Jester's Privilege

Samay Raina, Kunal Kamra and the Shakespearean Fool

The most profound moment in King Lear by William Shakespeare is the storm scene. After giving away his kingdom to his daughters, Lear is abandoned by them. Everybody who vowed their loyalty is gone.

Everyone but the Fool.

He follows Lear into the storm and tells him the obvious truth — that he was foolish to give away his kingdom to daughters whose love he mistook for something real. But he wraps his rebukes in riddles and jokes because that is the only way truth survives in court.

This is the jester’s privilege. He can say the unsayable as long as he makes the king laugh.

I have thought long about where the fool lives now.

And he lives, I think, in stand-up comedy.

(Yeah, I know. Stay with me.)

Comedy has always been the art form with the most consistent access to the king’s ear. It’s the one medium that could say the unspeakable, most difficult truths and have them received as entertainment rather than a threat.

It’s actually very structural. You see, comedy makes you laugh first, you lose your defences that the political speech or journalism would trigger, and by the time you have fully registered what was said, it has already settled somewhere in you.

Comedy has sort of steered the ship without ever really holding the anchor (so proud of that analogy, btw). It moves culture. It shifts what feels normal and what feels absurd or taboo. And this is a very subtle and collective process. Our brain slowly registers what we’re allowed to laugh at, and in doing so, it decides what we are allowed to think, subconsciously.

The stand-up scene in India does not always reckon with this. And I say this not as an accusation but as an observation (and one I hold with a lot of uncertainty). Because the rebuttal writes itself -- “people just want to laugh after the 9-5..they are not looking for a TED talk..they are looking for respite”. And that is all completely, entirely fair.

I watch shows with anti-feminist undertones sometimes because they are my comfort shows. And I am aware, even as I’m watching, that some of it is seeping in. That what I accept as a joke in the moment becomes slightly more normal in my mind by the next morning. Or that the line between laughing at a scene and quietly absorbing it is actually thinner than I’d like it to be. So, I am not speaking from outside this. I am very much inside it.

~

Last year, India’s Got Latent was shut down.

And I was genuinely two minds about it. I usually land on the side of — I may not agree with what you say, but I will forever defend your right to say it. That is my default position, and I hold it very seriously. But the joke that triggered the shutdown was about incest, and I kept thinking that had it not been checked, had it been allowed to pass and be laughed at and scrolled away simply, what would it have normalised slowly, in the collective psyche?

Because that’s exactly how swift the osmosis of ideas is. It shifts in moments that accumulate into an acceptable idea over time.

So the initial outrage, imo, was necessary. It drew a cultural boundary that upheld the civilised framework. Where it went wrong was everything that came after. The media turned it into a witch hunt (which is still ongoing, btw). Ranveer Allahbadia, Samay Raina, and the entire India’s Got Latent and the stand-up ecosystem —it became a spectacle that conveniently redirected attention from the more pressing national concerns.

~

The latest comeback video of Samay Raina moved me to tears. Someone with his reach and impact in India said out loud that he was not okay. That he had struggled and was medicated. In a country where mental health still carries the weight of shame and silence, this is not nothing. The jester used his privilege, and he used it for something so genuinely real and intimate. And the “I love you, dad” trend that followed. The video had cracked something open, and people felt permission.

But can I point to a nuance that got lost midway? Men struggle to express emotions and suffer in silence; they need to be allowed to feel. True. But men do not suppress all emotions - the rage, anger, pride, lust (these are all emotions too), they suppress the ones that have been culturally coded as feminine and, by the logic of patriarchy, inferior. So, this ain’t suppression exactly, it’s hierarchy. Patriarchy had collectively decided that certain emotions belong to women (hysteria, grief, vulnerability, love, etc.) and the ones that signify power and strength are the forte of men. Men have suffered greatly for not being able to access those emotions (this is why the male loneliness epidemic exists), but they have also simultaneously deprived women to freely access the ones they claimed for themselves. Like, her anger is termed hysteria; her ambition is aggression.

~

Kunal Kamra is a different kind of jester. His comedy has always been explicitly political and left-leaning. And I want to be careful with my discourse here because I am not saying his politics are wrong. What I’m saying is that the jester’s privilege has always had a ceiling, and Kamra’s ceiling is visible if you look at it long enough.

Even the Shakespearean fool could not touch Elizabeth. That was the limit of his privilege.

Kamra speaks against the right. Fair. But the absence of certain conversations—Islamic extremism, for instance—is not accidental. The community that sustains a comedian like Kamra exists on one side of a very polarised spectrum. A moderate would not survive this ecosystem. So, the jester positions himself where the audience is, and in doing so, the jester’s privilege becomes the jester’s brand.

This is not unique to one comedian. This is the structural trap of the modern jester. Shakespeare’s Fool followed Lear into the storm with nothing to lose. The contemporary stand-up comedian has a following, a livelihood, a platform. The privilege and the constraint arrive together.

~

So, here is where I land, and I want to be upfront, I do not land cleanly.

I do not think that comedy has to be essentially political or that a joke has to mean something or challenge something. People want to laugh; it’s a need in our modern society, and it is absolutely fair. Dark humour exists, stereotypes get joked about, prejudice gets processed through comedy and sometimes that’s exactly how it should work. I have no interest in policing the texture of a joke.

But I do think (and this is an observation, not a verdict) that the people who hold the jester’s privilege should know that they hold it. What gets normalised through their laughter will not be un-normalised easily. Their audience is not passive, nor is their collective subconscious; it is always absorbing and curating itself. The fool who thinks he is just making the people laugh (”just” is the keyword here) is also, always, doing something else.

Where exactly is the line I genuinely do not know. I have thought hard about it, and I do not have an answer. Is there a threshold past which the joke stops being a joke and becomes an ideology in itself? If yes, then at what point exactly?

~

Midway through the play, the Fool vanishes, and the bard never explains why. There is no explanation or a death scene. Maybe the truth had been spoken, and there wasn’t anything to be said that would change the outcome because nobody acted on it. Or maybe the privilege ran out. I just keep thinking about the Fool’s disappearance. About what it means for the truth to be said out loud, into a laughing room, and then dissolve.

-anshika