Am I the only one who is a tad suspicious of Vir Das’ wokeness?
Let me explain what I mean. I think because some of his material is catering to a western audience he has this tendency to use orientalist tropes as material. I can’t distinguish between the internal orientalism and the punchline. I don’t know. Does this make sense?
Again I do applaud him for speaking out but the India he represents is an India that has mostly been protected by privilege. I think I would like to applaud him for taking a stand, but I also think it’s healthy to open up a debate about stand-up and discourses of power embedded
Comedic material.
Watch Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette for a critique of stand up and power.
They say “do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from someone who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak. In order to seek permission to speak”.
This is the kind of reflection in stand up that is missing in India. Which is possibly why we have comedians with privilege cracking casually casteist and racist jokes and comedians from the margins doing exactly what Hannah Gadsby says.
The selling point of a stand up comedian’s popularity cannot be how many obvious truths they point out about the government and society. However we live in a time when even that is celebrated as “courage”. That’s fine. Under normal conditions we would call it freedom of speech
and forget about it. We don’t live under normal conditions. So I guess we are all redefining courage.
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