91 3.5 Towards Feminist Public Sphere 91-95 Work Cited 96-100 4. Conclusion 101-109 4.1 In Conclusion 101-102 4.2 Performativity and Subversion in their Routines 102-104 4.3 Intersectionality 104-105 4.4 Feminist Public Sphere 105-108 Work Cited 109 Bibliography 110-126
vii
List of Tables
Table 1 Number of clips, average views, average time of the video, average up votes, 37-38 and subscribers for channels owned by individual female performers. Note: This tabular format was last updated in the month of February 2018. Table 2 Number of clips, average views, average time of the video, average up votes, 38-39 and subscribers for channels owned by individual male performers. Note: This tabular format was last updated in the month of February 2018. Table 3 Comparative account of the number of clips, range of upper limit of views, 39-40 range of up votes and subscribers for channels owned by individual male (Top 10) and female performers. Note: This tabular format was last updated in the month of February 2018. Table 4 Profiling of comments section 42 Table 5 Differences in positive and negative comments for individual performers 43 who performed their routines that dealt with similar themes
viii
Chapter 1 ‘Funny Women’
Introduction
1.1 Introducing the Thesis
In contemporary times, there is an extension of the vigilance from real to the virtual world online. This often diminishes faith in the rational public sphere. However, that does not negate the need for public spaces for political participation neither does it challenge the democratic function of these spaces. Rather, that eventually leads to the construction of an alternative platform where observations on the politics in everyday life through entertainment are made accessible to all (Cvetkovich and Pellegrini 1-19). Paul posits how the emergence of a relatively uninhibited public sphere in the form of stand-up comedy has proved promising and has been argued as being particularly important when media organisations in India are experiencing new forms of censorship and control, via more informal mechanisms of business practice, including judgements about audience taste that use ratings, and the need to advance advertising revenues, as the sole justification for the presentation of programming (125).
While the uninhibited public sphere has been considered as a celebratory intervention, humour researchers have been puzzled about the lack of intersectionality in these spaces that are particularly accountable for providing alternative spaces for articulations arising from the intersections of humour, public sphere, and gender. Sahoo 2
1.2 Review of Literature
In the studies on humour, it is often argued that there is no sense of humour that is universal. Our deeply held beliefs influence our sense of humour (Hale 3). Additionally, individuals tend to create humour around culture-specific ideologies or value systems embedded in a society. What is funny in a state/area with a specific history of the land may not be funny for members of another state/area with a very different social and cultural history. To create and comprehend a joke on a particular minister in India, one needs to understand the context of the joke: the understanding of the governing system of India, the political and ideological history of the party, and the importance or lack of importance of the minister in question. While this is true of comprehending humour, in the current understanding of humour, there are other dimensions which influence the creation and comprehension of humour. One significant question pertains to understanding the relationship between gender and humour.
1.2.1 Humour
Humour has been defined in various ways. Humour can be understood as a discourse that accepts ambiguity, paradox, and alternate reality, which otherwise in a non-humourous discourse gets rejected (Hay 709). However, these parameters, both with reference to production and consumption have been argued to be culture dependent (Dijik 84, 205).
Humour as a literary tool can be found in stories, anecdotes, essays, jokes, dialogues, one- liners, epigrams, and all. It is found in the form of comedy, satire, irony, and various others, making it difficult to define it clearly (Chatterjee 24). Humour is often private and/or public, that is, what is humourous differs depending on who is being laughed at, several social and cultural markers, apart from individual preferences of what is funny. However, there are Sahoo 3
several sub-conscious mechanisms underlying what can be otherwise be written off as an individual ‘quirk’. Therefore, often a person’s joke does not evoke laughter or is considered offensive (Machan 218). Acknowledging the understanding that humour does not necessarily lead to laughter, it can be written off as unfunny, based on the individual sensibility (Ross 1).
Functionally, it has been defined as a mechanism of social interaction (Crawford 1413;
Farb 768). Social interactions include a wide array of humour-functions (Williams and Emich
653). Humour-function has been broadly classified into three or four categories (Meyer 311-
324). It includes ‘to command’ or ‘show authority’ (Collinson 197), ‘bring forth the conflict’
(Meyer 317), ‘relieve stress’ (312), or ‘create or bring out the divisions’ (Linstead 762). The last function has been linked to political participation and is often called as the unmasking tactic. Humour often allows bringing out the social disparities by exposing contradictions and flaws in institutionalised systems of privilege and power (Hertz 8). This specific function of humour is deeply connected to an understanding of how humour facilitates the creation of critical and political participation.
Interestingly, studies indicate that humour is gendered (Tosun et al.). Women have often been considered as not being funny (Lakoff 56). In response, several studies have posited how female comedians by their own performances and theories have attempted to explain their comedic routines that challenge the stereotypes, predominantly western, though now encompasses spaces beyond the West (Hertz 25, 39, 41, 44). Women have often been considered as being not funny on the grounds of “heteronormative and biological essentialism” (Cameron 21), that is, scholars have argued that for women, reproduction is the primary purpose, being funny, secondary (Hitchens). This is reiterated by Blyth, who claims that “they are unlaughing at which men laugh” (14-15). This is further used to substantiate a Sahoo 4
model that explains how women as the teller of jokes invoke a reversal of gender roles and power positions in society (Marlowe 150).
Hay conducted a study on the gender differences in humour functions and reported that most women use humour to promote solidarity, whereas men use it as status symbol and dominance (733-738). Scholars noted how women have evaded from being humorous in mixed company as that was considered as being impolite and a threat to social bonding (Hay
712). In terms of style, several scholars have noted how domestic experiences of women have been overlooked by men in their comedic routines (Lindsey 10-11). With reference to humour perception, several studies report that the male is assumed as the funnier sex regardless of the parameters considered for judging humour (Mickes 108; Hooper et al. 54). However, women who are funny have existed in spite of being discouraged and have performed in spaces restricted to women only interactions for appreciation (Hay 713). This provides the first premise of this research endeavour. Specifically, this thesis attempted to unravel how in specific humour contexts, gender plays a role in the production and consumption of humour.
The review of literature reveals that the conclusions and understanding that the studies above reported have not necessarily been drawn from one specific kind of humour context, such as informal interactions and stand-up comedy among others. However, in contemporary times, one of the contemporary avenues for understanding humour has been to examine stand-up comedy spaces. These are considered as new age entertainment spaces which have been used to bring out various issues for public consideration, acknowledgement and debate that are otherwise not discussed in mainstream or public domain (Maheshwari).
Sahoo 5
1.2.2 Stand-up Comedy
Brodie defines stand-up comedy as
“…stand-up comedy [1] is a form of talk. It implies a context that allows for reaction,
participation, and engagement on the part of those to whom the stand-up comedian is
speaking. When it is mediated through broadcasting and recording, an audience present
to the performer is included in that mediation. However heavily one - sided, it is
nevertheless a dialogic form, performed not to but with an audience.” (153)
Stand-up comedy has been acknowledged across the world. It is included in shows, or performed as stand-alone events. It is often performed in clubs where the performer and the audience are in close proximity. The performer performs on a stage and uses a mic. The content is often improvised depending on the audience’s reactions. Laughter becomes a rubric for the performer and the audience to evaluate and more importantly acknowledge the performer’s humorous acts, which in the literature is referred to as comedic routines. Stand-up comedy’s minimalistic format, with a stage and a mic, makes it probable for everyone to be on the stage and speak to an audience. This feature has been considered as being democratic as the performance space provides, theoretically, anyone, not only the power to speak, but also subvert or claim the space for challenging power hierarchies (Hertz 12). The hierarchies of positions are not only challenged by the representation, presence, and articulations of individuals from varied sections of the society but also from the acknowledgement of the varied content that is being discussed. Themes and ideas that are otherwise tabooed are brought out and presented under the garb of “joking” (Storla). Stand-up comedians therefore, while considered humorous, engage in ‘serious business’ wherein they critique, inform, and create a space of public discourse to engage in a participatory citizenship, leading various Sahoo 6
scholars to articulate that stand-up spaces emerge as humour spaces that are “honest and true”
(Pinto and Marcal 14-16).
1.2.3 Stand-up Comedy as Public Sphere
Mintz defines stand-up as the oldest form of humorous expression and argues further that in its new avatar in the present society, stand-up often challenges cultural, institutional, and social norms in the present society (71). The content, the socio-demographic profile of the performers, and the controversies surrounding it contribute to the construction of the performative space to be viewed as a public sphere. German sociologist Jurgen Habermas defined the public sphere as, “a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens” (49). It has been found that the stand-up stage is used to bring out the social malice, politics, taboo subjects in a society
(Maheshwari). Female stand-up comedians talk about women’s issues regarding sexuality, marriage, infidelity, which are considered as taboo subjects (Zinoman). Women speak of their domestic experiences as well as larger concerns that are social, cultural, political, and ideological. Topics that are otherwise not spoken about are often expressed through humour due to its ambiguous nature (Storla). Thereby, the emergence of stand-up as a genre of humour that is politically participatory becomes undeniably true.
The form of stand-up as comedy also assists in its role as an alternative political space.
While stand-up is typically seen as a medium of entertainment, Alamaula observes that stand- up comedy’s apparent lack of threat in terms of its improvised aesthetic, it's casual delivery, and the resounding proclamation that “it’s just jokes”, which could be seen as contradictory to its function to critique society, challenge dominant ideologies, and enact dissidence is useful in the construction of the public sphere, albeit veiled (18). However, it is this aspect Sahoo 7
specifically, which perhaps provides stand-up comedy’s branding as “popular culture” to helpfully distract from its ability to perform dissidence, its power, and its potential to incite change. The argument regarding the duality is an important premise for the thesis.
The censorship that works against the dissent and the emerging consciousness of the common public is often used as a means of subversion against the enforced hierarchies
(Gilbert 317). He further argues that “throughout history, talented misfits have used their difference as a means of survival, foregrounding and capitalising on the very stigma that threatens their existence. Excluded from the power center of society, these individuals have emphasised and relied upon their difference for a living. The artist, the fool, the social critic
[…] all stand aside from the center in order to critique it. Although they are not allowed within the ruled lines of society’s pages, these ‘others’ gain a certain freedom, a latitude that can only be experienced in the open space of margins. By ‘performing’ their marginality, social outcasts call attention to their subordinate status; by commodifying their performance, they ensure that the dominant culture literally pays a price for this disparity” (Gilbert xi).
Gilbert’s understanding connects performance, marginality, commodity, dominant culture, and disparity. It is imperative at this juncture to understand how one performs marginality (328). Shifman argues that “women have been marginalized in many fields of humour – especially in the public realm” (Shifman 2). In addition, the distinction between feminist and sexist humour in literature is fairly well documented (Kotthoff). It falls in line with a basic differentiation described in humour scholarship between conservative/hegemonic humour that targets disempowered segments of society and subversive/rebellious humour employed as a weapon by marginalised groups against those in power (Billig 39). Sexist humour performed both by men and women performers on stage maintain and reinforce the power hierarchies. This thesis acknowledges the understanding that the analysis of humour Sahoo 8
along the axis running from conservative/sexist to subversive/feminist is important and fundamental for an understanding of stand-up spaces and their possibilities of creating a
‘public sphere’ for people across gender.
1.2.4 Gender in Humour and Stand-up Comedy
Humour is one of the most poignant tools through which gender gets constructed and deconstructed via performance (Crawford 1416-1427; Cameron 590) and practices in a society (Davies). Davies showed how humour participates in constructing gender characterisations. Humour is presented through various expressive media including physical, verbal, oral, and written forms (Nijholt) and gender is performed through a variety of humour strategies that are inclusive of the attire, nonverbal behaviour, language, and role enactment according to societal expectations that are marked by gender identifications (Kessler and
McKenna). In this thesis, we adopt West and Zimmerman’s idea of gender wherein, “any individual is not born with gender, nor has a gender, in fact one defines his/her gender through their practices” (West and Zimmerman 138).
“A large body of academic and industry-related evidence suggests that the stand-up comedyscape has always been, and continues to be, male-dominated (Channel 4, 2010; Gray
1994; Nilsen and Nilsen 2000; Ross 1998; Zoglin 2009)” (Lockeyer 1). In humour, specifically, in stand-up performances, female participation has been less, not absent
(Nesterhoff). There is a steady increase in the number of women performers globally (Keisalo
1). This, however, reflects global trends wherein almost all spaces are registering a steady increase of female participation. Keisalo further adds that in humour, more than in any other art and entertainment forms, not only participation but the capabilities of women comedians have been questioned (Keisalo 1). She adds that “the scholarly discussion of gender in Sahoo 9
(English language) stand-up comedy has revolved around the question of why there are so few women, and whether this is because of women, comedy or tastes of the audience (e.g.
Colleary 2015; Krefting 2014; Limon 2000; Seizer 2011).” In addition, there are differences in the themes of the sketches of male and female stand-up comedians (Zinoman).
In humour studies, scholars have looked at how joking styles are used as aesthetic typifications which can be used in the service of characterisations. The comedians often use
“stock” characters to make fun of them. The most common example would be body size, personality differences-often invoking the idea that those women who are aggressive after marriage, non-compliant with gender roles, such as the wife who does not cook, be in the kitchen or do “homely work” are too careerist. Comedy performances often repeat gender roles in compliance with the gender expectations (Zevallos) thereby reinforcing the ‘sexist’ dimensions of humour. This suggests how humour not only facilitates gender performances in accordance with the social expectations of gender but also reproduces the gender system that is built on inequalities (Mauldin 76-95).
1.2.5 Laughter and Power
Laughter is power. In stand-up comedy spaces, laughter implies acknowledgement of the performer as a comedian. The audience laughs if they understand the connotations and implications. Comedy in stand-up like all other forms of humour is contextual (Dundes).
More importantly, since laughter implies power, the audience’s laughter concedes power to the performer’s presence. If women comedians are marginalised and laughter promotes solidarity (Farb 10-11) then women comedians’ recognition challenges two stereotypes.
Women’s humour itself challenges the stereotypes of unfunny women, and male audience members’ laughter challenges the masculine nature of the form and structure of the stand-up Sahoo 10
comedy space. Therefore, the acknowledgement of these connotations makes the women comedians’ candidature in such a comedy space, a reversal of the male domination, and by extension subversive (Hertz 10). This is evident in some of the observations made by female comedians who report that their routines have been marked as an ‘other’, by being referred to as a routine from a “female comic” (Gilbert). Therefore, socio-cultural analyses of “stand-up comedy performances are important as they provide interesting insights into the ways in which the performer negotiates the comedy space in relation to her/his own identity, the identity dynamics of the audience and the wider societal beliefs, values and ideologies”
(Lockeyer 12).
“Stand-up comedy performance involves a complex combination of elements and it fuses features that are regarded as ‘traditionally masculine’, such as aggression, with features frequently used by other female stand-up comedians, such as self-deprecating comedy and confessional comedy” (Lockeyer 1). This incidentally has been used as a defining element of marginal humour, where, “self-deprecation and blatant rhetorical subversion” have been predominant strategies of female comedians, albeit not exclusively (Russell). Lockyer argues that “gender and sexuality are negotiated and re-negotiated” (1) and “dominant ideological identity constructions reinforced and subverted within the same comic moment (1).” The marking of marginality also happens by the sheer presence of female comedians in a traditionally masculine space. Through their critiques, female comedians evoke laughter and simultaneously offer a critique, thereby subverting the hegemony (Gilbert). In Jenkins’ paper
Was It Something They Said? Stand-up Comedy and Progressive Social Change, he argued that stand-up performances not only provide us with the understanding of gender experience but also establish the comedians as public intellectuals and cultural critiques. These comedians bring the normative of gender and race onto the stage and render it a dialogic Sahoo 11
status against the existing social order. Since comedic texts draw on prevalent ideologies, stereotypes, and cultural codes, analyses of humour offers a unique perspective for understanding contemporary perceptions and stereotypes pertaining to gender and sexuality
(Billig 82-85).
Gender as a performative act is therefore presented in stand-ups in various ways; from jokes that subvert and reinforce social roles to the ones that present one’s identity while defending the idea of ‘funny.’ The gender differences and understanding of how comedy reinforces the cultural stereotype allow us to understand how stand-up comedy spaces as potential public sphere, in spite of promising “equal access to all”, fails in its delivery because of two issues: 1) lack of representation and participation and 2) reinforcing gender stereotypes in the representations. While it is true that there is a global trend in stand-up humour wherein, the question of representation is being taken cognizance of, though far from being acted on, hence, to locate the importance of the study in the context of India, is important.
1.2.6 Stand-up in India
Chakyaar koottu, a 16th century Kerala art form has been traced as a traditional equivalent of the stand-up in India today (Bhatt). Naidu explained the similarity by quoting
Margi Madhu, a Chakyar Koothu performer “Koothu was originally an art of narrating stories in Sanskrit or Malayalam language relating to Ramayana and Mahabharata. Then over a period of time, it became an extensive extempore narration which would have ‘spoofs’ on the modern day-to-day social and political happenings around us.”
Sahoo 12
The recognition of stand-up comedy as an exclusive form of humour performance in
India performed live with no props, involving just the mic and the stage is a recent phenomenon. However, it had existed before the 1980s as fillers and supporting acts during other entertainment performances. It was Johny Lever, one of the most prominent Indian comedians who brought change in how comedians were perceived, when his comic performance was well received and appreciated in the Bollywood tour of Amitabh Bacchan around the World in 1986. The Great Indian Laughter Challenge (2005), a TV reality show gave the much required platform to the Hindi stand-up comedians and helped them create a niche for themselves. The Great Indian Laughter Challenge on television is distinct from the stand-up comedy form popularised by individual performers on YouTube in their live performances in the past few years. The TV shows were scripted and recorded interactions would be interjected during performances whereas, for stand-up, the focus is on the live audience, instant feedback, and unscripted improvisations.
According to an article Stand-up Comedy in India, stand-up comedy is believed to be the most successful form of comedy in the industry at present. Its adherence to a distinct format used for performance and telling jokes create a specific niche for this emerging art form. A comic artist, Naresh Adurthy locates the emergence and evolution of stand-up performance within the dynamics of socio-cultural changes in India (Agarwal). This is particularly so because stand-up is irreverent and deeply personal, and is often far away from being apolitical except on certain occasions (Gupta), thereby playing the role of an alternative public sphere.
The beginning of English stand-up comedy in India can be traced to the 2008-2009 when the now popular comedian and film actor, Vir Das and stand-up Papa CJ having Sahoo 13
performed in U.K. started performing in India. In the subsequent years, open mic in the bars and cafeterias in the big metropolitan cities of India became a regular, popular leisure activity for the young adult professionals in India. YouTube channels that broadcasted these recorded performances garnered significant views (Mandhani). Previously, comedy collectives such as
All India Bakchod (AIB), East India Company (EIC), The Viral Fever (TVF) on their
YouTube channels had uploaded sketch comedy previously. Solo performers like Kenny
Sebastian, Kannan Gill, Neeti Palta, Aditi Mittal, Radhika Vaz, Biswa Kalyan Rath, Abish
Mathew owe a share of their popularity as Stand-up comedians to the YouTube platform where they had earlier uploaded their sketches regularly.
Stand-up comedy as we perceive today in India could be seen as being quite similar to
Jaspal Bhatti’s sketch comedy in shows like Flop Show (1989) and UltaPulta (1997) in nature and humour-function (Sundaram). They include commentary on social mannerism, habits of the common man in India, while criticising the rampant corruption of the citizens at the government office and otherwise. It is often argued that sketch-comedy in India had set the grounds for stand-up comedy (Sundaram). Stand-up videos have functional plurality. They spread awareness while presenting a critique of various socio-political issues in any given society (Almaula 80).
The videos on the internet are both user-created and user-led; hence, they give equal opportunity to every citizen of the country a choice to participate in the way one wishes to
(Burgess and Green 2). They are author approved and mostly uploaded either by the comedy clubs that have their YouTube channels or the Stand-up comedians themselves. Often times, these videos are edited clips comprising of a joke or two from their whole set which might otherwise be hour long. Other times, these comedians upload their whole performance as well. Sahoo 14
The videos tend to create an identity of the uploader/ stand-up comedian and establish her/ him as a certain kind of a comedian, moreover an individual.
1.2.7 Stand-up in India on YouTube
While stand-up is quite popular across the urban youth in India, the largest platform for sharing their performances with a wide audience is YouTube. YouTube, as a social networking site provides a space ideally designed for uninhibited participation of individual users, reflecting an egalitarian or democratic spirit through its tagline, “Broadcast Yourself.”
It connotes “a sense of freedom to be whoever you want to be and communicates this conceptualisation of the self with the world” (Szostak 47). By providing a space where opinions and ideas are shared that is created by users themselves, it allows both men and women to participate in this collective process of dialogues via videos and comments.
YouTube has a great role in popularising stand-up comedy in India (Paul). In exploring the potential of YouTube channels that host stand-up comedy as spaces of engagement for political satire, Paul (125) argues, that “the popularity of these channels comes at a time of declining credibility for traditional news media in India because of growing interference from corporate and government institutions” (Punathambekar). Russell argues that “stand-up comedy in particular has a tradition of ridiculing moral, social, and political conventions.” It has been found true in case of India, where scholars and critics have cited growing censorship in India as a major reason to have led citizens to pursue such alternate public spheres for social criticism (Paul 130).
Sahoo 15
In addition, Internet penetration (2016) is 35 percent and by 2020 India is estimated to overtake the U.S. in terms of the absolute number of online users (PTI, 2016) implying a steady increase in the audience for the sketches posted on YouTube. Internet presence of the channels hosting comedy content presented through stand-up is, therefore, an important area of study to understand contemporary cultures of political participation.
While, not only has English stand-up comedy become popular, Hindi and bilingual stand-up comedy sketches have found their voice too. It is also important to note that regional stand-up comedy is gradually getting popularised at present (Shah). For the purpose of the thesis, we however focus on English Stand-up comedy performances in user created or shared videos which have not been systematically studied till now.
1.2.8 Gender Differences in Stand-up in India on YouTube
However, observations and data show that the experience of male and female
YouTubers has been quite different (Szostak 47). She asserted that “according to the top one hundred most subscribed channels on YouTube, only six channels feature a female content creator” (Szostak 47). There is no data yet available on the Indian stand-up comedians on
YouTube. Szostak in her research paper argues that “content written and produced by male
YouTubers is “default” content that can be enjoyed by everyone regardless of their gender, in contrast to the ones created by female YouTubers which are put under the content category
“other” (47-48). This exclusivity and distinguishing feature might lead to the women users feeling a sense of alienation and exclusion. This situates the differential nature of participation, experience, and access to online spaces for female individuals.
Sahoo 16
According to the top one hundred most subscribed channels on YouTube, only six channels feature a female content creator (Szostak 47). There is no data yet available on the
Indian stand-up comedians on YouTube. For the purpose of the thesis, however, the focus is on English Stand-up comedy performances in user created or shared videos which have not been systematically studied till now.
It is important to note the controversy surrounding Karthik Kumar’s Amazon special
“Blood Chutney” when twitteratis (twitter users) found a lot of the script sexist; Kumar on the other hand still took a stance saying it was pro-woman. “The ideal function of stand-up is punching up” says Ayushi Jagad. The moment Kumar, an Indian male brings women into his comedic routine; the whole point is negated then and there. This is well enunciated by Jagad
(2018) where she explains the technical and socio-political aspect of a joke: punching up and punching down are processes in which a person identifies his/ her position in a society.
Ideally, in comedy, a person is supposed to punch up, which is to say a joke about someone privileged than you are. Men either are punching laterally, or punching down, cracking jokes on women and other marginalised in a society (Green). It is of utmost importance to ask who you are laughing at, who comes out looking bad at the end of your joke. If the answer is someone who is less privileged than you are - be it caste, class, race, gender or sexuality - then your humour is derisive and needs to be called out (Rajendran). Kumar’s defence can also be questioned through Shifman’s argument of how sexist jokes emphasises that men and women have different features (2). In doing so, it indicates that there is a clear hierarchy positioning women as inferior to men. In this context, it is important to examine the content of the female comedians’ scripts, whether they are punching up or punching laterally for creating discourse.
Sahoo 17
The studies that are currently investigating stand-up comedy also take into consideration the relationship between performance and equity. Rebecca Krefting in her book makes an observation on how marginalised comedians play their stereotypical images in their early performances, given the potential threat of the masculine nature of the space. Molyneaux argues that “the greater visual representation of women on the internet, for example, is not necessarily a sign of progress for women, as greater representation could mean greater exclusion” (3). Szostak commenting upon this in the context of the female vloggers on
YouTube asserts that women are often considered as the objects of desire, that is, used as passive objects for the active gaze of their male watchers (49). This reinforces that the nature of interaction between the viewers and the comedians need to be evaluated to understand the marginalities, their nature, and dynamic in a performative space.
1.3 Research Questions, Objectives, and Methodology
Ideally, participant representation in any public sphere should be intersectional (queer, gender, class, colour, caste et. al) in nature. There are two aspects of experience however, one in terms of participation and second in terms of the nature of participation. This dissertation is a study of Indian female stand-up content on YouTube, specifically, expanding on the objective, to evaluate the participatory nature and the subversive and/or non-subversive performative affordance in the humour content of the routines produced by Indian female stand-up comedians.
Therefore, the objective that would underlie the thesis would be to understand the nature of participation of Indian female stand-up comedians through their YouTube participation. The research questions that the thesis will seek to understand are the following:
Sahoo 18
1. What is the nature of participation of female stand-up comedians in Youtube
in India?
2. Continuing the thread of inquiry, if indeed female stand-up comedians perform,
how do they perform their marginality on stage, that is, what is the nature of their
performance?
1.4 Methods
This thesis employed a mixed-methods approach. In trying to respond to the question, what is the nature of participation of female stand-up comedians in Youtube in India?, the researcher used the quantitative descriptive method, mainly focusing on percentage values to provide a general overview of the comedyscape in India. Quantitative descriptive method is used for representing responses in numbers that quantify the data as a testimony to the relation between two variables. The thesis has used one of the quantitative descriptive methods, the survey method, also known as survey descriptive method. It is a numerical representation of the responses in percentage, frequency distribution and some other statistical approaches
(Tochim). It was used to count the number of male and female stand-up comedians, the number of videos uploaded by them, average views, average likes and subscription of six female comedians and chosen top ten male comedians on YouTube, all of whom have their own YouTube profiles. Additionally, the question required a quantitative analysis of the audience response measured through the popularity which was operationally defined as the public displays of acknowledgement by the commentators on YouTube through their up-votes and subscriptions. To respond to the question, if indeed female stand-up comedians perform, how do they perform their marginality on stage, that is what is the nature of their performance?, a qualitative analysis using Thematic and Critical Discourse Analysis was undertaken which facilitated the observation of the themes, content, nature and function of Sahoo 19
performance, style of comedy performed by female stand up comedians. Discourse Analysis was understood as a “detailed analysis of language-in-use, whether it took the form of speech or text (In practice, it was almost always text which was analysed, since speech is usually transcribed from audio-or video-recordings for analysis” (Hammersley 2). Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA) has been used as a specific form of discourse analysis wherein the analysis uncovers how the “social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take an explicit position, and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social inequality” (Van Dijk 352).
Consent was acquired through an e-mail that was sent to each one of the stand-up comedians for analysing the text of their comedic routines. The profiles of the select stand- comedians selected for the study are presented below:
1) Aditi Mittal, considered to be amongst the first few female stand-up comedians in its current format, is thirty years of age. Apart from being a stand-up, she is a writer and an actor. Talking about her genre of humour she has been quoted saying “my brand of humour is personal, it is observational (Banerjee).
2) Radhika Vaz is a forty-four years old, Indian born, New York based improve artist and stand-up comedian. She is a columnist for the ‘The Times of India’. She identifies herself as a feminist while calling herself barely a woman in one of her interviews. She quotes from the personal experiences that make most of her comedy self-reflexive or self-satirising.
3) Neeti Palta, in her late thirties, is a screenplay writer.
4) Primlani is the first homosexual female comedian in India. As an environmentalist and social worker, she has extensively used the platform of comedy in spreading her ideas on human rights, environment, somatic therapy and other social stigmas. Sahoo 20
The government of India has also honored her with ‘Nari Sharkti award’ (Saxena).
1.5 Theoretical Framework
Scholars in Gender Studies have argued how creation and comprehension of humour are influenced by gender roles (Decker and Rotondo; Robinson and Smith-Lovin; Crawford;
Caviness). They have studied not only how the meaning of gender has undergone revision in the past years due to the ever-changing culture in any given society (Crawford), but also how gender in humour has offered new observations about societal expectations, accessibility, and discrimination on the basis of gender roles ascribed to individuals. Studies have noted “the deep embedding of gender inequality in traditional and normative practices of humour”
(Decker and Rotondo 453; Robinson and Smith-Lovin; Crawford; Caviness 52). Bociurkiw observed that in cultural stereotypes, if women are considered as “generators of comedy”, that
“seemingly set them at odds with traditional notions of feminity”. In taking the argument forward, it has also been asserted that there is an observed cultural preference for watching women suffer, wherein the society prefers “women’s tears over laughter” reflecting a gendered perception of humour (Bociurkiw 179). These stereotypes exist and are often causes of marginalisation of women, individuals from financially vulnerable sections and caste and otherwise in varied situations. On preliminary observation, it was found that female stand-up comedians use distinct strategies for constructing humour. They often use aggressive language, satire, and parody, and provide particularly significant examples of autobiographical performance, that is, the content of their performances are sourced from their own life experiences. Performance studies have asserted that for female bodies to be prominently featured in comedy, they have generally been required to stand outside normative notions of female beauty (Stott 79). Kathleen Rowe has enumerated the ways in which women have been depicted in comedies and called them ‘unruly women.’ Sahoo 21
Keeping these indicators as underlying premises for our thesis, the work largely draws upon the frameworks of West and Zimmerman for understanding how individuals engage in
“doing gender”, and how that creates a “public sphere” (Habermas), that attempts to respond to the questions of the apparent lack of intersectionality in these spheres. West and
Zimmerman’s argument rests on the premise that gender is not fixed and enduring, it is not intrinsic, is not restricted to socialisation in early lives. Gender instead is understood as a continuous process that is created during interactions and is seen as an “institutionalized achievement” (Rothchild). They extended the theoretical premise drawn by Butler wherein she had argued that gender does not exist prior to the gender expressions; they are rather constituted by these performances. West and Zimmerman, however, argued that the individuals “doing gender” are aware of the expectations and when they are conforming or failing to conform to gender expectations. Within Gender Studies, the categories of sex and the categories of gender have been analysed in detail. Often, in social contexts, the sex categories assigned by the society on an individual on the basis of rather subjective imprinting or selection of characteristic traits such as chromosomal typing, genitalia overshadows the individual’s sex as the characteristic traits so selected remain largely hidden. “Doing gender” strategically reconstitutes the responses and expectations through the activities of the individuals, from within the restricting socially assigned sex categories. Disagreeing to the understanding that gender is a role and the result, they argued that gender is neither “optional nor intermittent”, it is perpetual and constant. Biological essentialism, that validates the conflation of sex, the categories and gender and gender binaries, therefore is challenged by a historical, psychoanalytical, and anthropological framework of social institutionalisation that explains women’s domesticity as a socially institutionalised practice and not an intrinsic quality (Rubin 204-210; West and Zimmerman). Furthermore, they also provided an analytical framework that explained how individuals are aware of the gender roles and the associated behaviours that are seen as conforming or resisting the ascriptions and expectations Sahoo 22
of sex categories and gender roles as they have imbibed and internalised them, and therefore, can identify where they are conforming and where they are not. Individuals are identified, marked and are asked to account for their behaviours and predispositions as “developmental failures” when they fail to adhere to these cultural laws that maintain and reinforce these roles. While they have been critiqued for their skepticism and lack of providing ways to understand how through behaviours these ascriptions are resisted and disrupted, Deutsch extended their understanding of “doing gender” with “undoing gender” wherein the former adherence to normative cultural expectations that promote inequality can be addresses and in the latter, resistance and mitigations to such ascriptions can be provided (106-127). This thesis takes both “doing” and “undoing gender” as the primary theoretical framework for the study.
Habermas defined ‘public sphere’ as any committee of individuals that do not have any concretised space in the real world (Habermas). The public sphere is "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state”
(Habermas). Habermas in his paper The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
(1962), defined the bourgeois public sphere and the shifts it has undergone due to the social and cultural changes in western society. He explained how public opinion or consensus was created through the involvement of the private individuals in political debate in undefined spaces. He asserted that “the bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public”, often extending the understanding that public sphere is formed through debates that include rational deliberation, which however in the mediatised world, have extended to the spheres of mass consumption (Habermas). Social conditions such as education, class, and position at the hegemonic level define an individual’s identity in the private realm. The aforementioned parameters not only determine but allow the people to have access to the public sphere as private individuals and engage in dialogue or Sahoo 23
question the public authority.
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Habermas proposed to examine the influence of public opinion in the policy making by the public authority.
Habermas (1962) explored how public spheres could become the site of evaluation for public consensus with the authority, remarking how the socio-political situations impacted the shifts in the public sphere in any given society. Soules argued that “for Habermas, the success of the public sphere was founded on rational-critical discourse-everyone is an equal participant and the supreme communication skill is the power of argument.” Soules further argues that
Habermas' analysis has an “oral bias: he believes the public sphere can be most effectively constituted and maintained through dialogue, acts of speech, through debate and discussion” and that public debate by various associations, organisations, religious or otherwise, citizen movements, trade unions can resist the hegemony of the authority. However, feminist scholars have critiqued the idea stating that “the public sphere is no less permeated by power relations than society as a wholes” (Calhoun 34, 35), wherein the gender binaries, marginalities of women, and the masculine nature of public participation observed in other forms of social organisations, including comedy spheres are reinstated in the public sphere as well. Soules had presented few parameters of the success of public sphere which includes the universality of access, the celebration of autonomy and hierarchy, nature of commitment and participation and the acknowledgement of the state. However, by its very nature, public sphere had ignored several social categories. In response to a critique of non-inclusivity of public sphere,
Habermas in his essay Further Reflections on the Public Sphere, considered the potential for the emergence of popular or plebian public sphere inclusive of the marginalised across class, gender, and education. He expressed how he had been inattentive towards "the significance of oppositional and non-bourgeois public spheres", indicating the possibility that the bourgeois Sahoo 24
public sphere does converge with a plebian one (Habermas). Habermas’ framework of how private individuals through mediatised performances can engage in rational critical discourse and thereby subvert the hegemonic power positions become critical in the thesis’s analysis of what role do these female stand-up comedians’ routines have. Furthermore, for the purposes of the dissertation, the parameters of the definition of the public sphere motivate the probing of the equity in representation in stand-up comedy spaces which are being argued as emerging alternate spaces for registering dissent, political commentary and critique, and new forms of political participation analogous to public sphere.
The thesis understands intersectionality as presented by Crenshaw, who introduced the term intersectionality into women studies which recognised race and class along with gender as interconnected areas of subordination (139-167). In the recent years, intersectionality as a framework has been applied to various socio-political movements or setting. However, it has encountered problems that acknowledge intrasectional which considers multiple grounds of discrimination apart from gender, race and class (McCall 1773). McCall explained how an area of discrimination is based on the socio-demographic profile of an individual that is not independent of socio-cultural biases (1780). In simple terms, intersectionality, therefore, is the recognition of discriminatory social markers in any given socio-cultural/political setting held plausible for threatening an individual’s identity or making him/her vulnerable to marginalisation. For example, the overlapping social markers for discriminating a Dalit female comedian in India will include, gender, caste, class and profession.
1.6 Locating the Significance of the Study
While previous studies have looked at the intersection of political satire, public sphere, rhetoric, and humour in stand-up, according to the best our knowledge, no systematic study Sahoo 25
has engaged with the question of the intersection of public sphere, female participation and humour in the performances of female stand-up comedians in India through the analysis of their presence on YouTube. This is important as Paul has argued that it is in spaces like
YouTube, therefore, that we might look to see this transformation from traditional media institutions to emerging forms of cultural production unfold, where the “channel” structures of existing media adapt and evolve to serve new media logics (125). This is a question not only of industry, but also of politics, as this transformation enables cultural genres such as comedy to support public dialogue, deliberation, and debate in ways that the channels of previous media institutions could not. Moreover, one important question being asked in the thesis is to explore how public spheres are constructed and negotiated by female stand-up comedians on
YouTube in India. Reiterating a point made earlier that our deeply held beliefs influence our sense of humour (Hale) and Paul’s argument that “the phenomenal prospects of the Internet to expand the public sphere, and specifically the accompanying potential of YouTube channels to foster democratic dialogue and political critique, remain little explored in academic literature”, this thesis locates its relevance within a concern for not only in terms of the function of humour in the society, but also its representation and accessibility for female participants. This thesis specifically aims to ask whether the democratisation and political critique that stand-up comedy prides on possessing has been accessible to all members across gender. As the focus is on select female participants across gender it is understood in the following sentence, gender is an overarching term for a set of complex interrelations of sex, social positions, and ideological constructions of performance (Butler 1993; West and
Zimmerman 1987).
Sahoo 26
Work Cited
Agarwal, Sonali. “Stand-Up Comedy in India: Mastering the Art.” Media India Group, 16 Oct
2017, https://mediaindia.eu/lifestyle/stand-up-comedy-in-india/.
Almaula, Mirali. The Evolution of Mediatized Stand-Up Comedy: Investigating Para-
Performances on Television, Film, and YouTube. 2015. University of Guelph, Ph.D
dissertation. https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlui/ bitstream/handle/10214/
9248/Almaula_Mirali_201509_Phd.pdf?sequence=3.
Banerjee, Olina. “Laugh Out Loud.” India Today, 18 July 2011,
https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/supplement/story/20110718-laugh-out-loud-
746777-2011-07-07.
Billig, Michael. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. Sage, 2005.
Blyth, Regional Horace. Humour in English literature: A chronological anthology.
Folcroft Library Editions, 1959.
Bociurkiw, Marusya. "It's Not About the Sex: Racialization and Queerness in" Ellen" andThe
Ellen De Generes Show." Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 24, no.2, 2005, pp.176- 181,
cws.journals.yorku.ca.
Burgess, Jean, and Green B Joshua. “Agency and Controversy in the YouTube Community.”
In IR 9.0: Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place - Association of Internet
Researchers (AoIR) conference, 2008, https://eprints.qut.edu.au/15383/1/15383.pdf.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. NewYork and London
Routledge, 1993.
Calhoun, Craig J., ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. MIT press, 1992.
Cameron, Deborah. “The Language-Gender Interface: Challenging Co-Optation.” In Bergvall,
V.L., Bing, J.M., Freed, A.F. (Eds.), Rethinking Language and Gender Research:
Theory and Practice, New York, 1996, pp. 31–53. Sahoo 27
Caviness, Courtney M. “Oh, I'd do All the Sex Jokes": Stand-Up Comics and the Negotiation
of Humor, Gender, and Accountability. 2013. Texas State University, Master of Arts
thesis. https://digital.library.txstate.edu/handle/10877/4703.
Chatterjee-Padmanabhan, M. Humour in Indian Writing in English: Three Novels Women
Writers: Namita Gokhale's Paro Dreams of Passion, Suniti Namjoshi's The
Conversations of Cow, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. 2002. University of
Wollogong, Master of Arts dissertation.
https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredi
r=1&article=3241&context=theses
Collinson, David L. "'Engineering Humour: Masculinity, Joking and Conflict in Shop-Floor
Relations." Organization Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 1988, pp. 181-199.
Crawford, Mary. "Gender and Humor in Social Context." Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 35, no.
9, 2003, pp.1413-1430.
Crenshaw, Kimberle. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist
Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." The
University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 140, 1989, pp. 139-167.
Cvetkovich, Ann, and Ann Pellegrini. "Public Sentiments." The Scholar and Feminist Online,
vol.2, no.1, 2003, pp. 1-19.
Decker, Wayne H., and Denise M. Rotondo. "Relationships Among Gender, Type of Humor,
and Perceived Leader Effectiveness." Journal of Managerial Issues, 2001, pp. 450-
465.
Deutsch, Francine M. "Undoing Gender." Gender & Society, vol.21, no.1, 2007, pp. 106- 127.
Davies, Christie. "Ethnic Jokes, Moral Values and Social Boundaries." British Journal
of Sociology, 1982, pp.383-403. Sahoo 28
Dundes, Alan.“Texture, Text, and Context.” Southern Folklore Quarterly, vol. 28, no.4, 1964,
pp.251-265.
Farb, Peter. "Speaking Seriously About Humor." The Massachusetts Review, vol. 22,
no.4,1981, pp. 760-776.
Gilbert, Joanne R. "Performing Marginality: Comedy, Identity, and Cultural Critique." Text
and Performance Quarterly, vol.17, no. 4, 1997, pp. 317-330.
Gilbert, Joanne R. Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique. Wayne
State University Press, 2004.
Green, Devin. “Punching Down” in Comedy. 22 Aug 2017,
https://medium.com/@devinpg/punching-down-in-comedybb122bc135dd
Gupta, Nidhi. “Dropping the Mic.” The Sunday Guardian, 22 Feb 2014, http://www.sunday-
guardian.com/artbeat/dropping-the-mic.
Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence,
MIT press, 1964.
Habermas, Jürgen. Further Reflections on the Public Sphere. Habermas and the Public
Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 1992.
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i218/s15/calhoun_BPSIntroduction.pdf
Hale, Adrian. "Gender Bender Agenda: Dame Edna, k.d. lang and Ivana Trump." European
Journal of Humour Research, vol, 4, no. 3, 2016, pp. 1-23.
Hay, Jennifer. "Functions of Humor in the Conversations of Men and Women." Journal of
Pragmatics, vol. 32, no.6, 2000, pp. 709-742.
Hertz, Emily. Alternative Comedy: Women in Stand-Up. 2010. Central Europian University,
Master of Arts Thesis, www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/hertz_emily.pdf.
Hitchens, Christopher. “Why Women Aren't Funny.” Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, 29 Aug. Sahoo 29
2017,www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/hitchens200701.
Hooper, Jade, Donald Sharpe, and Sam George Bradley Roberts. "Are Men Funnier than
Women, or Do We Just Think They Are?" Translational Issues in Psychological Science, vol.
2, no. 1, 2016, pp. 54-62.
Kessler, Suzanne J., and Wendy McKenna. Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach.
University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Keisalo, Marianna. "The Invention of Gender in Stand-Up Comedy: Transgression and
Digression." Social Anthropology, 2018.
Kotthoff, Helga. “Gender and Humor: The State of the Art.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 38,
no. 1, 2006, pp. 4–25., doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.06.003.
Krefting, Rebecca. All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents. The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2014.
Lakoff, Robin. "Language and Woman's Place." Language in Society, vol. 2, no. 1, 1973, pp.
45-79.
Linstead, Steve. "Jokers wild: The Importance of Humour in the Maintenance of
Organizational Culture." The Sociological Review, vol.33, no. 4, 1985, pp.741-767.
Lockyer, Sharon. "From Toothpick Legs to Dropping Vaginas: Gender and Sexuality in Joan
Rivers' Stand-Up Comedy Performance." Comedy Studies, vol. no. 2, 2011, pp. 113-
123.
Machan, Dyan. "What's Black and Blue and Floats in the Monongahela River." Forbes, 140,
1987, pp. 216-220.
Mandhani, Nikita. “How Amazon and Netflix Are Changing.” BBC News. 24 June 2018.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44497002
Maheshwari, Laya. “India’s New Face of Comedians Laugh in the Face of Taboos.” The
Guardian, 9 Sept. 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/sep/19/india- comedians-
standups-varun-grover-aditi-mittal. Sahoo 30
Marlowe, Leigh. A Sense of Humour. In: R.K. Unger, ed., Representations: Social
constructions of gender, Baywood Publishing Company, 1989, pp. 145-154.
Martineau, William H. "A Model of the Social Functions of Humor." The Pychology of
Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical issues, edited by Jeffery H. Goldstein
and Paul E. McGhee, Academic Press, 1972, pp. 101-125.
Mauldin, R. Kirk. "The Role of Humor in the Social Construction of Gendered and Ethnic
Stereotypes." Race, Gender & Class, 2002, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 76-95.
McCall, Leslie. "The Complexity of Intersectionality." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society, 2005, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 65-92.
Meyer, John C. “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in
Communication.” Communication Theory, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 17 Mar. 2006.
Mickes, Laura, et al. "Who’s funny: Gender Stereotypes, Humor Production, and Memory
Bias." Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol.19, no.1, 2012, pp. 108-112.
Mintz, Lawrence E. “Standup Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation.” American
Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 1, 1985, pp. 71-80.
Molyneaux, Heather, et al. "Exploring the Gender Divide on YouTube: An Analysis of the
Creation and Reception of Vlogs." American Communication Journal, vol. 10, no.2,
2008, pp.1-14.
Naidu, Jaywant. “Traditional Stand-up Comedy.” Deccan Chronicle, Deccan Chronicle, 9
Nov 2016, www.deccanchronicle.com/entertainment/theatre/091116/traditional-stand-
up-comedy.html.
Nesteroff, Kliph. The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American
Comedy. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2015.
Nijholt, Anton. "Incongruity Humor in Language and Beyond: from Bergson to Digitally
Enhanced Worlds." Fourteenth International Symposium on Comunicación Social:
Retos Y Perspectivas (Invited),vol. 2, 2015. Sahoo 31
Paul, Subin. "A New Public Sphere? English-language Stand-Up Comedy in
India." Contemporary South Asia , vol. 25, no.2, 2017, pp.121-135.
Pinto, Bruno, David Marçal, and Sofia G. Vaz. "Communicating through Humour: A project
of Stand-Up Comedy About Science." Public Understanding of Science, vol. 24, no. 7,
2015, pp. 776-793.
Rajendran, Sowmya. “Kartik Kumar’s Blook Chutney: Comedy It May Be, Feminist It Is
Not.” The news minute, 14 June 2018, Rubin, Gayle. "The Traffic in Women:
Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex." Towards an Anthropology of Woman,
1974, pp.157-210. https://genderstudiesgroupdu.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/the-
rraffic-in women.pdf.
Robinson, Dawn T., and Lynn Smith-Lovin. "Getting a Laugh: Gender, Status, and Humor in
Task Discussions." Social Forces, vol. 80, no.1, 2001, pp. 123-158.
Ross, Alison. The Language of Humour. Routledge, 2005.
Rothchild, Jennifer. "Processes of Gendering and the Institutionalization of Gender in the
Family and School: A Case Study from Nepal." Gender Realities: Local and Global.
Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2005, pp. 265-296.
Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. University of
Texas Press, 2011.
Saxena, Shambhavi. “Starting a Dialogue on Gender and Sexuality is No Joke! Comedian
Vasu Primlani Tells All.” Youth Ki Awaaz, 2015,
https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/11/vasu-primlani-stand-up-comic-interview/.
Shah, Manali. “Why An Increasing Number of Stand-Up Comedians Are Choosing to Talk in
Hindi.” 23 March 2017, Hindustan Times, https://m.hindustantimes.com/art-
andculture/why-an-increasing-number-of-stand-up-comedians-are-choosing-to-talk-
inhindi/story-ZO7BcDoeJvG1jsqgNdPNM_amp.html
Shifman, Limor. "Humor in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Continuity and Change in Sahoo 32
Internet- Based Comic Texts." International Journal of Communication, vol.1, no.1,
2007, 23.
Storla, Kari. “Laughing About the Unspeakable: Using Humor as a Medium to Talk about
Rape.” Civic Paths, University of South California, 25 Mar 2014,
civicpaths.uscannenberg.org/2014/03/laughing-about-the-unspeakable/.
Stott, Andrew. Comedy. Routledge, 2004.
Sundaram, Sushmita. “How Sketch Comics Like Jaspal Bhatti Laid the Foundation for
Comedy Scene in India.” Scroll.in, 1 Nov 2018,
https://scroll.in/magazine/899206/how-sketch-comics-like-jaspal-bhatti-laid-the-
foundation-for-indias-comedy-scene.
Szostak, Natasha. "Girls on YouTube: Gender Politics and the Potential for a Public
Sphere." The McMaster Journal of Communication, vol. 8, 2013, pp. 46-58.
Tochim, William M.K. “Descriptive Statistics.” Web Centre for Social Research Methods.
https://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/statdesc.htm
Tosun, Sümeyra, Nafiseh Faghihi, and Jyotsna Vaid. "Is an Ideal Sense of Humor Gendered?
A Cross-National Study." Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, 2018, 199.
West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. "Doing Gender." Gender & Society, vol. 1, no.2,
1987, pp. 125-151.
Williams, Michele, and Kyle J. Emich. "The Experience of Failed Humor: Implications for
Interpersonal Affect Regulation." Journal of Business and Psychology, vol. 29, no.4,
2014, pp. 651-668.
Zinoman, Jason. “Female Comedians Breaking the Taste Taboo Ceiling.” The New York
Times, 15 Sept, 2011.
Zevallos, Zuleka. “Sociology of Gender.” The Other Sociologist.
https://othersociologist.com/sociology-of-gender/
Chapter 2
Am I Not Funny? An Analysis of Gender
Representation of Women in Stand-Up Comedy Space
on YouTube
2.1 Introduction
This dissertation studied Indian female stand-up comedy on YouTube to evaluate the features, participatory nature of the genre, and the implications of performing the genre on
YouTube, a popular social networking site that allows users to create and upload content. In this chapter, the researcher presents the participatory nature of Indian female stand-up comedians on YouTube, and the thematic difference in the content of male and female stand-up routines respectively. First, an attempt is made to describe the genre, its form, variables important for the study and report the observations of a survey on the presence of the female stand-up comedians on YouTube. It also documents how audience
(commentator) responds to them, the nature of the interactions between the performers and the audience and the content of the female stand-up performers’ routines.
Sahoo 34
2.1.1 Stand-up Comedy: Definition and Variables
The Form
From 1930 onwards, this form of comedy has been recognised as part of popular culture. Specifically, designated spaces for stand-up comedy started cropping up from 1960 onwards (Gilbert 52). Often, performed as part of large shows, stand-up comedy later received dedicated spaces, such as clubs for the performances (Gilbert 52). The necessary and sufficient elements of a stand-up comedy performance are the presence of the performer, the microphone, and an audience. Digitisation has allowed us to revisit live and recorded performances on sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and so forth. Stand-up comedy shows are frequently uploaded on YouTube videos a part of individual channels or as part of channels hosted by groups or media houses.
The Audience
While in live shows, the audience is present before the performers, in YouTube videos, there are two sets of audience. This is primarily because the stand-up shows are performed for a live audience and the recordings of the same are uploaded on YouTube in their own channels or channels owned by groups, either owned by a private individual or a media house. Most performers who are visible on the live stand-up comedy spaces are also represented on YouTube through these means. Therefore, the second set of audience is the
YouTube user who participates by viewing, evaluating via upvotes or downvotes, subscriptions and comments. In live performances, the audience and the performer are in close proximity and the audience feedback is immediate. In YouTube videos, the comments can continue across time and space coming from people and locations who are not in close proximity of the show locations. Additionally, while in live feedback, the audience can be identified and responded to, on YouTube, the comments can come from accounts whose validity and accountability is often hard to discern. It is important to note that there Sahoo 35
has been no study on male or female comedians’ stand-up comedy routines in India according to the best of the scholar’s knowledge. This thesis attempted to address the important concern pertaining to how audience members respond to female comedians’ routines to understand the acknowledgement and/or resistance to the female comic’s participation in such a space.
The Routine
The performance is often called as a routine (Hertz 13). It could be made of jokes, personal narratives often devoid of a specific punchline. The function of that has been detailed in the latter part of the chapter. Though not entirely scripted, the routine has significant portions that are written before, and some portions of it are improvised during the performance as a necessary step taken by the performer in reaction to the audience response prior to it. The latter makes the performance not strictly scripted and therefore different from scripted television shows. Another important element of these performances is that the stand-up comedy performer usually writes h/er own script. One cannot ignore the impact of promotions and other economic considerations of the shows being organised similar to such considerations in films and television shows which negotiate the nature of the audience, grandeur of release and promotions, and more importantly the cast line (Hertz
13). One cannot also ignore the fact that these clubs are business ventures. Both the host and the performer are connected to the form by economic considerations.
YouTube
In the last few years, the participation of performers in clubs, bars, other informal entertainment spaces and YouTube have expanded exponentially (Raut). YouTube is typically understood as a place where opinions and ideas that are created by users themselves are shared; it allows both men and women to participate in this collective process of dialogues via videos and comments. However previous studies have shown that Sahoo 36
the experience of male and female YouTubers has been quite different (Szostak 46-58).
According to the top one hundred most subscribed channels on YouTube, only six channels feature a female content creator (Szostak 47). There has been no systematic study of enumerating the participation of male and female stand-up comedians’ presence on
YouTube.
Keeping these variables into consideration, the thesis aimed to study the nature of participation of female stand-up comedians in YouTube on India. Specifically, by a comprehensive survey of YouTube channels and archived shows, an attempt was made to provide information regarding the participants, their nature of participation and audience feedback, and an overview of the thematic diversity of routines.
2.2 Nature of Participation on YouTube
For Habermas, “the success of the public sphere was founded on rational-critical discourse-everyone is an equal participant and the supreme communication skill is the power of argument” (Soules). This provided the first aspect of investigation for the thesis since feminist scholars had critiqued the idea by stating that analogous to social marginalities of women in other aspects of social lives, the masculine nature of public participation in stand-up comedy, conceived as an emerging public sphere had not been taken full cognisance of. Soules had also provided few parameters of the success of public sphere which included the universality of access and the celebration of autonomy and hierarchy for a successful alternative public sphere among others (“Jurgen Habermas and the public sphere”). A survey of the number of male and female comedians had to be completed to understand the nature of access and participation of the performers across gender in creating a public sphere through stand-up comedy performances via YouTube. Sahoo 37
The built-in search engine available on YouTube (YT) website was utilised to calculate the total number of channels owned by Indian stand-up comedians. As YT generates an automated result in the section titled Related Channels on any opened profile, it helped in segregating the names of all the comedians in alphabetical order for easy documentation of the same. This was furthered by profiling of all the stand-ups to investigate the nature of the stand-up space on YouTube.
Both male and female performers upload their videos on their own channels as well as in channels owned by groups and other media houses. For the purposes of the dissertation, the focus was primarily on videos uploaded by the performers themselves in their own channels as that reflected ownership and accountability of the performers themselves. The survey presented below in Table 1, 2 and 3 provide certain significant insights regarding their participation, measured using the number of clips uploaded by individual performers, the average views generated for each video uploaded by them, the average time length of the video, the average upvotes, the videos received from the YouTube audience, and subscribers for the channels owned by individual female performers below.
Table 1: Number of clips, average views, the average time of the video, average upvotes, and subscribers for channels owned by individual female performers. Note: This tabular format was last updated in the month of February 2018.
Name of the No. of clips Average Average Average Subscribers channel views time upvotes generated Radhika Vaz 12 57,346 2:3 406 9,990 comedy NeetiPalta 9 3,56,583 3:06 3,766 36,559 (6 videos) Aditi Mittal 7 14,20,971 3:26 12,545 199,137 Sahoo 38
Vasu Primlani 8 53,755 3:06 48, 075 6,111 Filmy Chokri 5 9,631,13 4:13 3768 42,113 Punya Arora 5 18,580 1:33 183 1,880
In total, there were only 6 female stand-up comedians who owned their channels and uploaded their own video and there were only 46 videos uploaded by female stand-up comedians in their own channels. The analysis presented covers all their channels. Each of the channels that was surveyed below was owned by the female stand-up comedians. It is to be noted that male performers outnumber the female performers in the ownership, subscriptions, and other dimensions. Hence, only the top 10 male stand-up comedy performers (based on reports and media perception and subscriptions) were included in the analysis.
In total (sum of the number of individual videos), 46 videos had generated on an average 2, 854,864 (approx.) views. These values are cumulative and do not reflect individual counts. The upper limit of the views was 14, 20, and 971. The range of subscription of these channels was between 1880 and 199,137. The range of upvotes of these channels was between 183 and 48,075. The clips on an average were generally between 1:33 and 4:13 minutes long.
Table 2: Number of clips, average views, the average time of the video, average upvotes, and subscribers for channels owned by individual male performers. Note: This tabular format was last updated in the month of February 2018.
Sahoo 39
Name of the No. of clips Average Average Average Subscribers channel views time upvotes generated Abhishek 3 96, 61, 022 5:11 1,43,333 5, 24,125 Upamanyu Atul Khatri 5 1, 30, 1560 5:41 29,520 1, 34,224 Abhijeet 21 1,79,67,533 4:39 8,267 1, 20,623 Ganguli Abish 9 1171710 2:34 9,833 646,724 Mathew Biswa Kalyan 10 22796521 4:12 35,300 429,016 Rath Kanan Gill 4 1739798 3:30 40,0000 619,376 Kenny 13 2908604 4:13 3,9,003 1,239,553 Sebastian Zakir Khan 6 3293206 2:3 35,716 2,096,303 Varun Grover 1 4855278 1:43 101000 78,276 Sorabh Pant 13 605769 1:28 92307 268265
In this data, the top 10 male performers were examined. In total, 85 videos had generated on an average 65, 755, 808 (approx.) views. These values are cumulative and do not reflect individual counts. The upper limit of the views was 2, 27, 96, 521. The range of subscription of these channels was between 78, 276 and 2, 096, 303. The range of upvotes of these channels was between 8267 and 400000. The clips on an average are generally between 1:28 and 5:11 minutes long. A comparative report of the male and female stand-up comedy performances as evidenced through their YouTube participation is presented below.
Table 3: Comparative account of the number of clips, range of upper limit of views, range of upvotes and subscribers for channels owned by individual male (Top 10) and female performers. Note: This tabular format was last updated in the month of February
2018. Sahoo 40
Gender No. of Upper limit of Range of up Subscribers clips (Top views votes 10) generated Male 85 65755808 8267- 78276- 400000 2096303 Female 46 1420971 183-48075 1880- 199137
A significant disparity was noted in the views, upvotes and comments between the male and female comedians’ channels. The channel with least number of subscribers amongst the male comedians (78276) was significantly more than (approx.) the channel that had the highest number of subscribers amongst the female comedians (1880). This provided us with an understanding of the differential participation of male and female stand-up comedians, in terms of presence on YouTube. The researcher extended the investigation with a detailed analysis of the possible reasons for this differential participation.
Audience
During stand-up comedy performances the performer assumes the power. However, the audience is not rendered powerless either in live shows or on YouTube. In live shows, laughter provides a rubric to assess whether the audience acknowledges, accepts, understands, and agrees to the shared world view which leads to laughter. In YouTube viewing, the audience interacts post-act, whicsh is after the show, not immediately, often receiving comments years after the video has been uploaded. While in live shows, there is a closure, the curtain remains folded in YouTube. Interestingly, the viewers on YouTube can see the audience reaction of the live performances in the archived recording as well, albeit not systematically but often.
Sahoo 41
While this provides an understanding that there is an uncontested power position adopted by the performers on stage, what is important to note is that, in live performances, hecklers, and in YouTube performances, commentators can adopt a disruptive position.
Traditionally, hecklers, who disrupt the relation between the audience and the performer through questions, comments and taglines, have been male (Hertz 15). However, the nature of the performance (in a bar or a club) determines the nature of interaction between the comic, the heckler, and the audience. In live performances in bar, aggressive hecklers often take the stage and control from the comic (Galifianakis, Comedians of comedy Episode 2).
In YouTube, the nature of interaction between the comic, the audience, and the audience- hecklers has not been studied in detail. The thesis assumed that this could provide an understanding of why there has been a differential participation of male and female performers on YouTube. This is based on the assumption that studies have reported how trolling on social networking sites have been a major cause of concern for female bloggers
(Mantilla 563). An attempt was made to profile the nature of interaction between the comic and the commentators on their own channels. The profiling included the dimensions of positive and negative comments. Positive and negative dimensions were operationalised as the following: any comment that included abuses, personal attacks on the basis of race, caste, gender, personal histories, sexual assault threats and comments that undermine the humour potential of the performer were included as negative comments. Any comments that included acknowledgement, appreciation (words in comments such as “good point”,
“nice video”, “hilarious”, “funny”) were included as positive comments. A representative image of the data received through random sampling of the profiling gave the following data as presented in Table 4.
Sahoo 42
The total number of comments mentioned below the YouTube video was counted.
This total number is cumulative and includes responses from the time the video was uploaded and had started receiving comments. The representative sample of profiling was however drawn from the comments received on each of the videos in the past one year and categorised under positive and negative based on the above mentioned parameters. The segregation of the data was done by choosing the ‘newest first’ option that allowed the comments to be organised according to the last received comments and manually comments were sifted according to the parameters for each the video.
Table 4: Profiling of comments section
Gender Name of the Title No of Positive Negative performer commen ts Female Radhika Vaz Why men and women 141 41 100 have separate toilets: Radhika Vaz: Stand Up Comedy Female Aditi Mittal The Story of 814 312 502 Madhumakkhi Stand-up comedy by Aditi Mittal
The analysis did not provide significant differences in the number of positive and negative comments that male and female comedians received for all videos, albeit in some videos, as mentioned before in Table 1, the differences were significant. This implies that male and female members received both positive and negative comments and often the number of positive and negative comments received by male and female comedians was comparable. However, a select case study of the comparative survey record of the male and female comedians is presented below that allows to probe deeper than the enumeration of positive and negative comments. Both videos had similar content but the male member had Sahoo 43
more positive comments than the female performer.
Table 5: Differences in positive and negative comments for individual performers who performed their routines that dealt with similar themes
Gender Channel name Title of the video Positive Negative comments comments Male Tongue in cheek Mumbai versus 46 13 Delhi - Stand Up Comedy by Rajneesh Kapoor (499) Female Vasu Primlani Delhi men Vs 21 51 Mumbai men
This reflects a general trend wherein the male performers often receive more positive feedback than female performers in spite of the content being quite similar.
However, a systematic quantitative study is required to show the significance of difference between the performers which further study on the same area could address. It should be noted that since several video owners had dismantled the comments sections, that is, the videos are not open to comments anymore; it posed serious difficulty in a comprehensive statistical analysis. Moreover, a statistical analysis that could measure standard deviation, significance and so forth could not be done as the comments for some videos were added from years which could only be enumerated by manual counting. Some comments that the videos have received are as responses to the primary comments as well, thereby making it difficult to differentiate between comments addressed to the video uploader/performer and the commentator to whom often comments would be directed. While in the survey, it could not be established that the number of comments were possibly responsible for the differential participation; the thesis examined the issue further using a qualitative thematic analysis of the comments received. Sahoo 44
The data derived in Table 2 was collected from videos received from two performers, Rajneesh and Primlini. Both Rajneesh and Primlani talk about violent men in
Delhi and how women are not safe there, Rajneesh however also talks about how even men can become targets of Delhi men’s violence. Both account for their comedic routines from their personal experience. Commentators have taken personal jibe at Primlani using abusive words such as “Ganduaurat” (stupid woman), “cheap”, “chapman chutiya” (the latter word is an abuse that has explicit derogatory sexual connotations). Commentators have concluded how she must have been cheated by one of the Delhi men, which must have led to a personal grudge against Delhi men. People called her “uncle”, “old frustrated woman”, “u r a farting asexual pimple” linking her physical attributes to her sexual orientation. One of the commentators even called her “she must be a communist+feminist...judging from her hair cut and cloths” connecting her gender performance (clothing + hairstyle through presentation) to her ideological and political positions. Primalani has been called “unfunny” in the comment section for not only choosing a topic that has been commonly used by male stand-up comedians but also for calling out Delhi men (the capital state for India which is often considered unsafe according to news reports owing to large scale violence against women) for the street assaults. Rajneesh, on the other hand, has talked about how women are not safe in Delhi in the beginning of his routine and then he shifted to ‘toxic masculinity’ for the rest of the routine. In the routine, he spoke about how men from other states have also become a target of “toxic masculinity”. One of the commentators did include comments such as “He is Gay.” Most other commentators called him “Best comedian”. Despite Rajneesh continuously complaining against a certain section of men who promote “toxic masculinity” which overlapped thematically with Primlani’s routine, commentators reacted differently towards them. For Rajneesh, comments reflected that the attribute of “toxic masculinity” is “funny” and not threatening, despite the fact that he mentioned repeatedly how he is scared, whereas for Primlani, a recurring feature of the Sahoo 45
negative comments were based on the commentators calling her out for her own prejudices against men. Hitchens’ argument concerning “biological and heteronormative” essentialism is at play here. While Primlani is abused for talking about harassment and complaining against it in her routine, Rajaneesh Kapoor is not taken seriously for his complaints. Hence, while Primlani is found to be “unfunny” when she is voicing out, Rajneesh is being laughed at when he shows his vulnerability as a “man” in front of other members (Hitchens).
The thematic analysis provided certain significant insights regarding the nature of comments received by the performers. It was found that in the comment section not only did people use abusive words for Radhika Vaz, an established female comedian but also undermined her abilities as a comedian. For instance, “Bc comedy nahi aati tho karti kyun hai” which translates to “BC if you do not know to do comedy, why do you do it?” (BC refers to the acronym of a Hindi derogatory abuse that includes an explicit sexual connotation referring to the individual as sister-fucker). This comment simultaneously undermines her comic abilities and makes an inappropriate sexual derogatory comment.
This could be read as reiterating what Hitchens’ (2007) argument was about, that funniness in women is a secondary characteristic, reproduction being primary. These comments reinstate the arguments that women are not supposed creators of comedy rather they should be at the receiving end and if they indeed produce comedy, they risk challenging the heteronormative power positions concerning male authority (Hertz 8).
Commentators used specific comments to undermine the female comic’s humour abilities, which was almost never the case for the male stand-up comedians. The comments, such as “No one is laughing” “Insightful but not funny”, “When is the comedy on?”, “100% not funny” on Radhika Vaz’s routines undermined her comic abilities. An analysis of the Sahoo 46
commentators for Neeti Palta, another female stand-up comedian also provided similar data.
Commentators asserted that her jokes were “bekar jokes, bad” (useless jokes, bad),
“boring”, “she is not good at it, not at all”, “I was waiting for some comedy”, “wasn’t funny”, “was I supposed to laugh? Very predictable.”, and “Sad attempt…women just can’t do comedy well”, “very bad comedy”.
While these are shorter phrases, full narrative descriptions also spoke about various issues. “Fake laughter”, “the only thing funny that I found in this, was your face... I mean how can one look so hilariously weird.... and can somebody please tell me, ki yeh uncle hai ya aunty (is she an uncle or aunt)????” also provided evidence of the claim that the commentators routinely not only undermined her capabilities but they also commented on how she looks, asserting that she is “unladylike”, and exudes masculinity. The recurrent phrases used by the commentators were “Quit comedy, not funny, no humour, women are not funny”, and more explicit ones stating “is this a standup or a rant..either way not funny at all”, “women are not funny. Theory proved thanks to Radhika” and “Not phuking funny, don’t give up day jobs”.
While some of the above mentioned comments spoke about her specific comedic routine, there were several comments that expanded to include Radhika Vaz as an individual, such as, “Radhika Vaz how does it feel to be the worst comedian”, “Radhika
Vaz your comedy is feminism, its cancer :’) :’) :’) ”, “Is she a comedian??? She should take part in feminist March and spread her cancer using that agenda not in the name of comedy”, or “ek number ki Randi hai sale (she is a regular/pro sex worker)”. Comments on her
YouTube stand-up videos range from derogatory comments such as Randi (prostitute) (the use of the language has been marked as derogatory; the scholar does not assume a position Sahoo 47
where prostitution is considered as derogatory), chichori (lose character), and misandrist comments that included words like Feminazi, lesbian feminist apart from asking her to quit comedy by undermining her potential as a comedian.
It is also important that several comments also speak about the incongruity of her as a creator of comedic routines not only referring to her alone but also including “women” as a general category offering solutions of alternative career or professional options. For example, a commentator remarked, “women are not funny. Theory proved thanks to
Radhika” and “Not phuking funny, don’t give up day jobs”. Hitchens in ‘Why Women
Aren’t funny’ argued that “humour is a trait valued and honed by men as a means of assisting them in their reproductive goals. In expressing a preference for women as passive auditors rather than active participants in the production of comedy, Hitchens replicates the prejudice that has seen women demoted to what Frances Gray has called the role of
‘handmaid of laughter, not its creator” (Stott 86).
If the social expectation is that women cannot create comedy, then Ayushi’s statement mentioned earlier could be seen as the critique of the expectation. Specifically, the expectation that while women can be laughed at and admired but when they create content they are not funny provides an understanding of the issues and challenges faced by female stand-up comedians when they tread the space. This further substantiated the position of female stand-up comics as marginalised. Not only is the expectation that the theory that women aren’t funny does play a role in creating social expectations but also the expectation that women should consider alternative job preferences, such as “other day jobs” made it perhaps evident why there are few women who write their own content. This is aggravated by the fact that women encountered abusive trolling, ranging from labeling, Sahoo 48
undermining, and trolling them for spreading the feminist rant aka “cancer”.
On similar lines, a thorough thematic analysis was carried out for Vaz’s other videos and it was found that most commentators found it offensive when she spoke about her experiences on a humour platform. Some even called the themes that dealt with women a
“feminist rant”. It is important for us to note that apart from commenting on the laughability of the routine, often these spaces become a space for abusive trolling. The commentators also illustrated another important dimension. They called her out on grounds of feminism, comparing the movement to a disease, cancer, possibly illustrating the frightening and seriousness of the disease. This analogy would be used later to position her as a feminist activist and her explicit statements about the need of the hour to take note of the contemporary concerns of feminist struggles as evidenced through her interviews.
Additionally, the comments also spoke of her as a randi (a prostitute/adult sex worker) on the grounds of her “feminist rant”.
Vaz was abused not only for her content but also for using “obscene language” in her comedic routine. For example, one of the comments received on her routine titled
Reasons to not have a baby was “Feminism has destroyed her...her moral standards are quite low...being a matured woman... cursing...thats bad” :’( :’( ” The comment denoted her as a feminist and offered their evaluation of what feminism is. They also commented on her language and morality.
One needs to understand what the topic of the comedic routine was. Vaz (“Reasons to not have a baby”) elaborated on how her friend and mother-in-law were the reasons she didn’t wish to have born a child. All of them included reasons that involved the society, Sahoo 49
biological clock, the husband, except the birth giver. Feminist movements have in the
Reagenian era offered their critiques of motherhood as being an essential component of defining a female role through several feminist scholars who have argued in defence of both mothers and non-mothers (Snitow 33). Vaz’s rebellion is against the patriarchal norms, albeit resonating the feminist struggles but it is also a reinstatement of her choice. She argued quite fervently in the routine why she doesn’t want to be a mother, because it is her choice. The latter self-assertive proclamation incidentally is the underlying premise and
USP of the routine and the very assertion that commentators questioned and resisted. This provides an understanding of how when comedic routines explicitly formulate the stereotypes of gender expectations and include an individual’s critique of gender norming, that not only challenges the norms but also risks upsetting the audience who resist the subversive act. From an act of acknowledgement of the comedic routine, the act quickly changes fervour and becomes a political subversive resistance that has to negotiate how
“doing gender” is and would be in a social context.
Laughter recedes and abuses and trolls substitute it. In this case, it could be argued that female comedians asserting their rights in a traditionally patriarchal, heteronormative power and authority driven space was seen as a challenge as well which the audience members sought to resist. While it cannot be conclusively proven that the names reveal the sexual identities of the commentators, the cursory analysis of who considered her routines as problematic reveals that more men than women (as understood from their names and their profile pictures) resisted her assertions. The researcher would like to indicate a methodological concern for audience studies on YouTube. Profile details and images are not authentic resources to conclusively state any information about an individual’s personal identity because there are cases of gender reversing accounts, wherein a male member can Sahoo 50
create an account as a woman and vice versa. Hence, the last observation needs to read as indicative.
On the other hand, Fernandes’ comedic routine titled feminism, was welcomed by the commentators. Comments such as “Any women would love to have a guy like u as a friend, boyfriend, husband, brother or a son.. Ur mother will be proud of u”. Not only was his choice of topic highly appreciated “you sir, are a mozart of ""intellectual comedy""Brilliant topics” but also his worth as a comedian was also acknowledged “An intelligent comedian with a great sense of humor. you go Daniel!”
This could be antithetical to the image of commentators who might be considered anti- feminist if one observes Vaz’s comment section, as audience who reinstate the norms of “doing gender” and resist subversion. However, further analysis reveals a distinct observation. Men speaking on behalf of what women want and moreover further essentialising what women want leads to the acknowledgement of the individual as being progressive wherein the movement recedes to the background. Articulations of women rights from men reinstate the patriarchal authorial voice. Women articulating their concerns challenge the authority at two levels: by speaking themselves, women upset the patriarchal norming of the space and by speaking for women, they challenge the authorial voice of the patriarch. Hertz (13) had argued that “If women’s use of humour already violates gender roles and threatens normative order, a woman on-stage making the traditionally male audience laugh would be dangerous to the masculine structure of stand-up”. It could be argued that it is not justifiable to compare two stand-ups just on the basis of their subject for the sensibilities of the content could differ. It could also be argued that the demographics of the audience would differ. However, audience members who view stand-up comedy also Sahoo 51
base their viewership depending on YouTube suggestions of related videos and therefore often have overlaps in the audience base. In addition, a comparative account of randomly sampled videos featuring similar content gave comparable results.
As a critical commentary to Fernandes’ routine, it should be noted that Fernandes in the aforementioned routine spoke more on what feminism is not rather than what feminism is. He iterated the term “feminazis”, a slang used for women hating men under the garb of being feminists. Then, he pushed his agenda to define what feminism is, or how should be looked at. It is ironic that Fernandes spoke about the loopholes of the movement in the present times than its principles and aims. Fernandes explained how women who are male haters proclaim themselves to be feminists. It is already a much speculated notion which is built on a misplaced understanding of feminism that both men and women have adopted.
Feminism, indeed, has been understood and represented in many diverse ways, formulated in different a manner across time and space, critiqued from multiple theoretical perspectives. It should suffice to say that analogous to various theoretical positions, feminism is not a monolithic enterprise. To abuse it online and otherwise, considering it as a monolith creates false propaganda and muddies the popular culture understanding of the concept. This is particularly important as stand-up comedians are not just presenting comedy but reflecting on perspectives critically to engage in the construction of an emergent public sphere. A performer, who presents the same uninformed content, garners up-votes but also challenges his/her accountability and the routine as a political participant.
This is not to argue that one cannot disagree with feminism but to offer it uncritically, could be argued as not making it subversive humour which they present it under the garb as.
This is illustrated in the analysis of his joke when not only Fernandes punched down (to make a mockery of individuals who have been structurally been marginalised in a society) Sahoo 52
in his routine, he also made sure that he becomes the torch bearer of the movement as evidenced in the following comment made for the video. The comment below shows how
Fernandes is, in fact, being taken seriously as he is called a “teacher” whereas Vaz is trolled and abused for similar content. The commentators argue, “Daniel is the only stand - up comedian who makes me search all the references he makes during his act. He is a teacher.”
Another significant aspect of the analysis was to understand how female comedians face abusive trolling. Consistently, in their negative comments, they are addressed using sexually explicit derogatory comments as mentioned above. Trolling can be defined as a conscious decision of an individual to spew hatred on the other person online using slangs, puns, irony, abusive language under the garb of humour to derogate them on the basis of their sex, race, class or in general upon a difference in opinion (Moreau).
These analyses provide us an understanding of how through commentators shifting the agenda not only is the chance for women to speak about their concerns is being denied but also the theme is replaced by what the commentators inscribe it to be. It becomes more of targeting an individual on her personal ideologies. Vaz has often spoken about feminist concerns in interviews off the comedyscape. The trolls online seem to target her for the same. It needs to be noted that Fernandes’ fan base is much higher than Vaz’s. People are more interested in Fernandes’ feminism than in Vaz’s. While it is acknowledged that
Fernandes cannot be a representative of all the male participants, neither can Vaz, this analysis could initiate a discussion concerning how in comedy it’s important to note
“who speaks for whom” and the nature of resistance female comedians face when they write themselves. Sahoo 53
Women’s writing, their articulations and performances have been marginalised
(Bielby and Bielby 248) or have been categorised as suitable for women only performances
(Wagg 73) in several entertainment industries. This premise was probed further to understand whether the differential participation, the fact that there is a significant difference in the male and female comedians on Youtube is due to the structural disadvantage or “glass ceiling” related to “who can speak for whom”. Articulations require equality of access and not exclusivity. However, in context to our data wherein 6 female stand-up comedians own their individual channels, whereas, male stand-up comedians own channels more than ten times their number, the difference is evident. In order to understand the nature of routine that is being created by female stand-up comedians, a survey was conducted on the performers trying to delineate from their sketches, routines and interviews, the nature of the scripts and who creates or writes the scripts.
The scholar found that most humour content that the men claimed to be feminist in nature were written and produced by them included just the female characters and not feminist concerns. In the stand-up front, for instance, Kartik, a stand-up who claimed his comedic routine to be feminist in nature received a lot of backlash on Twitter regarding his script which was found to be sexist. Ayushi Jagad, a stand-up and a critique pointed out that none of the scripts other than women only comedy sketches (performed by women concerning issues that concern women, not necessarily written by a woman scriptwriter) presented by All India Bakchod (a popular progressive group of performers who perform sketches, scripted and recorded performances and routines) could pass the Bechdel test
(Jagad and Natu). She explained further that the basic requirement is for the female to write the script. Moreover, the other requirements for a script to pass Bechdel test is to have two or more women in a sketch, talking about anything except men, which does not occur in the Sahoo 54
videos. The only videos that feature female in important roles are women only comedic sketches that revolve around women’s lives and the issues that they have to face. However,
AIB acknowledged this area of concern (Kanchwala) and had reacted positively showing their support to female content creators of professional stand-up comedy
(@allindiabackchod).
The select stand-up comedians that we have studied have their own channels and write their own scripts. Does this lead to any difference in the content produced or could they be playing a role in the negativity of the comments? In order to understand that, the content created by female performers in their routines become inevitably important. In order to do so, a thematic analysis was carried out. Thematic analysis is the process of identifying patterns or themes within qualitative data (Maguire and Delahunt).
The next section provides analyses of the four select comedians’ routines, Radhika
Vaz, NeetiPalta, Vasu Primlani and Aditi Mittal. The performers were selected using
“purposive sampling.” “Purposive sampling, also known as judgmental, selective or subjective sample, is a type of non-probability sampling technique. Non-probability sampling focuses on sampling techniques where the units that are investigated are based on the judgment of the researcher”(Purposive sampling). The table provided in Appendix 1 provides details about the thematic patterning of the content of the routines of male and female content performers in stand-up comedy.
The male comedians’ comedic routines included socio-political commentary on the state of affairs in the country, childhood, cars and automobile fetishes, marriage and women. The range was quite diverse. However, the most common amongst the recurrent Sahoo 55
themes were specifically connected to comparing men in metropolitan cities like Delhi and
Mumbai, discussing their bachelorhood, love life, failed relationships, a comparison between the middle class and upper middle class and so forth. The criticality observed in their routines included a challenge to capitalism, privatization, liberalization, fundamentalism and cultural stereotypes. The conspicuous absence of feminist concerns made the content quite different from most female comedians, who apart from raising issues pertaining to the latter category also included routines that touched upon the ideological and political critiques addressed by male comedians. Another common factor was to make fun of women using stereotypical qualities and generalizing privileged urban women who were not aware of the harsh realities of society. For example, Abhishek Upmanyu in his comedic routine titled Delhi, Mumbai and Rich people| Stand-up comedy by Abhishek Upmanyu said
“There was girl sitting next to me…meikya excuse me “are you from Bombay?”
Kehrahi (saying) “no, I am South Bombay” “Okay, okay” “How do you get to
Nasik?” Kehrahi simple (It’s so simple) “you get off at the airport and take a cab
till Nasik” “Ye kaisa solution hai (How is this a solution?), aisethomujhe New York
ka rastapatahai (Likewise I know the route to New York).”
There was a girl sitting next to me, I asked excuse me “are you from Bombay?” She said
“no, I am from South Bombay” “Okay Okay” “How do you get to Nasik?” She replied
“Simple, you get off at the airport and take a cab till Nasik” “How is this a solution?
Likewise, I know the route to New York.” (@Abhishek Upmanyu)
On the other hand, it was noticed how each female comedians’ portrayal of their womanhood was very different from the other. They were not talking about the same issues.
Their choices, lifestyle problems were very different from one another. The recurring Sahoo 56
thematic concerns throughout the comedic routines of female stand-ups were on politics of love, sexuality, current political decisions-satirical comedy sketches, female body, ageism, motherhood, marriage and agency. Their comedic routines were derived from their personal experiences pertaining to structural discriminations of women. Davis argued that often comedic portrayals perpetuate social stereotypes even in spite of hiding behind the assertion of “it’s just a joke”. Most male comedians fell back on essentialising womanhood. Female comedians too provided routines that magnified prejudices. The humour created by both male and female comedians fell within the spectrum of subversive and mainstream. It is also important to note that Ford and Ferguson (81) had challenged the necessary correlation between mainstream representation, prejudicial stereotypes and perpetuation of socially inscribed hegemonic gender roles and stated that instead of reinstating the latter, disparaging humour often provides a magnified view of the prejudices and explicitly present them to individuals who adhere to the prejudiced world view and increase the tolerance level for the discriminatory acts as presented through the stereotype content. They define disparaging humour as humour that (e.g.,racist or sexist humour) denigrates, belittles, or maligns an individual or social group (Janes and Olson 474-485; Zillman, 85-
105). Hence, the categorization of the implications of mainstream stereotypical representations cannot be provided by a simplistic analysis of a surface level observation of the content of the routine.
Therefore, it is imperative to study the scripted and narrated aspect of the content of the routines to examine where were the references drawn from also what their ending stances were. Meanwhile, also locate the consistencies in their ideologies both on and off performances, and study the recurring thematic commitment of the comedic performances.
In the next chapter, an attempt was made to analyse the subtler linguistic and performative Sahoo 57
aspects of female comedic scripts to understand how they negotiate gender in their routines, do they perpetuate “doing” or undoing gender” in their participation through their routines in the process of contributing to the emergent public sphere.
Sahoo 58
Work Cited
Bielby, Denise D., and William T. Bielby. "Women and Men in film: Gender Inequality among Writers in a Culture Industry." Gender & Society, vol. 10, no. 3, 1996, pp. 248-270.
Davis, Jeffery. Children's Television, 1947-1990: over 200 Series, Game and Variety Shows, Cartoons, Educational Programs, and Specials. McFarland & Company Incorporated Publication, 1995.
Fernandes, Daniel. “Feminism- Daniel Fernandes Stand-Up Comedy.” YouTube, 7 Mar 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Pwn_LUi1Q&t=187s.
Ford, Thomas E., and Mark A. Ferguson. "Social Consequences of Disparagement Humor: A Prejudiced Norm Theory." Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 8, no. 1, 2004, pp. 79-94.
Gilbert, Joanne R. "Performing Marginality: Comedy, Identity, and Cultural Critique." Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 17, no.4, 1997, pp. 317-330.
Gilbert, Joanne R. Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique. Wayne State University Press, 2004.
Hertz, Emily. Alternative Comedy: Women in Stand-Up. Central Europian University, 2010. Hitchens, Christopher. "Why Women Aren’t Funny." Vanity Fair, 2007, pp. 54-59.
Jagad, Ayushu., and Natu, Sumedh. “How AIB Uses Feminism.” YouTube, 21 Feb 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLIT9buq-FQ&t=181s
Janes, Leslie M., and James M. Olson. "Jeer Pressure: The Behavioral Effects of Observing Ridicule of Others." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 26, no. 4, 2000, pp.474-485.
Kanchwala, Mohammad. “AIB and Feminism: Sumedh Natu & Aayushi Jagad make one of
the Best Articulated Video Ever.” Social Ketchup, 22 Feb 2018,
https://www.socialsamosa.com/socialketchup/sumedh-natu-aayushi-jagad-criticize-
aib-response Sahoo 59
Maguire, Moira, and Brid Delahunt. "Doing a Thematic Analysis: A Practical, Step-by-Step
Guide for Learning and Teaching Scholars." AISHE-J: The All Ireland Journal of
Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, vol. 9, no.3, 2017.
Mantilla, Karla. Gendertrolling: How Misogyny Went Viral: How Misogyny Went
Viral.Praege, 2015.
Moreau, Elise. “Internet Trolling: How Do You Spot Real One?.” Lifewire, 5 Oct 2018,
https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-internet-trolling-3485891
“Purposive Sampling.” Lund Research Ltd, 2012
Raut, Siddhesh. (2018). “Not a Laughing Matter- Stand-Up is a Serious Buisness.” Money
control, 26 May 2018.
Snitow, Ann. "Feminism and Motherhood: An American reading." Feminist Review, vol. 20,
no.1.1992, pp. 32-51.
Soules, Marshall. “Jurgen Habermas and the Public Sphere.” Media Studies, 26 Nov 2007,
https://www.media-studies.ca/articles/habermas.htm
Stott, Andrew. Comedy. Routledge, 2004.
Szostak, Natasha. "Girls on YouTube: Gender politics and the Potential for a Public
Sphere." The McMaster Journal of Communication, vol. 8, 2013, pp. 46-58.
Upmanyu, Abhishek. “Delhi, Mumbai & Rich People| Stand-Up Comedy by Abhishek
Upmanyu.” YouTube, 23 Jan 2017,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPCDQ34S8Rs&t=68s.
Vaz, Radhika. “Reasons to Not Have a Baby.” YouTube, 28 June 2017,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzP9wTGaZGc&t=
Wagg, Stephen, ed. Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference.
Routledge, 2004.
Zillmann, Dolf. "Disparagement Humor." Handbook of Humor Research. Springer, New
York, 1983. pp. 85-107.
Chapter 3
Unruly Women: Mitigating Gender and Humour in
Stand-up Comedy Spaces
3.1 Introduction
While previous work had located how humour negotiates the boundaries between gender and humour, very few studies have examined the impact of female comedians’ routines on the audience in a digital platform and vice versa (see Vortruba). The thesis attempted to explain a few of these dimensions in the last chapter. Moreover, the manner in which their performance, with specific focus on India, negotiates the traditional masculine space has not been examined before in a comprehensive manner. The analysis conducted and reported in this chapter provides an attempt to demonstrate the nature and style of their comedic routines and the intent underlying the use of feminist humour.
Sahoo 61
Three themes emerge as significant from the observations and analysis. One, female comedians’ language, and style of rhetoric frequently and consistently, albeit not exclusively evoke personal experiences that are autobiographical anecdotes. This feature has been observed in the routines of female comics across the world (Vortruba). Their routines were presented with a narrative and a punchline. The routines were presented as a narrative with a plot, punchline and set-up. Another important dimension of the female comics’ discourse is that they use self-deprecation as a strategy across their routines-self- deprecation referring to using derogatory comments about oneself. Second, they don’t use
“dirty jokes”, but do include abuses, refer to sexual themes, and aggressive language or style of presentation. Comedians themselves or commentators in certain cases ascribe the language and style of performance to be “unladylike” or unfeminine. Third, their routines and their interactions beyond the stage provide complementary narratives of their purpose in engaging in stand-up comedy.
3.2 The Semiotics of the Routines
The thesis aims to understand the function of select female stand-up comedians’ routines, specifically, Aditi Mittal, Radhika Vaz, Neeti Palta and Vasu Primlani’s routines in constructing a discourse. During the course of understanding, it was also important for the study to ask whether the recurrence of the themes in the female stand-up comedians’ routines has any role in negotiating their social identities. Are they through the themes challenging the social expectations and narratives with a different kind of narrative? Using thematic and Critical Discourse analysis to engage with these questions, this chapter provides an analysis of these above mentioned dimensions and explores the primary themes that have recurred frequently in the select female stand-up comedians’ routines. The Sahoo 62 method employed to analyse these aspects is the following: the routines uploaded by each individual female comic was heard and transcribed, performative profiles were drawn depending on their language, performative, and comedy styles, categorised according to the themes that occurred consistently and identified as engaging in activism or not. For analysing the performances, the understanding of performative is derived from the theories of speech acts as proposed by Austin. He designated utterances to neither description nor report, or constate, rather postulated that the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just,’ saying something (Austin). The question of how performing becomes an important aspect of creating an ontological rupture is worth investigating. For the last part, that is, the understanding of whether their routines create a feminist public sphere, Sorensen, Lay and
Vortruba’s framework was used to identify the characteristic features of identifying feminist humour that engages in activism.
Autobiographical
Before engaging in the detailed discussion of these dimensions, this section presents an overview of the semiotics of the performance of the select female comedians. Every female stand-up comic presented their routines as a narrative, used observational and autobiographical anecdotes, and focussed on the use of first person pronouns to undermine their own experiences as motivations for their routines. An attempt was made to locate the differences between male and female comic routines and a cursory analysis of the comparison revealed that male members often used jokes that were not marked explicitly as an autobiographical anecdote. Female comics marked their stories with statements such as “then I joined” or “I said I am no longer young”. They also often used collective pronouns such as “we”. Male members used fictional characters and tropes, such as Sahoo 63
“middle class people do this”, “There was girl sitting next to me” typically. This difference was also noted when the structure of the joke was compared between male and female comedians. The process of telling the joke by drawing from observations about certain incongruous situations without a necessary punchline marked the female routine and performances quite distinct. Vortruba (8) argues that women in their childhood are made to internalise that the space for comedy is not for them. When they assert their position as subjects who create comedy, female comics reclaim the space. With their personalised experiences and autobiographical anecdotes, they engage in “problematizing absolutes and universals, focusing attention instead on the situated, local, and communal constitution of knowledge” (Heikman 356). When they engage in stand-up comedy with a feminist perspective, they also allow activism to feature in the pop-culture domains in which it is hosted and shared culturally. Another important observation from all their comedy is the fact that they all engage in self- deprecation. The function and implication of deprecatory comedy as a feminist method will be discussed in the later section.
Language
In terms of language, comics apart from Vaz used a bilingual code, often shifting from English to Hindi or Punjabi. Radhika Vaz’s routines included abusive words, imprecations, and aggressive tones, marked by large gestures, loud voice, addressing the audience directly, often calling out people from the audience to crack a joke intermittently.
This style of using dirty jokes, bad language, and derogatory words is considered “blue” humour and is categorised as unfeminine (Hitchens). However, not every comedian used a similar style. It is an element that needs further analysis as Radhika Vaz calls herself
‘unladylike’. To probe further, as to what qualifies as “unladylike”, the language, gesture and the attire of the select female comedians’ routines were observed in detail. She said, Sahoo 64
“We are not under any fucking pressure to be clever, to be ambitious, to be fucking funny, nah”. This line is an example of how Vaz uses curse word like “fuck” in her comedic routine. In another routine, she said, “Dance like there’s no one watching, laugh like there’s no one listening and drive like benchod (“sister fucker”) there’s no one on the road.”
Several observations need to be made here regarding the style, “blue” humour and unladylike attributes. Vasu Primlani hardly ever used the same style as Vaz’s. She had a calm demeanour, normal voice composed style of presenting her routine. She has hardly used abuse. Note, however, the commentators have marked her routines as “the only thing funny that I found in this, was your face... I mean how can one look so hilariously weird.... and can somebody please tell me, ki yeh uncle hai ya aunty (is she an uncle or aunt)????”
Neeti Palta intermittently used Punjabi/Hindi imprecations, notable however, was her style of use of imprecations. She wouldn’t mark it as evident or explicit and include the abuses as part of a narrative. This was also evident from audience response; commentators hardly indicated her routine to be abusive in nature which they had done for Vaz. However, for
Neeti Palta, the commentators had frequently called her “beautiful” instead of commenting on the content of her routine. Every female comedian used self-deprecation in their jokes and routines when they made references to themselves. Aditi Mittal used slangs intermittently but she prioritised the use of caustic satire more than abuses. While Vaz proclaimed herself as unladylike, others were called so by the audience in their comments to be masculine, not feminine, quite routinely. Commentators routinely used words such as
“Fake laughter” While this is an observation from Vaz’s commentators, irrespective of the style, language, and presentation of humour including the variations in the performative presences of the comic, female comics were routinely accused of engaging in “anti- humour”. Their jokes were not “funny enough”. The next section presents few observations about the comics’ persona on stage and elaborates on the relationship between unfunny, Sahoo 65
unladylike and “undoing gender” (Deutsch).
Dress, Diction, and Demeanour
Moreover, in terms of their performative presence, Vasu Primlani maintained her performative identity as a ‘butch dyke’ on stage, that is, she wore short hair, coats, formal shirts, trousers. Radhika Vaz performed in casuals and used colour, lines, and shirt cuts that were androgynous. Radhika Vaz presented her routines with her tag, unladylike. Aditi
Mittal presented her sharp coloured hair (blue), dresses; her attire and performance did not strictly adhere to the binaries of masculine or feminine dressing. She used loud voice, assertive statements to create the routines. Neeti Palta performed both with androgynous clothes and feminine dresses. She also presented her routine with a smiling face, not including explicative or aggressive tone. None of the comics eluded a “hyperbolic feminity” which were often found as specific features of female comedians during the early years of female solo stand-up comics (Hertz 17). To understand how the on-stage persona affects the audience reception, future studies can look in detail the nature of the audience, both live and online, their social positioning, gender orientations and social contexts. This is particularly so because the audience members often are mistaken when they take the stage’s constructed persona as the comic’s persona and allows that to influence their reception of the routine material (Hertz 24). Their personas overlap often, not always.
Unfunny, Unladylike
What is important for us to note is that all the comics were commented as being not funny enough. In the section, the observations on unfunny, unladylike and “undoing gender” (Deutsch) is elaborated on.
Sahoo 66
Anti-humour
Laughing makes a distinction clear: who creates and who consumes (Farb 768). If audience does not laugh, they indicate that they do not understand or concede power to the performer, implying that they do not approve or acknowledge the presence of the female comic on stage. Quinn (2000) had argued that funniness was evaluated according to pre- existing power relations. Contextualising “anti-humour” as a measure of female comics’ performances allows the interpretation of the text as a space for negotiating the relationship between gender and humour. Women’s humour challenges gender stereotypes and a female comic eliciting the laughter of the audience is “dangerous to the masculine structure of stand-up” (Hertz 13). The previous chapter explains the observation in detail. The idea that prevails in the observations and connects to this chapter is, therefore, the reiteration of an essentialised understanding that women, both as a producer and consumer of comedy, and humour are antithetical (Hitchens).
Here, it’s the production of humour by the female comic that is being routinely targeted as being not humourous or unfunny while in many instances the content for both remained the same. The double bind facing female comics is created by their gender and their role as a stand-up comic in a masculine space where the normative is defined by
Bociurkiw’s (2005) argument that “suffering ennobles women and even sanctifies them as part of what Kathleen Rowe has called ‘the culture preference for women’s tears over laughter’. Further, he added, imagining them as the generators of comedy has seemingly set them at odds with traditional notions of feminity” (Stott 85). The constant reiteration that female comics’ routines are anti-humourous and not funny is possibly a reinstating of the social position of the female comics as ‘second-class’ citizen. This is a way to articulate Sahoo 67
that the audience prefers to view women as surrendering to other’s humour and not produce
them. Stott (86) argued that according to the cultural expectation, while “tears or suffering
are considered as a part of feminine expression, laughter is not. At even greater odds is to
become the generator of that expression, which one is not even permitted to even respond
to” (Stott, 2014, p. 86); this is perhaps evident in how the ascriptions are being made. This
non acceptance is further substantiated by the assertion that “women who share their point
of view as second-class citizens by telling personal stories about being pushed into the
margin are less likely to succeed among their male counterparts who address light-hearted
issues (Krefting 134)” (Vortruba 2).
Unladylike
As explained before, the female comics presented their routines in varied ways.
Few of them present themselves by using specific linguistic registers and styles marked by
not only different kinds of humour such as satire, irony, parody, but by speech styles,
volume, pitch, among other things. Hitchens had argued that “my argument doesn’t say
there are no decent women comedians..there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of
them, though, when you come to review the situation are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some
combo of the three..And the Saphic faction may have its own reason for wanting what I
want-the sweet surrender of female laughter. While Jewish humour, boiling as it is with
angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition”.
The observations of the female stand-up comics’ routines, albeit not as Jewish
humour, are presented in a very similar manner. Their routines are filled with observations
of objectification, unbearable angst emerging from social expectations of enforcing
marriage and motherhood, dressing styles, standards of morality and so forth. Not Sahoo 68 surrender, the routines, seek to subvert the ascriptions. While Vaz had called herself unladylike, commentators have asked Vasu Primlani if she an uncle or aunty ( “ki yeh uncle hai ya aunty”). The ascription of unladylike cannot be ascribed to every female comic. However, this aspect was common for both Radhika Vaz and Vasu Primlani.
3.3 “Undoing Gender”
West and Zimmerman’s framework of “doing gender” argued that ritualised behaviours and displays adopted and performed by individuals, both male and female, often are seen as attempts to conform to gender roles ascribed by social patriarchal hegemonies. The role of language in ascribing to these gender roles was highlighted by studies as well (Bemiller and Scheider). However, the female comics’ performances create a rupture in the theoretical observations of West and Zimmerman. The female comics do not “do gender” here. Instead, they “undo” gender. West and Zimmerman have been critiqued for their non-explanation of how these gender hegemonies could be contested.
Radhika Vaz: A Case Study
One has to note the distinct difference between Radhika Vaz and others in their styles of presentation. Carson (1979) observed that “a woman is feminine, a woman is not abrasive, a woman is not a hustler. So, when you see a gal who does ‘stand-up’ one liners, she has to overcome that built-in identification of a retiring, meek woman. I mean, if a woman comes out and starts firing one-liners, those little abrasive things you can take from a guy, but from women, sometimes, it just doesn’t fit too well. Carson’s objection appears to stem from the oft-repeated opinion that comedy is a combative form requiring a level of aggression unattainable by women. …‘Comedy is masculine,’ she says. To stand-up and take control of an audience verbally is very difficult. Women are oppressed in childhood Sahoo 69
and not allowed to do this” (Stott 85).
Radhika Vaz’s blurb on “Unladylike: The pitfalls of propriety” asserts the position quite uniquely and assertively:
“It is a one-woman comedy show that debuted in New York City in September
2010 to sold-out audiences. The show is the love child of a dirty affair between
stand-up and sketch comedy and between Radhika Vaz (writer and performer) and
Brock Savage (director and developer). The show explores the universal truths of
modern womanhood which means that the words ‘I hate giving blow jobs’, and
‘I nag because I am good at it’, and ‘It is impossible for me to look sexy and
have an orgasm at the same time’ are all part of the script.” (Vaz)
Being called unladylike is combating the gender ascriptions on women as meek and as individuals who cannot engage in comedy as the latter requires aggression and an unlearning of childhood conditioning of hegemonic structures. Could this performative aspect, therefore, be a challenge to the normative of “gendered identities”? There are various ways in which people conform or resist gender identities. While Radhika Vaz’s style directly attacked the gender ascriptions as observed in Carlson, other comics seemed to engage in “undoing gender” (Deutsch) “by using comedy as an apparatus to transgress traditional gender expectations and destabilize normative power relations” (Deutsch).
Aggression, expression of angst is unladylike. By using a specific style of performance, therefore, they seek to write the gender roles differently. Therefore, while our observations above pertain to individual comedians and their performative style, it also positions that perhaps with this specific language and form of comedy, female stand-up comedians are Sahoo 70 already creating a counter narrative to the expectation of women, who the curators of comedy could be and how should female comedians behave. Positioned against the normative ascriptions of the society, female stand-up comedians with their performances are perhaps creating a space where understandings of masculinity and feminity are put forth in the domain of popular culture to be discussed, debated and negotiated in their multiple dimensions.
Two observations need to be made here: West and Zimmerman (1987) had argued that individuals “do gender,” knowingly and are conscious of fulfilling or not fulfilling their gender roles. The unladylike performative therefore, at a literal and symbolic level, is a way for the female stand-up comedians to reclaim power in the masculinised space and be seen as a way to use the very structures that create distinctions to challenge the norms and inequalities.
Vaz’s aggressive style, exaggeration, and open proclamation of being unladylike could also be seen as a subversive critique of the cultural expectations of being ‘proper’, surrendering, meek and accepting as synonyms of “ladylike”. She being a woman, using the same gender rituals as prescribed for unladylike, which could refer to ‘improper’ women or ‘proper’ men, could project the laughability of the cultural standards that are set for individuals. In brief, therefore, the stereotype and double bind of conceiving women as performers and generators of humour at odds with the traditional traits of feminine behaviour is rewritten in two ways by the female comics: by their presence and their style.
Sahoo 71
However, one could argue whether engaging in a different form, or rather as
“unladylike” is conforming to the social expectations of how women are and should be?
Isn’t a female stand-up comedian when she calls herself unladylike essentializing womanhood or rather agreeing that she isn’t a woman, and alluding to the fact that she is perhaps, “lord like”. In the words of Vasudevan (Re-defining feminisms 136) they are perhaps uncoiling categories like ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘man’, ‘woman’ from getting essentialised in various social contexts (Vasudhevan 136). The performative dimension does allow for a rewriting of an alternate discourse, “undoing of gender”, the female stand- up comics are rewriting in yet another way.
In the next section, an attempt has been made to analyse the discourses created through their routines.
3.4 Texts, Discourses and Public Sphere
It is important first to locate the humour that they are engaging in as contributive to the public sphere. They do so in various ways: engaging in themes that are associated with a certain group wherein the heterogeneity in group membership, background, value- systems, and access to routines of participation are articulated on the basis of their own personal experiences. Their internalised ideologies are put forth and the activist agenda for an alternative reality is etched during the performance (see Vortruba 26; Sorensen 175;
Lay). These strategies locate them as citizens who through their participation in a social critique in a public forum, extends the participatory nature of a democratic citizenship.
Sahoo 72
It is important to locate the thematic categories addressed in the routines of four select female stand-up comedians. Gilbert (73) had provided categories that female stand- up comics centre their routines on, which included, “sex, relationships, weight/body image, fashion, religion/ethnicity/region, family, gynecology, domestic activities, politics, popular culture phenomena, and random observations.” It should be noted that male stand-up comics did also touch upon several of these categories, hence challenging the exclusivity of the categories.
There were significant differences between the female comics themselves in the categories that they prioritised on. However, thematically, there were certain overlaps.
Most comics dealt with marriage as a recurrent theme. The marriage plot has been the stock narrative from the classical antiquity to the romantic comedies of the present day.
Reiterating marriage as a stock narrative therefore not only defines stand-up “as a microcosm of the cultural structure of the society”, but it perhaps also allows a space
“against which it could enable the women to test their stand-points in terms of their freedom, agency and identity” (Stott). Though marriage has been dealt as an area of focus, the narratives utilised in understanding and unpacking the event differed across genders. A cursory analysis of the comparison demonstrated that the themes related to marriage as presented by the male and female stand up comedians indicate certain important distinguishing features.
Marriage and Agency
A male comedian, Atul Khatri, in his routine on Wedding, spoke about inters- community marriage. He specifically spoke about the Sindhi Punjabi communities. He made fun of the fact that Sindhis are obsessed with saving money and Punjabis are spend Sahoo 73 thrifts. However, he made no comments on sexuality in connection to marriage. Another male comedian, Abhijeet Ganguli in his routine on Bong Gujju Wedding spoke about inter- community marriage, especially pointing out the differences in the eating habits of
Bengali and Gujaratis. He made reference to how men are apologetic about getting married while women are not “…like when a man has to tell his friends that he is getting married, he is almost apologetic about it…andar lado phutega (happy from inside)…women are like..they go and tell to their female friends “merit tho horahi hai (merit ho horahi hai) ”.
Women are happier to get married, so are men but they have to pretend that they are sad about it. In the second part of the routine he asserts that brides just have to take care of themselves. The bridegroom has to take care of the guests as well. While Khatri brings out the differences in the community behavior with reference to wedding, specifically hinting at the economic considerations of a wedding in a neo-liberal state, with capital and commodity fetishism marking the social status of individuals, Ganguli points out how the dynamics of a marital status are different, tilting towards a sexist and essentialised understanding of men and women during marriage.
In contrast, the comedic routines of Neeti Palta, and her routine on Big Fat Indian
Weddings incorporated how Indian weddings are a big celebration. A lot of money is spent in Indian weddings. In this context, both male and female comedians’ strategies overlap: the needed critique of the popular fetish of a wedding of grandeur that leads to various social discriminations and perpetuates atrocities. She however extended the argument further. She observed that the guests and possibly even the relatives are not really bothered about the couple getting married. They are busy with their activities. Palta made fun of how old women are excited about weddings “She is the one dancing away with wild abandon, Sahoo 74
not caring who knockers, knock- off ”. She critiqued the capitalist patriarchy by saying
“And notice ha the vigourousness of aunty’s dance is directly proportional to how bigger catch the dulha is! ”, that their dance depends on how affluent the groom is.
Vasu Primlani in her routine however, provided an imaginary conversation with two of the mythological characters Gandhari and Kunti designated as chaste wife and fallen woman respectively. Below is Primlani’s comedic transcript. Following which there is a comparison drawn between her and Palta’s routine looking at how both of them include women in regards to marriage, in particular, what aspect they focussed on.
Vasu Primlani: Mahabharat| Views: 40k| Upvotes: 341|Downvotes: 96| (Full excerpt in Appendix 2)
“So I was reading Mahabharat the other day and I find I have some questions.
There's Dhritarashtra, the blind king, there's Gandhari who's going to marry
Dhritarashtra, the blind king…so the first guy that she thinks of the Surya dev to the
Sun God I'm just wondering first time she saw him and the first words out of her
mouth “God, you're so hot!” (Primlani)” (Primlani 00:10- 1:57)
Primlani began her routine by saying how she is curious about a few anecdotes mentioned in the Mahabharata (an Indian mythological text). She narrated how Gandhari who marries Dhrutrashtra decides to go blindfold because her husband is blind. In the mythological text and the commentaries it is highlighted that she did it conforming to the duties of a wife in a marital relationship. However, what she said instead is important. She said “There's Dhritarashtra, the blind king, there's Gandhari who's going to marry Sahoo 75
Dhritarashtra, the blind king. And she's got a question and the question is I wonder what
it's like to be blind Fair question!”
The lines “And she's got a question and the question is I wonder what it's like to be
blind Fair question!” position Vasu as reimagining the agency of a woman from a
mythological text. The specific question here is the cause of motivation for Gandhari to
adopt self-inflicted blindness. The way the joke could use mythological anecdotes as a
subversive text, to prioritise women’s agency would be to read the joke as an assertion that
Gandhari chose self-imposed blindness and not out of prescribed normative duties of a
wife. It challenges the normative dictum that in a marital relation, if the husband suffers,
the wife suffers too. It presents a possible viewpoint that perhaps Gandhari did not wish to
make it evident that she does not obey cultural norms but instead did it because she was
curious. This reinstates the agency and choice in an otherwise patriarchal normative
structure. Subversion here refers to the fact that ideological systems and norms are
challenged through critique and resistance to transform the oppressive social structures.
The alternative interpretation or people who wouldn’t read this as subversion might argue
that the reading of “curiosity” is a way to cover the inherent normative structures. What
Vasu did was to reinstate the normative that forced her to adopt the suffering and cover up
by saying she was curious.
Two issues need elaboration here: What Vasu did as a set-up of the joke was to use mythology to reinstate that there is an observed cultural preference for watching women’s suffering (Bociurkiw, 2005). The set-up started exactly from there: a tale of sacrifice. This works as a contextualising tool. However, soon she shifted the attention to unpacking why Sahoo 76
Gandhari took such a decision and what role does marriage play in reinstating these cultural expectations from a wife. Vortruba (83) argues that “through rhetorical subversion, comics are able to undercut audience expectations and highlight inconsistencies or injustices in their respective cultures”. Towards the middle of the set-up, it is noted that Vasu says, “that is sufficient experience, but no she keeps it on permanently. I'm like who are you helping?”.
This cuts the expected format of the narrative and with comedic routine; often function as a punchline wherein the audience is immediately brought back to the immediate realities to encounter the mythic world as a narrative form. This question evokes laughter as a conversation is not possible with a mythological character. More so, because the question is rhetorical. Denying her to see the world because she doesn’t want to upset and/or conform to social rules of accompanying the husband in sorrow and happiness, she is possibly not helping herself. The agency that should have been celebrated is being denied. This also posits that implications of the action, whether performed out of curiosity or because of cultural norms should have been evaluated by her. If someone continues to engage in self-inflicted harm without a rationale because of the fear of social ostracisation, that deserves attention.
Vasu uses this as a political tool to “critique through reinstating absurdities and oppressive dimensions of established powerful hegemonic socio-cultural-economic practices in the society” (Vortruba 83). Primlani isn’t convinced about her choice to keep the blindfold on for the rest of her life. She re-creates an imaginary situation in the present, cuts the story halfway and says, “tomorrow Dhritrashtra will be like… and then Gandhari will be like” She narrates the supposed result of Gandhari’s decision on their future to the audience in the form of a conversation. The conversation reflects Dhrustarastra’s dependency on Kunti, whose responses express the inability to help both herself and Dhrutarashtra. This is important because Vasu doesn’t stop with a critique and laughter; she presents through her routine a detailed account of the absurdity of the “blind” conformance of cultural norms. Sahoo 77
The routine is detailed and includes yet another instance. Primlani cites another example. It is important to note the choice of the characters that Vasu uses. The next character is Kunti, a mythological character who was unmarried. Primlani cites the situation where Kunti is given a boon to choose a man with whom she could have sexual intimacy. Vasu just gestures that they can have sexual relations, doesn’t use a word to qualify the same through her verbal script but includes her audience in a shared worldview, when she says “they can you know”. This gesturing evokes laughter, but also does another important function.
The gesturing brings forth the questions of agency and sexuality as an important element back to the public forum in spite of the latter being a taboo for discussion in the public sphere. West and Zimmerman had argued that the comic personae internalise the expectations of the sex and gender categories to negotiate censorship. But with the form of stand-up the expectations are brought forth, dissected, ridiculed and challenged (Crawford).
However, even with the possibility of subversion in such a form, it is found that men offer more jokes and include more sexually explicit and aggressive content in their routines
(Lampert and Ervin-Tripp, Caviness 2). By using sexuality as her climax, she breaks the norm and subverts the space of gender and thematic norming.
This routine therefore by using a narrative from the Indian mythology proposes an alternative critical literacy (Singh), whereby critical reflection pertaining to models of behavior prescribed in mythological stories are brought forth and challenged on accounts of absurdity and discrimination. Interestingly, Primlani’s creation of the possible avenues of
Kunti’s exploration of sexual identity the sun lord, aligns with the feminist assertion of Sahoo 78 agency and choice, and posts a powerful subversion as cultures take offense when mythological texts are reflected upon critically (Sarker). More importantly, by bring forth
Kunti who has been considered a bold woman of promiscuous character in mythology in the Indian society (Sarker) and positioning her in opposition to narratives of Gandhari, a celebrated chaste wife who engaged in self inflicted harm because of respecting her husband becomes the punchline in this routine. It reinstates her contribution to not just public-sphere, but feminist public sphere. Comedic routines have always been filled with depiction of chaste wives and fallen women (Stott 90). In addition, feminist scholarship also posits certain arguments pertaining to marriage. They have always asserted that marriage involves a practical oppression of participants (married women), the symbolic oppression of participants (women), the practical oppression of non-participants
(homosexuals and unmarried heterosexuals) and the symbolic oppression of non- participants (homosexuals and unmarried heterosexuals). While stand up comics perform their routines on marriage, they are cautious and do not take an anti-marriage position; rather they posit the various incongruous experiences, issues with regards to the silence on sexuality and agency in the narratives of marriage, even in humour routines.
Ageism and Agency
Why men and women are different: Radhika Vaz: Stand-up Comedy |View: 33, 086|
Up votes: 498|Down votes: 97| (Full excerpt in appendix 2)
Ageism is a concern for few select comedians. While some argue that sexism and ageism together “erode” an aged woman’s identity and an attempt to provide a resistance to such cultural norming is due (Barrett and Naiman). To be aged and female is a double bind
(Cohen 599). Media often falls back on reiterating negative typifications about aged women (Cohen; Harwood and Giles). Peterson and Ross argue that “when older women do Sahoo 79
appear in popular culture, they are often portrayed as ‘being helpless, unknowledgeable, disoriented, or in some other unfavourable fashion’ (425). It is in this context that we understand how Vaz and Palta use their routines to negotiate the double bind of gender and age.
The present the joke first and then provide an analysis of how female comics regularly use a subversive humour strategy to being forth the discussion on ageism and agency. The routine is the following:
“Women are under a lot of pressure to be young. We are not under any fucking
pressure to be clever, to be ambitious, to be fucking funny… I got a bunch of
fucking porno sites. Sexy older woman fucks younger man. Mature sexy woman
sucks younger man. Hot MILF and grandma dot orgy dot com. These are my role
models!” (Vaz 0:08- 3:07)
Vaz’s routine needs to be analysed in two parts. First, she uses a set-up that already prepares the audience about how the routine should be received. She says “Women are under a lot of pressure to be young”. This preps the audience that she will either reiterate or challenge the position taken. She follows this line with a statement such as,
“We are not under any fucking pressure to be clever, to be ambitious, to be fucking funny, nah. Only to be young, or at the very least pretend that we are young.” This statement clearly positions her as arguing that women are told when and where to be ambitious. By bringing this concern to the public sphere, she simultaneously positions the concern as important and specifically, she, being a woman, provides a first person critique of the absurd expectations of the society. Vaz begins her routine by introducing the theme as
“body image”. Allyn noted that “…culture prioritizes power and financial success for men Sahoo 80 over appearance; the standards are not as stringent. Men can let their weight or hairline rise and still be seen as attractive as long as they are professionally successful.” (Allyn) Vaz in this routine engages a distinct kind of humour. In this specific context, she is challenging the stereotypical beliefs, not by critiquing them directly, not by contesting them, but by directly and categorically reinstating what the typical social norms are. She uses the routine to reinstate the cultural expectations more as a journal diary being shared with fellow companions. This part of the routine does not follow a standard format of a joke structure whereby a set-up is followed by a punchline. Every assertion includes exaggeration, hyperbole, and imprecations. It might be interesting to note that one of the commentators confirmed the search results.
In the second part, she continues by saying, “but I think we all know that the only reason you want me colouring my hair, so that nobody can guess how old you are!” In this statement, she includes women in their support to the reiteration of the gender role ascriptions prescribed by the society. She asserts that her female friend wanted her to colour her hair to match the gender normative. This is because, Swati, who is suggesting would feel more comfortable in the company of a woman who complies with gender norms. This is further substantiated by saying that “But the point here is Swati would never have said this to a grey haired male friend. Right?” Herein, she engages in full-fledged direct combat, wherein she poses the genders in opposition to one another. This style could be seen as challenging to the other traditional and oft referred style of a comedic routine: using a joke for stand-up. This is perhaps one clear instance wherein the role of stand-up seems more tilted towards participatory citizenship through public sphere where citizens discuss and critique the discriminations without a garb of “just joking”. This instance Sahoo 81 positions her as a feminist activist more than a stand-up comic.
She continues with her narrative routine. She tells the audience, “So, I took this complaint of mine to my silver headed friend Vishwas and he says to me “ya, I guess we guys have George Clooney to thank for that”. She asserts here another concern. She asserts that searching for “old, sexy men” on Google would lead to celebrities, successful actors and entrepreneurs which undermine that older man are looked up to as role models.
However, in contrast, searching for “old, sexy women” on Google leads her primarily to the actors from porn industry. She waits for a while, engages with the audience for finding the answer to her question, “Guess what I got”. She then explains that she received recommendations from pornographic sites as search results. Vaz indicates how the
‘internalization’ of patriarchy exists not only in female members (Swati’s insistence of her getting her dyed) but also extends to the digital world. She perhaps attempts to suggest that the online world capitalises on the discrimination existent in the society instead of confronting the prevalent discrimination. Therefore, in this routine Vaz confronts the systematic oppression of the female body in the real as well as the virtual world.
Big Fat Indian Weddings - Stand-up Comedy|Views: 1,338, 435| Upvotes: 15k|
Downvotes: 1.6k| (Full excerpt in appendix 2)
“And, you know, bang in the middle of every Punjabi wedding in the baraat, there is
a ‘booby aunty’( hand gesture)…I am telling you next morning ask uncle ji kya
huya (what happened)” (Palta 1:00- 2:10)
Palta in this routine “builds on sexual objectification” (Bergman) of a section of Sahoo 82
women she calls “aunty”, alongside stereotyping them by commenting on their breast size, movement of their breast size, their dance. “Specified sexist jokes mock certain feminine groups, characterizing them by an exaggeration of traditional feminine stereotypes. For instance…mother-in-law-centred humour employs the stereotype of threatening, castrating, sexless womanhood.” (Shifman and Varsano) She uses the word ‘aunty’, ‘auntyji’, ‘booby aunty’ recurrently and makes a constant effort at pointing out their age and represents them using an imagery that is sexually grotesque. Throughout the routine Palta firstly puts them out of the spectrum of desirability due to their age by saying “This is why they put blinkers on our mares. Prevention of cruelty to animals”, indicating indirectly, however, quite discriminatorily that the aged women dancing is so grotesque that it can harm human beings who are near the spectacle. Her representation of their body parts, specifically breasts, by using explicit gestures and using words for like “dunga dunga..” referring to movement of the breasts while dancing indicates an explicit imagery following what Laura
Mulvey would argue as
“in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure and looking has been split
between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its
phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional
exhibitionist role, women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their
appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to
connote-to-be-looked-at- ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of
erotic spectacle: from pin ups to strip tease, Ziegfeld to Busy Berkeley, she hold the
look, plays to and signifies male desire.”
Sahoo 83
Palta seems to be using the same parameters: she uses an aged woman’s body as an erotic spectacle. Palta’s portrayal of women falls under the category of one of stock characters appropriate for featuring the comedic routine, which is described as the following “her body is excessive or fat, suggesting... inability to control her physical appetites” (Rowe 31). This method is used to represent the grotesque body. Stott (68) argued that “the grotesque body is not a closed system defined by clear limits, but a body that reaches out beyond its boundaries and interacts with the world in a sensual level”
(Stott 68). Further explaining the disregard for aged women in the society, Rowe has explained how “for old women who refuse to become invisible in our culture are often considered grotesque” (31). Therefore, Palta seems to be traversing the ‘grotesque genre’
(Bakhtin 315). Bakhtin had argued that the focus is on specific aspects of the body in this genre, that is, “on those part of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it…the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the potbelly” (26). While Bakhtin has been critiqued of romanticizing the body (Critchley 15), Palta does not seem to be doing so. It is quite evident with the phallocentric-norm-conforming, non resistance to the grotesque sexualisation of the female body. That aside, Palta also distances herself from the ‘idea of the body’ of the woman and addresses them as ‘aunty’ and never uses the words ‘we’ or ‘women’. This distance challenges the solidarity or sisterhood that other female comics have routinely used as their rhetorical strategies. The above mentioned explanations state how Palta’s routine is not only ageist but also sexist positioned in the gradient linking patriarchy and female experiences.
Sahoo 84
Body Image and Agency
Another recurrent feature or theme of the female comics’ routines was body image.
They often used self-deprecation to posit, use hyperbole, analogies, and symbolic references to express the laughability and absurdity of expected cultural norms set for females to conform to aesthetic norms. What is also important is that the female comics are talking about aged women, grotesque bodies, and self-deprecation to represent women’s experiences. For female characters or bodies to be prominently featured in comedy, they have generally been required to stand outside normative notions of female beauty (Stott).
Kathleen Rowe (1995) has enumerated the ways in which women have been depicted in comedies and called them ‘unruly women.’ Therefore, female comics use the platform to represent ‘unruly women’ to create an opposition with “an essentialized portrait of a character that draws on cultural stereotypes as a method for reinforcing negative prejudices, audiences who are able to pick up on the irony understand the underlying subversive effect of emphasizing the inaccuracy of reducing an entire gender to only a few exaggerated traits” (Vortruba 35). This is their strategy to re-negotiate subversion. This routine presented below formulates how Neeti Palta uses subversion to critique the gender norms and attempts to use self-deprecation and grotesque to present a personal anecdote related to weight, body image, health, and ideal body norms.
Neeti Palta on Body Image Views: 17300 |Upvotes: 97| Downvotes: 9
“Acha ji (alright people), then I joined a gym, and I worked out and I work out, and
at the end of the month, I lost an inch on my chest, haso mat dukh share kar rahi
hun (don’t laugh, I am expressing my agony here) and I gained an inch on my hips,
now I feel like Sharad Pawar, disproportionate assets” (Palta 0:17- 0:52) Sahoo 85
Palta in this routine explains the politics underlying the shift in conceiving exercise as a masculine domain: “the once-masculine province of exercise has become a part of commercial beauty culture” (Morse 23). However, Palta’s routine brings out the idea that the cultural implications of “work out” varies across genders. It is generally associated with fitness and health with reference to male members; however, it is associated with pleasure, sensuality, and appearance of the females. All of this reverberates how ““shape- expectations for women” has changed historically” wherein body size and features have been structured (Morse) according to the ‘male gaze’ (Mulvey).
Palta uses self-deprecation here. She posits how even after significant efforts, she failed to lose weight and develops a body that conforms to the ideal aesthetic female body form. Albeit, that is an indirect implication, she doesn’t explicitly formulate that, but that is implied. In addition, she says she lost weight from her “chest”. It is important to note that she doesn’t use the word, breast, but selects chest as a masculine feature. This could be read as subversive because breasts have been an object of sensuality and desire, most often, used as the primary feature of female objectification. Her selection of the word “chest” could be seen as resisting female objectification by substituting that with male features. She also adds that she gained a few inches on her hips, another body dimension that has been used for female objectification. It is almost as if she plays with the audience’s “male gaze” and lets it traverse the body used as a public spectacle. Here however, Palta is quick to subvert the joke within the second line when she brings in a “male figure”, Sharad Pawar, a minister of India. She compares her “fit body” which however could be addressed as
“disproportionate” by the standards of the female body norm to Sharad Pawar, a heavily built aged man, unfit by the gender norms of fitness. In the words of Freedman, it is Sahoo 86
important to note that “attractiveness is the prerequisite for feminity but not for masculinity”. Using subversion, she brings forth the contradiction of social expectation devised on the grounds of “attractiveness” as a comical reference for men, who have evaded the scanner. Also, by using pun, she refers to “disproportionate” as a feature of his body and capital, thereby expanding the public sphere engagement with the referred individual on the grounds of body image and monetary corruption.
The “excess” in female body is equated with corruption of the body against the set ideals; the corrupted wealth acquired by men is not. This helps her intervene into the gambit of political participation, wherein, the projections of “excess” (Rowe) can tackle both visual culture and electoral politics and subversively claim space for the critical take on how citizens are complicit with reference to certain excesses and grotesques (corruption by wealth) whereas unforgiving for others (female bodies and agency).
Another important dimension of some of the female comics were their insistence on activism. Several of them spoke on issues that were important for addressing discriminitaion, sexual assault, silence on issues pertaining to women health care. Below is an instance where Aditi Mittal speaks on an issue that’s is important for women’s health across the world.
Sexuality and Healthcare
Very few comics touch upon the issues of healthcare. Aditi Mittal speaks about her concerns with an important dimension, that of women’s healthcare with specific reference Sahoo 87 to cancer. The next routine elaborates on how she uses her routine to explain the same.
Bra Shopping |Stand Up Comedy by Aditi Mittal (Excerpt from the routine)Views:
8586020| Upvotes: 65k| Downvotes: 6k| (Full excerpt in Appendix 2)
“And I remember the first time I noticed breasts. First of all I was like breasts are
basically a large conspiracy to keep the safety pin industry …and so my advice to
you ladies is touch yourself once every six months touch yourself and I like that a
guy in the back is like “hehehhehhee video bhejna, theek hai na? (Send me the
video, alright?)” (Mittal 0:05- 5:12)
Mittal begins her routine saying that her theme would be on “breasts” and “tits”.
She makes the difference between breasts and tits by gestures, facial expressions, indicating that breasts represent both sensuality and adulthood whereas tits are perceived as features that do not deserve special attention and is often a signifier of immaturity, implying that tits are for young girls. She also attempts to compare and distinguish between tits and breasts. She uses personification to describe what breasts do, extending the signification to what individuals with breasts do. This is substantiated by her remark
“Breasts do networking. Breasts drink wine. Tits take money from their dad. Like that!
That’s the difference between breasts and tits. She uses personification specifically because she uses breast as an “erotic spectacle” (Mulvey). Mittal begins by telling the audience anecdotes related to ‘noticing breasts’ like an ‘outsider’ as a young girl, implying she had not experienced the insider (what she felt) and outsider (what others perceived) sensuality of having a breast.
Sahoo 88
She then talks about her own experiences when she “noticed breasts for the first time”. This brings forth the discussion of the conscious awareness of the feminine body.
She also posits how the moral standards force female young-adults to be constantly aware of the body image and therefore take precautionary measures to hide the body (Wolf). She highlights what Mulvey had said, “in their traditional exhibitionist role, women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote-to-be-looked-at-ness”. The ultra awareness is imbibed from a girl’s childhood and she is always conscious of the “looked- at-ness”. This is important because the social regimentations are so deeply entrenched that the female individual fails to recognise the normalcy in the breast, a feature which all women have, albeit in differing dimensions, as unfamiliar or strange. She posits another sub story that when she saw a senior in school with breasts, she almost thought that she had a role in creating that on her body and first, that has created a flaw in her attire, by extension her demeanor and that she would be reprimanded for the same. She however uses these anecdotes to highlight the primacy accorded to breasts and its everyday corporeality yet a distant and contested existence in women’s lives.
She then talks about her experience as an adult going for bra shopping. More importantly, it is important to note how the female body remains a site of exclusivity, as young women in India are “totally horrified and embarrassed. You go to mumble your bra size at him”. Mittal highlights the taboo associated with shopping for bra. Then she talks about commercialisation of essential products like brassiere in the capitalistic society.
Sahoo 89
When a comic begins his/her routine, they begin with a story, often familiar, which makes us perform a “speculative leap” (Dean 5) wherein we follow limited information from the set-up provided, fill in details after the 1st story that is, the “is the detailed scene imagined by the audience of what they expect to be true” (Dean 4). It does follow a logical deductive method, but it is implied. However she adds that “it is clear that a joke works by provoking audiences to make assumptions. Then tossing in a curveball, the comic is able to surprise the audience and evoke laughter” (18). It is important that in subversive humour, comics are challenging stereotype using laughter but also using anti-humour strategies.
Anti-humour refers to the strategy that the routine is not entirely focused on eliciting laughter and often provokes the audience to think of pressing issues affecting lives of people, often morose and difficult realities of life such as death and decay, in this reference, breast cancer.
Also, Mittal doesn’t stop there, she incorporates sexual assault in her routine when she says “woman finds out she has a lump in her breasts is when she spent 40 minutes on the train when after someone's groped and elbowed her for 20 minutes and been like “maza ayaa madam”(did you enjoy it, madam?) but there might be lump, you should go check it out.” However, it is important to notice how Mittal doesn’t end her routine at that and she uses a ‘pun’ to connect female sexuality and healthcare (breast cancer to be specific) when she says so “my advice to you ladies is touch yourself once every six months touch yourself.” She comes back to initial point where she ‘punches up’ to call out the male gaze by saying “I like that a guy in the back is like “hehehhehhee video bhejna, theek hai na?
(hehehhehe send the video, all right?)”. This once again reinstates that the gaze could be inverted and used as a means to negotiate the “looked-at-ness” (Mulvey). Sahoo 90
Women and Agency
Reasons to not have a baby: Radhika Vaz: Stand-up comedy| views 12,336 | Upvotes
201| Downvotes: 86| (Full excerpt in Appendix 2)
“When a woman doesn't want to have a baby the whole world is entitled to an
explanation…and I am like hang on a second your fully formed 44 year old man son
is yet to settle down that's on you bitch. You fucked up, I am not having any babies”
(Vaz 0:08-2:12)
This routine should be read in two parts. In the culture where motherhood is a part of feminine identity (Westervelt), Vaz in this routine represents “the experiences of women who decide not to have” (Kelly). She then points out how celebrities (Angelina Jolie here)
“set the ideals of womanhood” (Sharon). In the words of Neimark, Vaz’s complaint “the world is accustomed to women like Angelina Jolie and less accustomed to the likes of you and me, alright”, can be explained likewise, “mass-marketed images fit only a few people and stigmatize many” (Neimark). Therefore, while Angelie Jolie who has biological and adopted children turn into popular culture icons who provide the models of ideal womanhood.
Vaz points at how all the reasons given by people surrounding her “your husband will love you more”, “your life will improve”, “best thing you can do as a woman” culminate into what Adrienne Rich has explained as “ patriarchal notion of motherhood, not the actual experience of mothering” (Neimark).
Sahoo 91
It is interesting to note that the routine can be found in a conversational form in
Vaz’s memoire ‘Unladylike’ in the final chapter titled “The Baby Question” (183) where
she expresses how she is afraid to give birth but how her immediate family thinks
otherwise. However, Vaz doesn’t state any of those reasons in the routine, rather
propagates the idea of “choice” by rejecting the cultural enforcement blatantly by stating “I
am not having any babies”. One can see that her voicing of her “choice”, is rejected by the
commentators wherein she is rebuked for saying so. The question of choice is an important
feminist premise which disrupts the traditional patriarchal power structures and reclaims
the space for women. This routine therefore presents a testimony to the claim made
throughout the chapter as to how female stand-up comedians’ routines are autobiographical
in nature and voice a possibility of a feminist public sphere.
3.5 Towards a Feminist Public Sphere
Votruba (2) asserted that “women who share their point of view as second-class citizens by telling personal stories about being pushed into the margin are less likely to succeed among their male counterparts who address light-hearted issues (Krefting 134).
However, the primary feature of feminist activist humour is to address questions that are important for women to address any discrimination or driven by the sheer urgency of having their voice heard. In that process, comedy is negotiated and redefined in their routines. The next section uses interviews to substantiate what the select female stand-up comics are engaging in. In the last few sections the chapter has attempted to provide an overview of how select female stand-up comics in India are engaging in contemporary debates. Primlani,
Mittal and Vaz engage in debates through the most recurrent themes of marriage, body and agency. Through their interviews, the scholar observes how each one of them engage in the Sahoo 92 contemporary debates embedded in a public-sphere, albeit marking their individual struggles with a clear assertion of their ideological and activist motivations. The interviews provide a way to understand how their scripts are not disconnected, and builds on the activism that they are attempting to engage in the public sphere, through performances and through other forms of connecting with the world.
Palta in her interview said “my jokes come from my observations and experiences
as a female. The only thing I object to is my material being branded as “chick comedy”. I
would certainly call myself a feminist. That is, if we are talking about the original meaning
of the word “feminist”, someone who sees both genders as equals. In fact I’m even willing
to admit that there may be times that men are better than us in some things, but then we are
also better than them in other things, so in the end it equalizes” (Ghosh).
Palta, further speaking on the content said “Content vs. intent has long been my
measuring stick for myself too. As long as I feel that a joke, no matter how harsh, intends
to deliver the right message, it is fine. Yes, I stand by the fact that I feel that not just
females, but we as a society have become hypersensitive. First we dole out years of
repression and then when it comes to fixing the damage, we swing completely to the other
extreme of objecting to jokes! What happened to middle ground? Why don’t we start out
by teaching our kids better? So that they are equipped to decide what is appropriate and
inappropriate. Mothers have to get over their “raja beta (prince)” syndrome and, kick some
boy ass to instill the sense of equality in them. I actually have male friends who are
blissfully unaware of the fact that they are sexist. Seriously! They don’t even realise when
they are being offensive. And that’s where this joke was born” (Ghosh). Palta points out Sahoo 93
that her stand-up routines are a result of her study of her experiences with others in social
spheres. On another note, she reflects on her own perspective and emphasises that her
routines are based on her personal experience. Talking about the set-boundaries of humour,
Palta is of the opinion that a joke should not have any. Reflecting upon sexist jokes she
calls the society hypersensitive, and on the ideological front identifies as a feminist. For
her, it is quite ironical that the society after years of oppression a certain group of people
objects to the jokes based on ground reality that often have the right message underneath.
Thus, she believes in understanding intent over content in any comedic routine.
Primlani asserts that “thing is, in comedy, gender doesn’t matter. What matters is how good a comedian you are. Except the audience brings its assumptions and prejudices to your show” and further asserts that “the more they hear us women comedians speak, the better it will be for the men, for us, for the world. So, listen, speak your mind. And don’t take any lip.
Learn the craft. And speak with, well, verve” (Saxena). Primlani in this interview talks about the empowering nature of comedy. As she quotes how this genre of comedy allows individuals to be heard makes a difference against other performative genres. Primlani talks about how there is no culture of listening to the female members in a society from the very beginning of their lives, while the males are allowed to express their opinions. Specifically, stand-up facilitates a change in the culture as people listen to what the women have to say. Of course, they bring their prejudices and assumptions to the shows and often turn aggressive and abusive on online platforms, looking at the positive side, she says how people remember a comedian over their gender/ body after their show.
Sahoo 94
Vaz rationalises the gender gap in terms of addressing how there are fewer women comedians in the comedic scenario by comparing the nature of comedy and the nature of expectations from an Indian woman. She says that comedy performances allow the breaking of a performative barrier, her deprecation helps her address her concerns with insecurities about her body. Performing in a public sphere and engaging in comedy is a form of transgression which isn’t considered feminine. Vaz talks about finding a middle ground between freedom of speech and the struggle for women’s rights which are challenged once sexist jokes are made. She further asserts that how the blacks do jokes on blacks, so should the women be involved in doing so. Further she speaks on how any sexist joke makes the taboo subjects accessible to the otherwise tight lipped public. She adds that the tricky line of content v/s intent in any comedic routine often gives rise to controversy as well as discussions (Majumdar). Vaz also talks about how any comedic routines she says jokes should be made on topics that one must have either laughed at personally or must have gotten affected by. She further argues that how someone or the other can often find a routine offensive. Ashe argues that there are certain stock issues that amuse people universally, despite the geographical differences, such as “Mothers-in-law, awkward sex stories, jokes about powerful people, jokes about powerful people who also happen to be overweight”. Vaz also posits that a controversial issues such as fat-shaming of a powerful person works with the audience. On her style of stand-up, she says she is a story-teller who finds unexpected or risky things very amusing (Ghosh). This chapter aimed to study how the routines performed by the Indian female stand- up comedians negotiated public sphere, their participation as citizens in a democracy, and how they interacted with the expectations of this participation, that is, how by registering dissent and creating new discourses of women, they create a possibility of a heterogeneous feminist public sphere. This chapter has provided examples and instances of both covert and overt expressions of transgressions that the female stand-up Sahoo 95 comics are engaging in for challenging existing social structures. If we acknowledge that stand-up spaces are a part of “a larger ecology, generative of both social change and maintenance” (Kaisalo), we can understand how female comics negotiate their double bind: by being present in a masculine space and by creating humour by using content not determined by a patriarchal framework.
Sahoo 96
Work Cited
Allyn, Rachael. “Feeling Pressured to Look Young.” The Journal, 13 Jul 2017,
http://www.journalmpls.com/voices/ask-dr-rachel/2017/07/feeling-pressured-to-
look-younger/
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press, 1975.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rebelais and His World, Translated by Helene Iswolsky, Indiana
University Press, 1984.
Bemiller, Michelle L., and Rachel Zimmer Schneider. "It's Not Just a Joke." Sociological
Spectrum, vol.30, no. 4, 2010, pp. 459-479.
Bergmann, Memo. "How Many Feminists Does it Take to Make a Joke? Sexist Humor and
What's Wrong With It." Hypatia, vol.1, no.1, 1986, pp. 63-82.
Shifman, Limor, and Hamutal Ma’apil Varsano. "The Clean, the Dirty and the Ugly:
Critical Analysis of' Clean Joke' Web Sites." First Monday, vol.12, no.2, 2007.
Bociurkiw, Marusya. "It's Not About the Sex: Racialization and Queerness in "Ellen" and
The Ellen De Generes Show." Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 24, no.2, 2005,
pp.176- 181, cws.journals.yorku.ca.
Caviness, Courtney M. Oh, I'd Do All the Sex Jokes": Stand-Up Comics and the Negotiation
of Humor, Gender, and Accountability. 2013. Texas State University, Master of Arts
thesis. https://digital.library.txstate.edu/handle/10877/4703.
Cohen, Harriet L. "Developing Media Literacy Skills to Challenge Television's Portrayal of
Older Women." Educational Gerontology, vol. 28, no.7, 2002, pp. 599-620.
Crawford, Mary. "Gender and Humor in Social Context." Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 35,
no.9, 2003, pp.1413-1430.
Critchley, Simon. Very little, Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. Edited by Sahoo 97
Andrew Benjamin, Routledge, 1997. Google Books,
https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Very_Little_Almost_Nothing.html?id=F8KG
AgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepag
e &q&f=false
Dean, Greg. Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy. Heinemann, 2000.
Deutsch, Francine M. "Undoing Gender." Gender & Society, vol.21, no.1, 2007, pp. 106-
127.
Palta, N. (2015, July 27). It Ain’t ‘Chick Comedy’: Comedian Neeti Palta Sorts Out
Feminism, Padded Bras and More. (Ghosh, M. interviewer).
https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/07/neeti-palta-exclusive-interview/
Gilbert, Pam. "Discourses on Gender and Literacy: Changing the Stories." Constructing
Critical Literacies: Teaching and Learning Textual Practice, 1997, pp. 59-75.
Gilbert, Joanne R. Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique. Wayne
State University Press, 2004.
Ghosh, Moumita. “Of Saggy Vagina Tales and Sexist Jokes: Meet the ‘Unladylike’,
Radhika Vaz.” Youth Ki Awaaz, 2014,
https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/04/radhika-vaz-interview/.
Harwood, Jake, and Howard Giles. "Reactions to Older People Being Patronized: The Roles
of Response Strategies and Attributed Thoughts." Journal of Language and Social
Psychology, vol. 15, no. 4, 1996, pp. 395-421.
Hitchens, Christopher. “Why Women Aren't Funny.” Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, 29 Aug.
2017, www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/hitchens200701.
Hertz, Emily. Alternative Comedy:Women in Stand-Up. 2010. Central Europian University,
Master of Arts Thesis, www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/hertz_emily.pdf. Sahoo 98
Hekman, Susan. "Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited." Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 22, 2, 1997, pp. 341-365.
Keisalo, Marianna. "The Invention of Gender in Stand Up Comedy: Transgression and
Digression." Social Anthropology, 2018. Wiley Online‐ Library.
Kelly, Maura. Women’s Voluntary Childlessness: A Radical Rejection of Motherhood?”
Women’s Studies Quaterly, vol. 37, no. 3/4, 2009, pp. 157-172, JSTOR.
Krefting, Rebecca. All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents. The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2014.
Lay, Mary M. “Feminist Theory and the Redefinition of Technical Communication.”
Journal of Business and Technical Communication, vol. 5, no. 4, 1991, pp. 348-370
Lampert, Martin D., and Susan M. Ervin-Tripp. "Risky laughter: Teasing and Self-Directed
Joking Among Male and Female Friends." Journal of Pragmatics, vol.38, no.1,
2006, 51-72.
Majumdar, Anushree. “I Think Men Don’t Like Funny Women: Comedian Radhika Vaz.”
The Indian Express, 3 Dec 2018, https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/art-
and-culture/i-think-men-dont-like-funny-women-comedian-radhika-vaz/
Morse, Margaret. "Artemis aging: Exercise and the Female Body on Video." Discourse
vol.10, no.1, 1987, pp. 20-53.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures,
Pulgrave Macmillan, London, 1989, pp. 14-26,
http://www.composingdigitalmedia.org/f15_mca/mca_reads/mulvey.pdf.
Neimark, Jill. “The Culture of Celebrity.” Psychology Today, June 9, 2016,
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/articles/199505/the-culture-celebrity Sahoo 99
Peterson, Robin T., and Douglas T. Ross. "A Content Analysis of the Portrayal of Mature
Individuals in Television Commercials." Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 16, no. 4,
1997, pp. 425-433.
Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. University of
Texas Press, 2011.
Saxena, Shambhavi. “Starting a Dialogue on Gender and Sexuality is No Joke! Comedian
Vasu PrimlaniTells All.” Youth Ki Awaaz, 2015,
https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/11/vasu-primlani-stand-up-comic-interview/.
Singh, Parlo. "Reading the Silences Within Critical Feminist Theory." Constructing critical
Literacies: Teaching and Learning Textual Practices, Edited by P. Freebody, S
Musspratt, and A. Luke, 1997. Hampton Press, pp. 77-94,
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/10874626.pdf
Sarker, Pushpendu Bikash. Gender Relationships in The Mahabharata. 2016. University of
Liberal Arts, Bangladesh, B.A Degree dissertation.
https://www.academia.edu/31034811/Gender_Relationships_in_The_Mahabharata.
Sorensen, Majken Jul. “Humor As a Serious Strategy of Non-Violent Resistance to
Oppression.” Research Gate, 2008,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229928389_Humor_as_a_Serious_Strategy
_of_Nonviolent_Resistance_to_Oppression
Votruba, Ailine Karen. Redefining Feminist Rhetoric in Stand-Up Comedy: Offering
Cultural Critique Through Subversion and Silence. 2018. Iowa State University,
Master of Arts Thesis.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7488&context=etd.
Quinn, Beth A. "The Paradox of Complaining: Law, Humor, and Harassment in the Everyday
Work World." Law & Social Inquiry , vol. 25, no. 4, 2000, pp. 1151-1185. Sahoo 100
Stott, Andrew. Comedy. Routledge, 2004.
West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. "Doing Gender." Gender & Society, vol. 1, no.2,
1987, pp. 125-151.
Westervelt, Amy. “Is Motherhood the Unfinished Work of Feminism?” The Guardian 26
May 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/26/is-
motherhood-the- unfinished-work-of-feminism.
Wolf, Margery. Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan. Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 1972.
Chapter 4
Conclusions
4.1 In Conclusion
This dissertation has studied the nature of participation of female stand-up
comedians in YouTube in India and their performance of marginality on stage, that is, the
nature of their performance in creating an alternative discourse. It examined their
participation in terms of specific features. It studied how they represent themselves on-
stage, their thematic concerns and their participation in addressing questions of gender. In
terms of articulating their citizenship, the thesis studied how they engaged with the male-
dominated stand-up space to convey their resistance against socially enforced gender
norms. They provided access to the experiences of women in Indian society by including
narratives of oppression and discrimination against women to register their dissent.
The thesis used descriptive quantitative methods to survey female participation in the
Indian Stand-up comedy space on YouTube. It found that there was a distinct difference in the nature of participation between the male and female comedians. It also found that male members uploaded their comedic routines in their own channels and participated in other channels more than the female members. There were only six female comics against forty- Sahoo 102 four male comics in the Indian stand-up comedy setting (this data was updated in the month of February 2018) who had their own channels to upload their comedic routines. The average views, subscriptions and up-votes were less for female comedians as compared against the male comedians. The thesis used qualitative methods to address the nature of engagement the female comics have with the space. It was found that there was also a distinct difference in the thematic concerns between the male and female stand-up comedians. While comedic routines by male comedians dealt with childhood experiences, marriage and politics, social commentary of manhood, female comedians, apart from the similar themes the also consistently focused on experiences that were exclusive to the women. All the four participants engaged with concerns of agency across dimensions such as marriage, the female body, motherhood, ageism, sexism, and sexual assault. They also overtly criticized stereotypical gender roles in day to day life.
4.2 Performativity and Subversion in their Routines
In terms of their styles, they used sarcasm, parody, euphemistic words to elaborate
on these experiences and suitably make them a part of their comedic routines. Besides that,
the scripts challenged the social norms. They did not merely mock at the vices of the society
but also portrayed an alternative world of equity. It was primarily a way to provide new
perspectives by questioning traditional discriminatory social norms. None of the comics
presented themselves with uber-feminine features or dressing. They used formal,
androgynous clothing and alternatively formal clothing for women with straight cuts and
devoid of an exaggerated feminine expression, often used by the prior women stand-up
comics in the West. So, it could be said that while they addressed concerns conforming to
the feminist struggles across the world, they also projected their resistance, perhaps
implicitly, against the male gaze, wherein the woman is considered to be an “erotic Sahoo 103
spectacle” (Mulvey). By presenting themselves as female bodies in a masculinised space, and by projecting feminist concerns, they resisted the male gaze at two levels.
The presence of all the four comedians in the male dominate space such a stand-up comedy on YouTube marked the subversion (Krefting 137) as women had always been perceived as “handmaid of laughter, not its creator” (Gray 21). While subversion was used as a consistent strategy by female comics, the female comics differed in their articulations of dissent, in style, theme and registers. Aditi Mittal, Neeti Palta, Radhika Vaz and Vasu
Primlani uploaded their stand-up comedy videos on their personal channels on YouTube.
Their videos registered an overarching aim to articulate their personal stories to etch t h e possibility of gender non-conformation. They attempted to bring forth the gender bias still persistent in the Indian society. Mittal’s routine deal with women’s healthcare in a capitalistic society, Palta engaged in body politics, Vaz incorporated voluntary childlessness and marriage as social obligations, Primlani built her routines on imaginary situations to change the male narrative of the women from Indian mythology that form the basic ideals for the women in the Indian society. Thus, they performed their marginality through subversion.
There were some overlapping similarities and evident dissimilarities amongst the four. Specifically, however, Radhika Vaz and Vasu Primlani could be compared and contrasted as they registered their subversion quite explicitly wherein, they projected clearly the expected gender norms that women negotiate and mark themselves as distinct and as non- conforming. Vaz engaged with gender normative that need to be laughed at and she does so by including them in her comedic routines (Ghosh). Primlani has said that the thematic concern of her comedic videos depends on what she thinks as the most important Sahoo 104
social issues that the society needs to focus on (Saxena). On the other hand, Neeti
Palta and Aditi Mittal were found to be implicitly subversive in nature, wherein they used gender typifications and critique them. However, all the select female comics’ routines were autobiographical in nature. Vaz approved of sexist jokes on women only by women in a comedic routine as it had the potential to be subversive nature, thus striking the middle ground between freedom of speech and the struggle of women’s rights, otherwise, she argued that sexist humour could lose the potential to be subversive. This reiterated her insistence on the in-groupness in creating a subversive routine. Each of them used self- deprecatory humour in their comedic routines; Vaz and Primlani used the strategy to express social expectation and perception and create a distinct binary between the expected and the intrinsic experiences of women. Others presented it to the audience for showing the absurdity and laughability of the same. All of them punch-in or punch-up. This is however not true of all their comedic routines. Vasu Primlani sometimes neither punch-up nor does punch-down. Vaz, only sometimes punches-up. While Palta and Mittal always punch internally and then only punch-up.
4.3 Intersectionality
They largely represent urban, educated female issues in the Indian society, thereby possibly restricting their activism to be called a fully inclusive feminist struggle. Perhaps, they would include issues of female infanticide, education, child marriage, domesticity, and other issues cutting across the caste, class, and gender barrier in their future routines which they did not address in their routines currently.
Sahoo 105
In the current formulations of feminist struggle, intersectionality is an important concern. Their routines, by avoiding the above-mentioned social discriminations across caste, class, gender and sexuality, by not including the experiences of cis-genders and transgenders, have not shown the comprehensive acknowledgement of intersectionality.
However, their routines still have attempted to be intersectional in specific ways. They have projected their resistance to the oppressions that pertain to gender discrimination in the professional space which has been traditionally male-dominated. Moreover, thematically, in their construction of a feminist public sphere, they have intervened. They have replaced the male preference for “light- hearted humour” with feminist concerns. While few have been accused of being an outsider, others have been accused of anti-humour. However, despite the fact that the stand-up space does have the potential to register a more intersectional approach, the stand-up space as negotiated by the female comics have included intersectionality with reference to the dimensions of profession and gender (Sahoo and
Das).
4.4 Feminist Public Sphere
It is important to register that the thesis has argued that they have initiated a process to create a feminist public sphere via the stand-up comedy space. Ahmed argues that “the history of feminism is thus a history of making trouble…by refusing to follow other people’s goods, or by refusing to make others happy” (60). This is projected as a contrast.
While the female comics have articulated that they perform scripts which they find funny or think deserves public attention, the audience reactions have registered that there is a preference for stereotypes, hyperbolic expressions of gender performativity, “light-hearted humour”, but not so much for urgent concerns. This is perhaps because there is a distinct gap between the author and the reader of comedy. The readers or audience, to a large extent, Sahoo 106
as evident from YouTube viewership, have not yet registered stand-up comedy space as a space for critical literacy. They have perhaps acknowledged this space for entertainment sans criticality.
In terms of audience perception, few female comics were acknowledged, thereby, creating a space to counter the masculinized nature of the space. However, few female comics were trolled, abused and rejected as comics by claiming that the themes addressed by them were insensitive or unfunny. They faced rejection from the audience in the comment section because of the subversive nature of their routine’s topical concern. Paletz argues that “With rare exceptions, the more acceptable a piece of humour, the less subversive it is. Conversely, daring and outrageous humour tends to be spurned, rejected, or just ignored” (486). Therefore, in some spaces women were accepted and could free themselves from the double bind of being a woman and as a woman registering themselves as the creators of comedy, both of which were seen as challenging to the patriarchal design of comedy spaces. In other cases, the double bind was reinstated through the audience reactions when the latter rejected their presence and comedy by calling them unladylike” and “unfunny”. Alternatively, it can be argued that the negative audience responses perhaps have implicitly indicated that the comics were successful in ‘offending’ and thereby subverting the space for creating content not driven by populist humour trends and bringing forth comedy as engaging in ‘serious business’ wherein social discriminations can be debated just as a public sphere.
Mittal, an upper-class, urban female comic has organized a beginner’s workshop in
Stand-up comedy for domestic helps in the month of August (@addymitzy) and few participants are now performing solo. Meanwhile, she has been accused of misconduct by Sahoo 107
an improve artist and comedian Kaneez Surka in the ongoing #metoo movement for invading her privacy by kissing her on-stage during one of the shows without prior consent and calling it a part of her comedic routine. These accusations somehow jeopardise the functionality of comedy as a performative art that can be used to compromise the moral grounds. This also undermines the seriousness of a female comedic act that needs understanding, which the scholar had tried to bring forth as discussed earlier in this chapter.
However, instances such as these should not deter from understanding the space as a possible feminist public sphere. While it is true that “equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome” therefore, it is noticeable a fact that female stand-up comedians have increased in number despite the controversy and rejection and the barriers. Also, the participants in this dissertation still hold the top spots as they perform not only in India but also outside India at prestigious comedy festivals like Melbourne comedy festival (Jabbal).
The feminist consciousness therefore has evolved, albeit, the future will inform how intersectional they can be. It is to be noted that the number of participants in this dissertation is only four. The routines chosen as primary texts were from their YouTube personal profile. There are other videos available on YouTube of the chosen participants which were not looked into as they were either sketch comedies or hosted by other channels, implying the script would have been influenced by the production houses. The scholar also had a selective focus on the recurrence of themes and not comparative accounts of male and female comics. Given the dissent, as registered in their comedy, anti-humour as a form of resistance could become a matter of enquiry and would require a systematic study on the specific function of this exclusive nature of comedy for the marginalized across gender, caste and class. Given the style of humour presentation, one can try and understand why jokes with a “funny” punchline are typical of female stand- Sahoo 108
up comedians. Furthermore, with reference to the digital participation of both the female comics and the audience, it could be studied how the demographic, geographic spaces, and nature of interaction impact comprehension and acceptability of female comic routines.
Sahoo 109
Work Cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. 2010. Duke University Press.
Borghain, Ananya. “Vaz, You Like It!” The Pioneer, 20 Mar. 2016,
https://www.dailypioneer.com/2016/sunday-edition/vaz-you-like-it.html.
Gray, Frances. Women and Laughter. Basingstroke: Macmillan, 1994.
Jabbal, Preeti. “The Serious Business of Jabbal.” Indian Link, April 18 2017,
http://www.indianlink.com.au/gags-galore/.
Mittal, Aditi. “The Incredible Evening of Singing and Dancing…” Instagram, 28 Aug 2018,
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnAtOQpl55r/
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures,
Pulgrave Macmillan, London, 1989, pp. 14-26.
Paletz, David. L. “Political Humour and Authority: from Support to Subversion.”
International Political Science Review, vol 11, no. 4, 1990, pp. 483-493.
Sahoo, Sonali and Rolla Das. “Is Stand-Up Comedy in India Intersectional.” Language in
India, vol. 19, no.8, 2018.
“The Female Gaze: Do Yourself a Favour, Don’t Dumbdown.” Youth Ki Awaaz, 4 Nov. 2015,
https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/11/vasu-primlani-stand-up-comic-interview/
Sahoo 110
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agarwal, Sonali. “Stand-Up Comedy in India: Mastering the Art.” Media India Group, 16 Oct
2017, https://mediaindia.eu/lifestyle/stand-up-comedy-in-india/.
Ahmed, Arif. “Did You Hear the One About the Philosopher Writing a Book on
Humour?.” Richmond Journal of Philosophy, vol. 2, 2002, pp. 1-6.
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press. 2010.
https://blackfeministreadinggroup.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/sara-ahmed-the-
promise-of-happiness-2-feminist-killjoys.pdf.
Almaula, Mirali. The Evolution of Mediatized Stand-Up Comedy: Investigating Para-
Performances on Television, Film, and YouTube. 2015. University of Guelph, Ph.D
dissertation. https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10214/9248/
Almaula_Mirali_201509_Phd.pdf?sequence=3.
Allyn, Rachael. “Feeling Pressured to Look Young.” The Journal, 13 Jul 2017,
http://www.journalmpls.com/voices/ask-dr-rachel/2017/07/feeling-pressured-to-look-
younger/
Anna, Foka and Jonas Liliequist, editors. Laughter, Humour and the (un)making of
Gender: Historical and Cultural Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015
Apte, Mahadev L. "Ethnic Humor Versus “Sense of Humor”: An American Sociocultural
Dilemma." American Behavioral Scientist, vol.30, no.3, 1987, pp. 27-41.
Attardo, Salvatore, ed. Encyclopedia of Humor Studies. Sage Publications, 2014.
Atton, Chris. Alternative Media. Sage, 2002.
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press, 1975.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rebelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, Cambridge, MIT Press.
Banerjee, Olina. “Laugh Out Loud.” India Today, 18 July, 2011,
Sahoo 111
https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/supplement/story/20110718-laugh-out-loud-
746777-2011-07-07.
Being Indian. “Tanmay Bhat || Varun Grover || Vir Das - I AM OFFENDED.” YouTube, 4 Feb
2015,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swozBbWMzNQ&list=RDswozBbWMzNQ
Bemiller, Michelle L., and Rachel Zimmer Schneider. "It's Not Just a Joke." Sociological
Spectrum, vol.30, no. 4, 2010, pp. 459-479.
Bergmann, Memo. "How Many Feminists Does it Take to Make a Joke? Sexist Humor and
What's Wrong With It." Hypatia, vol.1, no.1, 1986, pp. 63-82.
Bhola, Jayati. “Punchlines in a Conflict Zone: Stand-Up Comedy Catches on in
Kashmir.” Hindustan Times, 13 Jun. 2018.
Bielby, Denise D., and William T Bielby. "Women and Men in Film: Gender Inequality
Among Writers in a Culture Industry." Gender & Society, vol. 10, no. 3, 1996, pp.
248-270.
Billig, Michael. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. Sage, 2005.
Blyth, Horace. Humour in English Literature: A Chronological Anthology. Folcroft
Library Editions, 1959.
Boyle, Karen. "Gender, Comedy and Reviewing Culture on the Internet Movie
Database." Participations, vol. 11, no.1, 2014, pp. 31-49.
Brodie, Ian. "Stand-Up Comedy as a Genre of Intimacy." Ethnologies, vol 30, no.2, 2008,
pp.153-180.
Bociurkiw, Marusya. "It's Not About the Sex: Racialization and Queerness in" Ellen" and The
Ellen De Generes Show." Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 24, no.2, 2005, pp.176-181,
cws.journals.yorku.ca.
Borghain, Ananya. “Vaz, You Like It!” The Pioneer, 20 Mar, 2016,
https://www.dailypioneer.com/2016/sunday-edition/vaz-you-like-it.html
Sahoo 112
Bose, Adrija. “6 Popular Comedians Sat Down to Discuss Sexism in India's Comedy
Scene. 5 of Them Were Men.” Huffpost, May 30, 2017,
https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2017/05/30/6-popular-comedians-were-invited-to-
discuss-sexism-in-indias-co_a_22116920/
Bucaria, Chiara, and Barra Luca, eds. Taboo Comedy: Television and Controversial Humour.
Springer, 2016.
Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green B. “Agency and Controversy in the YouTube Community.”
In IR 9.0: Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place - Association of Internet
Researchers (AoIR) Conference, 2008, https://eprints.qut.edu.au/15383/1/15383.pdf.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. NewYork and London
Routledge, 1993.
Calhoun, Craig J., ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. MIT press, 1992.
Cameron, Deborah. “The Language-Gender Interface: Challenging Co-optation.” In: Bergvall,
V.L., Bing, J.M., Freed, A.F., eds., Rethinking Language and Gender Research:
Theory and Practice, New York, 1996, pp. 31–53.
Case, Charles E., and Cameron D. Lippard. "Humorous Assaults on Patriarchal
Ideology." Sociological Inquiry, vol. 79, no.2, 2009, pp. 240-255.
Caviness, Courtney M. Oh, I'd Do All the Sex Jokes": Stand-Up Comics and the Negotiation
of Humor, Gender, and Accountability. 2013. Texas State University, Master of Arts
thesis. https://digital.library.txstate.edu/handle/10877/4703.
Choudhuri, Archismita. Moving Forward: Cyber- Misogyny and Creating Safer Spaces
Online. Diss. National Dialogue on Cyber Based Violence, 2018.
Cohen, Harriet L. "Developing Media Literacy Skills to Challenge Television's Portrayal of
Older Women." Educational Gerontology, vol. 28, no.7, 2002, pp. 599-620.
Chatterjee-Padmanabhan, M. Humour in Indian writing in English: Three Novels Women
Writers: Namita Gokhale's Paro Dreams of Passion, Suniti Namjoshi's The
Sahoo 113
Conversations of Cow, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. 2002. University of
Wollogong, Master of Arts Dissertation.
https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredi
r=1&article=3241&context=theses
Clarke, Victoria, and Virginia Braun. "Teaching Thematic Analysis: Overcoming Challenges
and Developing Strategies for Effective Learning." The Psychologist, vol.26, no.2,
2013, pp. 120-123.
Collinson, David L. "'Engineering Humour: Masculinity, Joking and Conflict in Shop-Floor
Relations." Organization Studies 9.2, 1988, pp. 181-199.
Crawford, Mary. "Gender and Humor in Social Context." Journal of Pragmatics 35.9, 2003,
pp.1413-1430
Crenshaw, Kimberle. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist
Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." U.
Chi. Legal F, 1989, 139.
Critchley, Simon. Very little… Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. London,
Routledge.
Cvetkovich, Ann, and Ann Pellegrini. "Public Sentiments." The Scholar and Feminist Online,
vol.2 no.1, 2003, pp. 1-19.
Davis, Jeffery. Children's Television, 1947-1990: Over 200 Series, Game and Variety Shows,
Cartoons, Educational Programs, and Specials. McFarland & Company Incorporated
Pub, 1995.
Davies, Christie. "Ethnic Jokes, Moral Values and Social Boundaries." British Journal of
Sociology ,1982, pp.383-403.
Dean, Greg. Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy. Heinemann, 2000.
Decker, Wayne H., and Denise M. Rotondo. "Relationships among Gender, Type of Humor,
Sahoo 114
and Perceived Leader Effectiveness." Journal of Managerial Issues, 2001, pp. 450-
465.
Deutsch, Francine M. "Undoing gender." Gender & Society, vol.21, no.1, 2007, pp. 106-127.
Deveau, Danielle Jeanine. English Canadian Stand-Up Comedy As a Field of Cultural
Production. Diss. Communication, Art & Technology: School of Communication,
2012.
Downing, John. Radical Media: The Political Experience of Alternative Communication.
South End Pr, 1984.
Dundes, Alan.“Texture, Text, and Context.” Southern Folklore Quarterly, vol. 28, no.4, 1964,
pp.251-265.
Farb, Peter. "Speaking Seriously About Humor." The Massachusetts Review, vol. 22,
no.4,1981, pp. 760-776.
Fernandes, Daniel. “Feminism- Daniel Fernandes Stand-Up Comedy.” YouTube, 7 Mar 2016,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Pwn_LUi1Q&t=187s
Filani, Ibukun. "Discourse Types in Stand-Up Comedy Performances: An Example of
Nigerian Stand-Up Comedy." The European Journal of Humour Research, vol. 3,
no.1, 2015, pp.41-60.
Ford, Thomas E., and Mark A. Ferguson. "Social Consequences of Disparagement Humor: A
Prejudiced Norm Theory." Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 8, no. 1,
2004, 79-94.
Franzini, Louis R. "Feminism and Women's Sense of Humor." Sex Roles, vol. 35,1996, pp.
811-819.
Foot, Hugh. Humor and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications. Routledge, 2017.
Ghosh, Moumita. “Of Saggy Vagina Tales and Sexist Jokes: Meet the ‘Unladylike’, Radhika
Vaz.” Youth Ki Awaaz, 2014.
Gilbert, Joanne R. "Performing Marginality: Comedy, Identity, and Cultural Critique." Text
Sahoo 115
and Performance Quarterly, vol.17, no. 4, 1997, pp. 317-330.
Gilbert, Joanne R. Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique. Wayne
State University Press, 2004.
Gray, Frances. Women and Laughter. Basingstroke: Macmillan, 1994.
Green, Devin. “Punching Down in Comedy.” 22 Aug 2017,
https://medium.com/@devinpg/punching-down-in-comedybb122bc135dd
Greenbaum, Andrea. "Stand-Up Comedy as Rhetorical Argument: An Investigation of Comic
Culture." Humor-International Journal of Humor Research, vol.12, no.1,1999, pp.33-
46.
Gupta, Anika. “A Stand-Up Job.” Hindustan Times. 27 May 2012,
https://www.businesstoday.in/magazine/features/stand-up-comedy-in-english-in-
india/story/24676.html
Gupta, Nidhi. “Dropping the Mic.” The Sunday Guardian, 22 Feb 214, http://www.sunday-
guardian.com/artbeat/dropping-the-mic.
Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT press, 1964.
Habermas, Jürgen. "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere." Habermas and the Public
Sphere, 1992.
Haghani, Fakhri. "The" New Woman" on the Stage: The Making of a Gendered Public Sphere
in Interwar Iran and Egypt." (2008).
Hale, Adrian. "Gender Bender Agenda: Dame Edna, kd lang and Ivana Trump." European
Journal of Humour Research, vol, 4, no. 3, 2016, 1-23.
Harwood, Jake, and Howard, Giles. "Reactions to Older People Being Patronized: The Roles
of Response Strategies and Attributed Thoughts." Journal of Language and Social
Psychology, vol. 15, no. 4, 1996, pp. 395-421.
Sahoo 116
Hekman, Susan. "Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited." Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 22, 2, 1997, pp. 341-365.
Hay, Jennifer. "Functions of Humor in the Conversations of Men and Women." Journal of
Pragmatics, vol. 32, no.6, 2000, pp. 709-742.
Hay, Jennifer. "Gender and Humour: Beyond a Joke." Unpublished Master’s thesis, Victoria
University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand, 1995.
Hertz, Emily. Alternative Comedy: Women in Stand-Up. 2010. Central Europian
University, Master of Arts Thesis, www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/hertz_emily.pdf.
Hitchens, Christopher. “Why Women Aren't Funny.” Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, 29 Aug. 2017,
www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/hitchens200701.
Hooper, Jade, Donald Sharpe, and Sam George Bradley Roberts. "Are Men Funnier than
Women, or Do We Just Think They Are?." Translational Issues in Psychological
Science, vol. 2, no. 1, 2016, pp. 54-62.
Jabbal, Preeti. “The Serious Business of Jabbal.” Indian Link, April 18 2017,
http://www.indianlink.com.au/gags-galore/
Jagad, Ayushu and Sumedh Natu. “How AIB Uses Feminism.” YouTube, 21 Feb 2018,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLIT9buq-FQ&t=181s
Jagad, Ayushi. “The Bridge Talks.” YouTube, 2018, https://youtu.be/JjEiBR_56Go .
Janes, Leslie M., and James M. Olson. "Jeer Pressure: The Behavioral Effects of Observing
Ridicule of Others." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 26, no. 4, 2000,
pp.474-485.
Jenkins, David M. Was It Something They Said? Stand-up Comedy and Progressive Social
Change. 2015. Dissertation.
Kanchwala, Mohammad. “AIB and Feminism: Sumedh Natu & Aayushi Jagad Make One
Sahoo 117
of the Best Articulated Videos Ever.” Social Ketchup, 22 Feb 2018,
https://www.socialsamosa.com/socialketchup/sumedh-natu-aayushi-jagad-criticize-
aib-response/
Keisalo, Marianna. "The invention of Gender in Stand Up Comedy: Transgression and
Digression." Social Anthropology, 2018. ‐
Kelly, Maura. Women’s Voluntary Childlessness: A Radical Rejection of Motherhood?”
Women’s Studies Quaterly, vol. 37, no. 3/4, 2009, pp. 157-172, JSTOR. Kessler,
Suzanne J., and Wendy McKenna. Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. University of
Chicago Press, 1985.
https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Gender.html?id=As563HBuZcAC&source=kp
_book_description&redir_esc=y.
Kotthoff, Helga. “Gender and Humor: The State of the Art.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 38,
no. 1, 2006, pp. 4–25., doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.06.003.
Krefting, Rebecca. All Joking Aside: American Humor and its Discontents. The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2014.
Lakoff, Robin. "Language and Woman's Place." Language in Society, vol. 2, no.1, 1973, pp.
45-79.
Lampert, Martin D., and Susan M. Ervin-Tripp. "Risky Laughter: Teasing and Self-directed
Joking Among Male and Female Friends." Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 38, no.1, 2006,
pp. 51-72.
Landes, Joan B. "Women and the Public Sphere: A Modern Perspective." Social Analysis:
The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, vol. 15, 1984, pp. 20-31.
Lay, Mary M. “Feminist Theory and the Redefinition of Technical Communication.” Journal
of Business and Technical Communication, vol. 5, no. 4, 1991, pp. 348-370
Lewis, Paul. Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature. SUNY
Sahoo 118
Press, 1989.
Lim, Joon Soo, and Guy J. Golan. "Social Media Activism in Response to the Influence of
Political Parody Videos on YouTube." Communication Research, vol. 38, no.5, 2011,
pp. 710-727.
Linstead, Steve. "Jokers Wild: The Importance of Humour in the Maintenance of
Organizational Culture." The Sociological Review, vol.33, no. 4, 1985, pp.741-767.
Lockyer, Sharon. "From Toothpick Legs to Dropping Vaginas: Gender and sexuality in Joan
Rivers' Stand-Up Comedy Performance." Comedy Studies, vol. no. 2, 2011, pp. 113-
123.
Lockyer, Sharon, and Michael Pickering, editors. Beyond A Joke: The Limits of Humour.
Springer, 2005.
Lone, Asaf Ali and Saumya Bhandari. “Mapping Gender Based Violence through “Gender-
Trolling.” National Dialogue on Gender Based Cyber Violence.
Machan, Dyan. "What's Black and Blue and Floats in the Monongahela River." Forbes, 140,
1987, pp. 216-220.
Maguire, Moira, and Brid Delahunt. "Doing a Thematic Analysis: A Practical, Step-by-Step
Guide for Learning and Teaching Scholars." AISHE-J: The All Ireland Journal of
Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, vol. 9, no.3, 2017.
Maheshwari, Laya. “India’s New Face of Comedians Laugh in the Face of Taboos.” The Guardian, 9 Sept. 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/sep/19/india-
comedians-standups-varun-grover-aditi-mittal.
Majumdar, Anushree. “I Think Men Don’t Like Funny Women: Comedian Radhika Vaz.”
The Indian Express, Dec 3 2018.
Mandhani, Nikita. “How Amazon and Netflix Are Changing.” BBC News. 24 June 2018.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44497002
Mangaldas, Leeza. “Why India’s Female Comedians Are the Most Subversive (and necessary)
Sahoo 119
Voices on the Internet.” Forbes, 20 Mar. 2017,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/leezamangaldas/2017/03/20/why-indias-female-
comedians-are-the-most-subversive-and-necessary-voices-on-the-
internet/#5a1450cb170d
Mantilla, Karla. Gendertrolling: How Misogyny Went Viral: How Misogyny Went Viral.
Praege, 2015.
Marlowe, Leigh. “A Sense of Humour”. Representations: Social Constructions of Gender,
edited by R.K. Unger, Baywood Publishing Company, 1989, pp. 145-154.
Martineau, William H. "A Model of the Social Functions of Humor." The Psychology of
Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues, 1972, pp. 101-125.
Mauldin, R. Kirk. "The Role of Humor in the Social Construction of Gendered and Ethnic
Stereotypes." Race, Gender & Class, 2002, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 76-95.
McCall, Leslie. "The Complexity of Intersectionality." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society, 2005, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 65-92.
Meyer, John C. “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in
Communication.” Communication Theory, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 17 Mar. 2006,
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2000.tb00194.x/abstract.
Mickes, Laura, et al. "Who’s Funny: Gender Stereotypes, Humor Production, and Memory
Bias." Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol.19, no.1, 2012, pp. 108-112.
Mintz, Lawrence E. “Standup Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation.” American
Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 1, 1985, pp. 71-80.
Mittal, Aditi. “The Incredible Evening of Singing and Dancing…” Instagram, 28 Aug 2018,
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnAtOQpl55r/
Molyneaux, Heather, et al. "Exploring the Gender Divide on YouTube: An Analysis of the
Sahoo 120
Creation and Reception of Vlogs." American Communication Journal, vo. 10, no.2,
2008, pp.1-14.
Moreau, Elise. “ Internet Trolling: How Do You Spot Real One?.” Lifewire, 5 Oct 2018,
https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-internet-trolling-3485891
Morse, Margaret. "Artemis Aging: Exercise and the Female Body on Video." Discourse,
vol. 10, no.1, 1987, pp. 20-53.
Mulkay, Michael Joseph. On Humor: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society. Polity
Press, 1988.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures,
Pulgrave Macmillan, London, 1989, pp. 14-26.
Naidu, Jaywant. “Traditional Stand-up Comedy.” Deccan Chronicle, 9
Nov 2016.
Neimark, Jill. “The Culture of Celebrity.” Psychology Today, June 9 2016,
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/articles/199505/the-culture-celebrity.
Nesteroff, Kliph. The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American
Comedy. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2015.
Nijholt, Anton. "Incongruity Humor in Language and Beyond: from Bergson to Digitally
Enhanced Worlds." Fourteenth International Symposium on Comunicación Social:
Retos y Perspectivas (Invited),vol. 2, 2015.
Norrick, Neal R and Delia Chearo, editors. Humour in Interaction. John Benjamins
Publishing Company, vol. 82, 2009.
Oswald, Patton. “The Comedians of Comedy.” Comedy Central, 11 Nov 2005.
Paletz, David. L. “Political Humour and Authority: from Support to Subversion.”
International Political Science Review, vol 11, no. 4, 1990, pp. 483-493.
Palta, N. (2015, July 27). It Ain’t ‘Chick Comedy’: Comedian Neeti Palta Sorts Out
Sahoo 121
Feminism, Padded Bras and More. (Ghosh, M. interviewer).
https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/07/neeti-palta-exclusive-interview/
Paul, Subin. "A New Public Sphere? English-language Stand-Up Comedy in
India." Contemporary South Asia, vol. 25, no.2, 2017, pp.121-135.
Paton, George E., et al. Humour in Society: Resistance and Control. Macmillan, 1988.
Peterson, Robin T., and Douglas T. Ross. "A Content Analysis of the Portrayal of Mature
Individuals in Television Commercials." Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 16, no. 4,
1997, pp. 425-433.
Pérez, Raúl. "Learning to Make Racism Funny in the ‘Color-blind’ Era: Stand-Up Comedy
Students, Performance Strategies, and the (Re) production of Racist Jokes in
Public." Discourse & Society, vol.24, no.4, 2013, pp. 478-503.
Pinto, Bruno, David Marçal, and Sofia G. Vaz. "Communicating Through Humour: A Project
of Stand-Up Comedy About Science." Public Understanding of Science, vol. 24, no. 7,
2015, pp. 776-793.
“Purposive Sampling.” Lund research Ltd, 2012
Pushkareva, Natalia. "«Women Scientists Resemble Guinea Pigs…» Anecdotes About
Women-Scientists in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia." Gender and Humour:
Reinventing the Genres of Laughter, vol. 33, 2011, pp. 52-62.
Robinson, Dawn T., and Lynn Smith-Lovin. "Getting a Laugh: Gender, Status, and Humor in
Task Discussions." Social Forces, vol. 80, no.1, 2001, pp. 123-158.
Rajendran, Sowmya. “Kartik Kumar’s Blood Chutney: Comedy It May Be, Feminist It Is
Not.” The News Minute, 14 June 2018,
https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/karthik-kumars-blood-chutney-comedy-it-
may-be-feminist-it-not-83030.
Raut, Siddhesh. (2018). “Not a Laughing Matter- Stand-Up Is a Serious Buisness.” Money
Sahoo 122
Control, 26 May 2018, https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/not-a-laughing-
matter-comedy-is-aserious-business-2544791.html.
Ross, Alison. The Language of Humour. Routledge, 2005.
Rothchild, Jennifer. "Processes of Gendering and the Institutionalization of Gender in the
Family and School: A Case Study from Nepal." Gender Realities: Local and Global.
Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2005, pp. 265-296.
Ravi, Mayuri,J. “10+ Female Comedians In India Whose Side-Splitting Acts Are Worth
Checking Out.” Polka Café, 2nd Mar. 2017, http://www.polkacafe.com/female-
comedians-india-3388.html
Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. University of
Texas Press, 2011.
Rozek, Christina. The Gender Divide in Humor: How People Rate the Competence, Influence,
and Funniness of Men and Women by the Jokes They Tell and How They Tell Them.
2015. Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive, Honours Thesis.
https://repository.wellesley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1323&context=thesiscolle
ction.
Rubin, Gayle. "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex." Towards
An Anthropology Of Woman ,1974, pp.157-210.
https://genderstudiesgroupdu.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/the-rraffic-in-women.pdf.
Ruiz-Madrid, Ma Noelia, and Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez. "A Multimodal Discourse
Analysis Approach to Humour in Conference Presentations: The Case of
Autobiographic References." Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 173,
2015, pp. 246-251.
Russell, Danielle. "Self-deprecatory Humour and the Female Comic." Thirdspace: A Journal
of Feminist Theory & Culture vo.2, no.1, 2007.
Sahoo, Sonali and Das, Rolla. “Is Stand-Up Comedy in India Intersectional.” Language in
Sahoo 123
India, vol.19, no.8, 2018.
Sarker, Pushpendu Bikash. Gender Relationships in The Mahabharata. 2016. University of
Liberal Arts, Bangladesh, B.A Degree dissertation.
https://www.academia.edu/31034811/Gender_Relationships_in_The_Mahabharata.
Saxena, Shambhavi. “Starting a Dialogue on Gender and Sexuality is No Joke! Comedian
Vasu Primlani Tells All.” Youth Ki Awaaz, 2015,
https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/11/vasu-primlani-stand-up-comic-interview/.
Schwehm, Andrew J., Wilson McDermut, and Katherine Thorpe. "A Gender Study of
Personality and Humor in Comedians." Humor, vol. 28, no.3, 2015, pp. 427-448.
Seizer, Susan. "On the Uses of Obscenity in Live Stand-Up Comedy." Anthropological
Quarterly, vol. 84, no.1, 2011, pp. 209-234.
Seizer, Susan. "Jokes, Gender, and Discursive Distance on the Tamil Popular
Stage." American Ethnologist, vol. 24, no.1, 1997, pp. 62-90.
Shah, Manali.”Why An Increasing Number of Stand-Up Comedians Are Choosing to Talk in
Hindi.” 23 March 2017, Hindustan Times, https://m.hindustantimes.com/art-
andculture/why-an-increasing-number-of-stand-up-comedians-are-choosing-to-talk-
inhindi/story-zZO7BcDoeJvG1jsqgNdPNM_amp.html
Shifman, Limor, and Hamutal Ma’apil Varsano. "The Clean, the Dirty and the Ugly: A
Critical Analysis of ‘Clean Joke' Web Sites." First Monday, vol.12, no.2, 2007.
Shifman, Limor. "Humor in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Continuity and Change in
Internet-based Comic Texts." International Journal of Communication, vol. 1, no.1,
2007, 23.
Siegel, Lee. Laughing Matters: Comic Tradition in India. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Sigelman, Lee, and Susan Welch. "The Contact Hypothesis Revisited: Black-white Interaction
and Positive Racial Attitudes." Social forces, vol.71, no.3, 1993, pp.781-795.
Sahoo 124
Sorensen, Majken Jul. “Humor As a Serious Strategy of Non-violent Resistance to
Oppression.” Research Gate, 2008,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229928389_Humor_as_a_Serious_Strategy_
of_Nonviolent_Resistance_to_Oppression.
Snitow, Ann. "Feminism and Motherhood: An American reading." Feminist Review, vol. 20,
no.1, 1992, pp. 32-51.
Soules, Marshall. “Jurgen Habermas and the Public Sphere.” Media Studies, 26 Nov 2007,
https://www.media-studies.ca/articles/habermas.htm.
Storla, Kari. “Laughing About the Unspeakable: Using Humor as a Medium to Talk About
Rape.” Civic Paths, University of South California, 25 Mar 2014,
civicpaths.uscannenberg.org/2014/03/laughing-about-the-unspeakable/.
Stott, Andrew. Comedy. Routledge, 2004. https://books.google.co.in/books/about/
Comedy.html?id=C9eCAgAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y
Sturges, Paul. "Comedy as Freedom of Expression." Journal of Documentation , vol.66, no.2
,2010, pp. 279-293.
Sundaram, Sushmita. “How Sketch Comics like Jaspal Bhatti Laid the Foundation for
Comedy Scene in India.” Scroll.in, 1 Nov 2018,
https://scroll.in/magazine/899206/how-sketch-
comics-like-jaspal-bhatti-laid-the-foundation-for-indias-comedy-scene,
Szostak, Natasha. "Girls on YouTube: Gender Politics and the Potential for a Public
Sphere." The McMaster Journal of Communication , vol. 8, 2013, pp. 46-58.
Tellis, Ashley. “The Nervous Energy of Sanjay Rajoura’s Comedy that Takes on Caste and
Class.”Indian Cultural Forum, http://indianculturalforum.in/2017/05/08/the-nervous-
energy-of-sanjay-rajouras-comedy-that-takes-on-caste-and-class/.
Thankur, Richa. “India’s Female Comedians Are a Badass and Much Needed Counter to
Sahoo 125
Sexist Humour.” Intersectional Feminism-Desi Style. Feb 27, 2017,
https://feminisminindia.com/2017/02/27/female-comedians-counter-sexist-humour/.
“The Female Gaze: Do Yourself a Favour, Don’t Dumbdown.” Youth Ki Awaaz, 4 Nov.
2015,https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/11/vasu-primlani-stand-up-comic-
interview/
Tochim, William M.K. “Descriptive Statistics.” Web Centre for Social Research Methods.
https://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/statdesc.htm
Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. A&C Black, 2001.
Tosun, Sümeyra, Nafiseh Faghihi, and Jyotsna Vaid. "Is An Ideal Sense of Humor Gendered?
A Cross-National Study." Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, 2018, 199.
Upmanyu, Abhishek. “Delhi, Mumbai & Rich People| Stand-Up Comedy by Abhishek
Upmanyu.” YouTube, 23 Jan, 2017.
http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPCDQ34S8Rs&t=68s.
Vaz, Radhika. “Reasons to Not Have a Baby.” YouTube, 28 June 2017,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzP9wTGaZGc&t=5s
Votruba, Ailine Karen. Redefining Feminist Rhetoric in Stand-Up Comedy: Offering Cultural
Critique Through Subversion and Silence. 2018. Iowa State University, Master of Arts
Thesis.
Wagg, Stephen, ed. Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference.
Routledge, 2004.
Watts, Jacqueline. "IV. Can't Take a Joke? Humour as Resistance, Refuge and Exclusion in a
Highly Gendered Workplace." Feminism & Psychology, vol. 17, no.2, 2007, pp. 259-
266.
Weaver, Simon, Raúl Alberto Mora, and Karen Morgan. "Gender and Humour: Examining
Discourses of Hegemony and Resistance." 2016, pp. 227-233.
Sahoo 126
West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. "Doing Gender." Gender & society, vol. 1, no.2,
1987, pp. 125-151.
Westervelt, Amy. “If Motherhood the Unfinished Work of Feminism?” The Guardian.
Williams, Michele, and Kyle J. Emich. "The Experience of Failed Humor: Implications for
Interpersonal Affect Regulation." Journal of Business and Psychology, vol. 29, no.4,
2014, pp. 651-668.
Weitz, Eric. The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy. Vol. 359. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009.
Zevallos, Zuleka. “Sociology of Gender.” The Other Sociologist.
https://othersociologist.com/sociology-of-gender/
Zillmann, Dolf. "Disparagement Humor." Handbook of Humor Research. Springer, New
York, NY, 1983. pp. 85-107.
Zinoman, Jason. “Female Comedians Breaking the Taste Taboo Ceiling.”The New York
Times, 15 Sept 2011.
Appendix 1
Theme Performer Title of the Video
Men in Delhi and Mumbai Abish Delhi Mumbai Rivalry - Abish Mathew Mathew Stand-Up Comedy
Abhishek Delhi, Mumbai & Rich People | Stand-up Upmanyu Comedy by Abhishek Abhijit Delhi Guy Issues - Stand-up Comedy by Ganguly Abijit Ganguly Kunal Kamra Bombay Indore | Stand-Up Comedy by Kunal Kamra
Kenny North Indians can talk to anybody – Sebastian Stand- Up Comedy : Kenny Sebastian
Upbringing/Childhood Kanan Gill Kanan Gill - Siblings - Stand-Up Comedy
Kenny Indian Parents, OCD and Electricity at Sebastian Home - Stand-Up Comedy by Kenny Sebastian Abhishek Breakup, Respecting Elders, & Upmanyu Discrimination | Stand-Up Comedy by Abhishek Upmanyu
Bachelor life Biswa Kalyan Biswa Kalyan Rath - Banana & P Rath Zakir Khan Suno, gharwale aa rahe hai! - Zakir Khan
Kenny Me, My Mother & Our Maid - Kenny Sebastian Sebastian | Don't Be That Guy
Rich and Middle class Kenny Middle class restaurant problems : Stand- Sebastian Up Comedy -Kenny Sebastian Taking a bucket bath in India : Stand-Up Comedy - Kenny Sebastian
Education Kenny Exams, CBSE, Punishments - Stand Up system/School/childhood Sebastian Comedy Biswa Kalyan Comedy for Kids - Stand Up Rath Zakir Khan Zakir Khan - Board Exams And Clarity In An Engineer's Life Kenny Why Sanskrit is useless (Stand-Up Sebastian Comedy) :Kenny on biology,10th standard & CBSE! Zakir Khan What happens when you fail in an exam! AIB Diwas
Sex, marriage and Abhijit Sex & A Funeral | Stand-up Comedy by Bollywood Ganguly Abijit Ganguly
Parody - political satire Sorabh Pant Beef Ban & Gay Rights: Stand-Up Comedy by Sorabh Pant The BEST TV Show in India!: Stand-Up Comedy by Sorabh Pant Kunal Kamra Patriotism & the Government | Stand-up Comedy by Kunal Kamra Varun Grover Padmaavat & The Parrot - Stand-up Comedy by Varun Grover Abhijeet Ganguly Modi Ji is Big Boss | Stand- up Comedy by Abijit Ganguly Perspectives on women Abish Mathew What Women Think About During Sex - Abish Mathew (New York Comedy Club)
Abhijit Ganguly Indian Moms & their Obsession – Stand-up Comedy by Abijit Ganguly 3. Me, My Mother & Our Maid - Kenny Sebastian | Don't Be That Guy Zakir Khan - When I meet a Delhi Girl | AIB Diwas
Thematic analysis of female Stand-Up Comedy scripts
Theme Performer Title of the video
Motherhood Radhika Vaz Reasons not to have a baby: Radhika Vaz: Stand-Up Comedy I have never been pregnant: Radhika Vaz: Stand-Up Comedy Are children overrated?: Radhika Vaz: Stand-Up Comedy Men, Women, Politics Radhika Vaz Why men and women have separate toilets: Radhika Vaz: Stand-Up Comedy Radhika Vaz Ask a Woman Her Age
Radhika Vaz Clorox for Me
Radhika Vaz Why Men Marry Younger Women Vasu Primlani Vasu Primlani: Mahabharata
Neeti Palta LadiesFirst Shaadi.co m Stand-Up Comedy by Neeti Palta Vasu Primlani Vasu Primlani: Didi or aunty Vasu Primlani NEVER Trust Your Mom!
Neeti Palta Men Peeing In Public | Stand- Up Comedy by Neeti Palta Neeti Palta Neeti Palta on Current Affairs
Neeti Palta Neeti Palta on Men
Aditi Mittal The Story of Madhumakkhi| Stand-up comedy by Aditi Mittal Aditi Mittal Anything for Love- LIVE in Chennai (2015)| Song Parody Aditi Mittal Aditi Mittal On Indian Ghosts | Stand-Up Comedy Neeti Palta Indian Parents Favourite Weapon | Stand-Up Comedy by Neeti Palta
Aging Neeti Palta Aditi Mittal On Vaginal Tightening Cream | Funny Video Ask a woman her age Why men marry younger women Body Aditi Mittal Bra Shopping | Stand- Up Comedy by Aditi Mittal
Aditi Mittal on Indian Ghosts Neeti Palta Neeti Palta on body image
Vasu Primlani Vasu Primlani - Didi or aunty
Delhi men v/s Mumbai men Hilarious comedy on public transport: Vasu Primlani on the Metro Radhika Vaz Why men and women are different: Radhika Vaz: Stand-Up Comedy Ask a woman her age
Street assault Vasu Primlani HILARIOUS comedy on public transport: Vasu Primlani on the Metro Neeti Palta Neeti Palta on Women
Ankita Bombay Girls, Local Train | Stand-Up Comedy By Ankita
Size Bharti Singh Great Indian Laughter Challenge 4- 19 SEP Bharti Singh Bharti Singh The Great Indian Laughter Challenge
Appendix 2
Vasu Primlani: Mahabharat| Views: 40k| Upvotes: 341|Downvotes: 96
So I was reading Mahabharat the other day and I find I have some questions. There's
Dhritarashtra, the blind king, there's Gandhari who's going to marry Dhritarashtra, the blind king. And she's got a question and the question is I wonder what it's like to be blind Fair question! So she puts a patti on her eyes and I can imagine a few times you bang into furniture and say teri ma ki.(“teri ma ki” is a derogatory abuse that has an explicit sexual connotation and included the mother) That is sufficient experience, but no she keeps it on permanently. I'm like who are you helping? Tomorrow Dhritarashtra will be like Gandhari mujhe chabian nahi mil rahi hain (Gandhari, I can’t find the keys). Gandhari will be like
“mujhe bhi nahi pata kahan hai (Even, I can’t find them). Dhritrashtra will be Gandhari tum kahan ho (where are you Gandhari?), Gandhari will be like mujhe khud nahi pata mei kahan hun (I, myself, am unaware of where I am!). Dhritrashtra will be like Gandhari tum mere budhape ka sahara ho (You are the support system of my old age), Gandhari will be like koi kisi ke budhape ka sahara nahi banega (nobody will become anybody’s support system in old age), we’ll keep banging (could have been used ambiguously-hitting on things and banging as a sexual act) into things.
They were a mythological couple, so you can’t say things about them for sure. But, one thing, I can say for certain, it wasn’t love at first sight. And then there’s Kunti, and then she gets vardaan (boon) from one from sage Durvasa that she can think of any celestial being and he's gonna come down and they can you know (makes a pop sound) so the first guy that she thinks of the Surya dev to the Sun God I'm just wondering first time she saw him and the first words out of her mouth “God, you're so hot!” (Primlani)
Why men and women are different: Radhika Vaz: Stand-up Comedy |View: 33, 086|
Up votes: 498|Down votes: 97|
Women are under a lot of pressure to be young. We are not under any fucking pressure to be clever, to be ambitious, to be fucking funny, nah. Only to be young, or at the very least pretend that we are young. Now, like I said I am no longer young. It was a few years before I like turned 40 that I started to notice how much pressure we were under to be youthful. So, I am having a conversation with my friend Swati. She is not listening to a fucking word I am saying. She is just staring at my hair. You know Vaz, I think you should colour your hair now, because now you don’t have so much greys, because if you do it, now no one will notice. But if you wait for a few years then you’ll have a lot and then everyone is going to know what you did. I was okay, thank you. But I think we all know that the only reason you want me colouring my hair, so that nobody can guess how old you are! But the point here is
Swati would never have said this to a grey haired male friend. Right?
So, I took this complaint of mine to my silver headed friend Vishwas and he says to me “ya,
I guess we guys have George Clooney to thank for that” and he is right, you fuckers have
George Clooney to thank for that because see what we have done is we have handed you people role models that show you aging isn’t just perfectly normal but that can also be kind of sexy. We do not have role models. I took this theory of mine to Google, alright? Which is where I take all my fucking theories. Which is why they are so strong and I did a search for
‘sexy older men’ sure enough! Website after website detailing every half way decent looking guy over the age of 40, okay! Erick Dane, Eric Banner, Bruce Willis, Barack Obama,
Salman Khan, Amir Khan, Saif kh, anyone with the last name Khan..were fucking on there.
Anthony Hopkins was on there. Ya, he was. Okay? Which goes to prove my point that every fucking man and his grandfather adequately represented. Then I do a search for sexy older women, Guess what I got. *Interaction* (That would have been a step in the right direction. Everything that you said.) Porno sites guys. I got a bunch of fucking porno sites. Sexy older woman fucks younger man. Mature sexy woman sucks younger man. Hot MILF and grandma dot orgy dot com. These are my role models!
Big Fat Indian Weddings - Stand-up Comedy|Views: 1,338, 435| Upvotes: 15k|
Downvotes: 1.6k| (Full excerpt in appendix 1)
And, you know, bang in the middle of every Punjabi wedding in the baraat, there is a ‘booby aunty’( hand gesture). She is the one dancing away with wild abandon, not caring who knockers, knock- off. It even takes a while to stop. This is why they put blinkers on our mares. Prevention of cruelty to animals. And auntyji’s pallu specially gravity friendly. And notice ha the vigourousness of aunty’s dance is directly proportional to how bigger catch the dulha is! NRI hai dunga dunga dunga dunga This is why the day after the wedding all
Punjabi uncles come down with a bad case of cervical (Bending and gazing from one side to another ) I am telling you next morning ask uncle ji kya huya (what happened)
Bra Shopping |Stand Up Comedy by Aditi Mittal (Excerpt from the routine)Views:
8586020| Upvotes: 65k| Downvotes: 6k| (Full excerpt in appendix 1)
“And I remember the first time I noticed breasts. First of all I was like breasts are basically a large conspiracy to keep the safety pin industry in functioning. Because we all know that na, that one button and some oddly placed, it’s just sticking out. And you’re like ahaaa ahh..andar se , upar neeche se (from the inside, top and the bottom). And I remember the first time I saw a pair of breasts… like I noticed a pair of breasts. Was one of those seniors in school. And I remember the first thought that came t my mind was iska school ka shirt ka istri toh gaya (her school shirt’s ironing will get ruined). She is going to get into so much trouble in assembly, dear God. And by the way buying a bra is a whole other ball game. ( for a lack of a better pun over there) Like you go there, and for some reason, for some odd reason, for some odd reason, there is always some guy. There’s always a man behind the counter first of all. There’s always a guy behind the counter. His name is something like chotu or Biju. And you go there because you’re like, you know and so you’re totally horrified and embarrassed. You go to mumble your bra size at him. You’re like “bhai sahibmuch mumble mumble size de dijiye”(brother give me mumble mumble size) . And then chotu or biju will do one of these things where he’ll be like “ madam aap 36 c try hi kar lijiye (madam, you try, only 36 c) and the worst is he will always be right. For guys, let me put this in perspective, this is like going to a chemist to buy condoms. And you’re like “bhai saab zara condom dena (brother, can you please give me condom)” and the chemist is like “who holi ke chote waale gubbare hai na who leke a jana(Bring the balloons that are used during Holi)” . He’s like “sorry beta aapka magnum sirf ice-cream main hone wall hai”( sorry son, your magnum is going to turn into an ice-cream). And as you sort of..now.. big- India, liberal India, India with new brands and new shops so now they have these high-end bra stores with names that you can’t pronounce, so youc can’t even show off. You’re like “yes indeed I am wearing a “kkkkhhhh” brand bra! Yes ! how kind of you to notice!” Like there’s a bra brand, the spelling is enchante, which is pronounced 3,000 rupees [Applause] [Applause] coz there’s always that one woman in the shop and she hates you.she hates you before you have walked in to the shop. You’re an inconvenience to her before you, walked in. And she ..she’s like what is this. Why are you bringing your imperfect breasts at me? One is looking there. Kanye breast syndrome . merko nahi dekhne ka hai (I don’t want to see). And then she’ll come with her tape, which then she just loses her mind with. She is like, here there , circumference, diameter, nipple to nipple, Mumbai to Pune, and at this point , I’m like “ guys do something to impress her’ sing a song – ek alto, ek soprano- GO! And then after taking these 3000 measurements, she’ll go to the back of the shop, be like “Biju idhar aa, dekhke madam ka size batana(Biju come here, and look at madam and tell the size)” right. I talk about this because it’s cancer awareness month, right and I realize that we spend more time and money thinking about what happens on the outside of our tits….breasts than what happens on the inside. Like it worries me to think that the time that a woman finds out she has a lump in her breasts is when she spent 40 minutes on the train when after someone's grouped and elbowed her for 20 minutes and been like “maza ayaa madam(did you enjoy it madam?)” but there might be lump, you should go check it out” and so my advice to you ladies is touch yourself once every six months touch yourself and I like that a guy in the back is like
“hehehhehhee video bhejna, theek hai na? (Send me the video, alright?)”
Reasons to not have a baby: Radhika Vaz: Stand-up comedy| views 12,336 | Upvotes
201| Downvotes: 86| (Full excerpt in appendix 1)
“When a woman doesn't want to have a baby the whole world is entitled to an explanation.
Because the world is accustomed to women like Angelina Jolie and less accustomed to the likes of you and me, alright! so, there I was crouched and hiding in my dark little corner with my dirty little secret ok, and I knew that if I were to come out of the corner and into the light
I was going to have to come up with a reason that everybody fuccking liked. At some point people stopped asking me for reasons and they started giving me reasons to have a baby.
“You know Radz I think you and Deepak should definitely have a baby now because it (will) take your relationship to the next level.” I’m sorry that my shitty low level relationship isn’t working out for you. Aaa but I am not clear how having a baby supposed to improve my situation, alright! but they tell us the shit, they tell us this all the time; “have a baby your husband will love you more” “have a baby your life will improve” “have a baby it's the best thing you can do as a woman.” Everybody tells us this shit including my mother-in-law beta bache ko Paida Karlo Deepak bhi settle down ho jayega (Daughter, please get pregnant so that even Deepak gets to settle down in his life) and I am like hang on a second your fully formed 44 year old man son is yet to settle down that's on you bitch. You fucked up, I am not having any babies.