'India’s Got Latent' Season 2: Samay Raina's Got His Kiddy Gloves On

In February 2025, a few days after comedian Samay Raina’s time, attention, bank balance, and patience were clogged with legal cases, including one by the Chief Minister of Assam, and poison-penned prime time debates and threats, including one by the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, he had a live performance in Washington DC. He couldn’t cancel it — there was too much money on the line. Neither could he leave the elephant in the room unaddressed. When he got on stage, “It was shaking from the applause,” Raina told Chalchitra Talks, “I made one joke about this [controversy], and phat gaya… I continued with my jokes, which did well, but the applause I got for my first joke, where I addressed the controversy — that was the biggest laugh of the night. I realised isme toh likhna padega.” 

In April 2026, he released his comeback special, Still Alive, which per a report by news agency PTI, was the most-watched full-length stand-up comedy special in the world. It is currently sitting at 65 million views on YouTube. 

Becoming  (in)famous enough to get a legal case filed, and using that case to further the fame—the “come back” special has become a genre and tradition unto itself. Everybody loves a martyr. It is amazing, though not unusual, that Raina has used the legal cases filed against him, turning his career inside out, into a money-spinning boomerang, and now a second season for his hit show India’s Got Latent, which premiered on both Netflix and YouTube last week to instant virality — garnering over five million views within a few hours of premiering. The martyr was minting. 

But martyr to what cause? Raina is most definitely not Kunal Kamra —whose comeback special dug deeper, flipping fingers fiercer at those who hounded him the first time, instead of apologising, as Raina did. Neither is Raina some Dave Chapelle-like figure, who cheaply needles minorities for a quick laugh. 

Raina was always a man of the men — the boundaries he pushed in his comedy sketches were not edgy, but well within the launda limits of those who loved seeing a man fly on stage, witty, languages potholed with potty-mouthed insults and “Love you bhai”s, charming and rude, careless and carefree — and always at ease. What he ended up congealing was a vague brotherhood, one whose foundation was threatened by the loss of India’s Got Latent. The joke was that he got to say what he said. Can’t men be men anymore?

A new season of India’s Got Latent means a new kind of brotherhood. It comes on the heels of Still Alive, where Raina uses phrases like “patriarchal setup”, but not as a setup for a punchline — he speaks of it unironically. He also speaks of boundaries; of mental health checks; of anxiety, bullying, and overcoming that twin-pressure by performing/faking. He expressed the masculine urge to become emotionally stunted by suppressing emotions (or I suppose the masculine urge to suppress emotion, becoming emotionally stunted). He ended it by noting, “You only fight when the fight is fair—when you have a chance of winning.” He also promises another season of India’s Got Latent, “Wild  wild fucking show, cut karke soft version dalenge.” 

This was that new brotherhood — which unlike the first season’s shoulder shrugging coolness, was now built on the foundation of something vulnerable being acknowledged. That Raina is fitting his personality into his performance, and not the other way round. That the audience must fit their expectations into this shifted performance is an unsaid rule of this brotherhood. 

The one hour India’s Got Latent episodes that he would upload would be chipped and chiseled from the five-hour-long live show — removing not just what would be boring, but would be too provocative. Raina’s irreverence online, pre-FIR, was his safe performance. But even that was not enough. He was pushed further into safety, hiring an army of lawyers — is that the collective noun? — credited at the end of the first episode. 

But not even that was enough. For the first guests, he got Alia Bhatt and Sharvari, who came on to promote Yash Raj Films’ Alpha, both women, promoting a film from a production house that stood for family viewing, both actresses with an army of PR — is that the collective noun? — not to mention that of Netflix, hovering around every word with a hawk’s eye. Latent got their bourgeois respectability, (2 million views from Netflix over the weekend) and the hope was that some of Latent’s irreverence and fanbase would rub off on the otherwise straitjacket promotional strategy of a film that is being hauled over the Twitter coals. 

But that is now how the math works. Virtues and vices don’t rub off into an equilibrium — instead, they feed off the contrast, and burn brighter as distinctions.

Irreverence — the very thing Raina’s brand of comedy stood on — was demolished, first by himself, then the state, then the platform. He had kiddy gloves on — Raina, the host, dealing with the actors; Raina, the editor, dealing with the law; Raina’s fans dealing with the show. Everyone is trying to be safe — don’t critique the show as though it were pre-FIR; don’t be crass on the show as though it were pre-Netflix; don’t be loose tongued on the show as though Rakhi Sawant were on the hot seat. 

People caught small moments. Before making a joke on Mahesh Bhatt, you can see Raina whispering something in Bhatt’s ears, and her nodding, as though approval. It was read online as Raina asking permission to make that joke. Pauses felt magnified. Reaction shots were being parsed apart like evidence. 

The jokes cracked on Bhatt — being a bimbo, being forgotten on the Cannes red carpet, being hated online, Jigra’s failure — did not ruffle her too much. Nor did it give Bhatt a launchpad to counter-strike or double down in self-deprecation; she only responded with laughter, and sometimes with an introspective, exhausted gaze. Bhatt’s presence was not going to rain thunder — she was kind to the contestants, never making them feel worse than they probably already do, pumping them up as she sent them off, with a hug or a dance or a compliment.

I suppose she leaned into the camaraderie of the show — one which Raina arrives at through cussing. Bhatt, instead, arrived at it through kindness. But Latent is as much about the camaraderie as it is about how we get there — through a smile or a strike. You could feel the show splintering as it collected its laughs. Different shows were playing out simultaneously. Or, perhaps, more poignantly, Latent is that new, splintered show.