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Why Do Men Find Comfort in Samay Raina's 'India’s Got Latent'?
THR examines the ‘boundary-pushing comedy’ on the uber-popular web series, hosted by Samay Raina
“You are a feminist. He is a man. How does [the marriage] dynamic work?” noted comedian Samay Raina asks Banti Banerjee, a Bengali-Bihari comedian and contestant on his viral YouTube show India’s Got Latent.
Banerjee’s husband, Aditya HK, also a comedian, was called on stage where he cracked a few “anti-feminist”, maternity-leave-paternity-leave-type jokes — nothing acidic — his wife standing behind him, laughing, thumping his back when he got a hoot from the audience. Banerjee responds to Raina’s question — which really is a joke, which really is a statement — with “Main uske mummy par bhi joke maar deti hoon,” clinching the punchline. (“I make his mother the butt of my jokes.”)
The kids were right all along — women are from Mars, men are from Venus; one endures, the other has a penis. Or some such neat assembly of gender. It is a boundary that is cleanly set in stone, though, this is not the boundary that comedians speak of when they tout their ‘boundary-pushing’ comedy. There, they mean edgy comedy. But to choose the boundary that you want to erase through humour is not edgy. It is comfortable. And to act edgy when you are, in fact, inhabiting comfort, is the dance that comedy in India is all too familiar with.
Since its launch on 14 June last year on Raina’s YouTube channel, India’s Got Latent — a parody of India’s Got Talent, and inspired by Kill Tony, an American live stand-up comedy variety show — has garnered what can be called an energised and outsized audience, one that, perhaps, skews male.
The trick of the show is that the contestant wins not based on their talent, but their self-awareness. Contestants rate themselves, and the judges — a rotating crew of people, mostly friends, fellow comics, and celebrities — with Raina as the fulcrum, rate the contestant, and if the contestant’s and the judges’ average match, the contestant wins cash. Beatboxers, poets, flutists, dress cutters, Salman Khan impressionists, stoned rhapsodists, all ply their trade in front of Raina and his jury, a humiliation that is also a celebration.
The episodes uniformly trend on YouTube. There is not a single episode of India’s Got Latent with fewer than 20 million views. Raina has put bonus content behind a paywall, which is being lapped up. A few weeks ago, he officially launched an app that houses all episodes of the show, and within a day of its release it climbed the charts, reaching the top spot on Apple’s App Store.
The fame felt sudden, and then it was everywhere. Frequent walkouts from the show made news headlines. Raina insisted that people outrage — but in the comments section. That way his ad revenue would pile up. There is a cottage industry of viral videos estimating how much Raina is making from this show, some pitting him as India’s richest comedian. There is another cottage industry posting viral clips from his show. A headline reads: “Comedian goes viral for sharing hilarious reason why she’s a ‘weak independent woman’ on Samay Raina’s ‘India’s Got Latent’”. The vultures come when the carrion calls.
Was this bulging audience latent too? One that Raina popped into consciousness, making it respectable. Have people found what they were always looking for — that same ‘edgy’ façade to couch what is familiar and comfortable, to be around mostly men? Men who are tired of the social demands that respectability makes on them and so resist with humour.
When a poet took the stage demanding “misogynists and pseudo feminists” pay attention, Raina pushed his frame forward, as though volunteering. When she clarified she was not calling him a misogynist, he replied, “Maine khud ko bola.” (“I called myself that.”)
The questions pile up, some so silly you would not even want to ask them: Is Raina a misogynist? Is he playing the role of a misogynist? Is he taking the piss out of the very word misogynist, while being indifferent to whether he is one or not? Humour makes these questions redundant in some ways, but in other ways, sharpens the demand for their answer.
The thing about a contentious joke is that people who hate it or feel demeaned by it take it literally, and those who make or defend it will insist that it was only said for effect. What if there is a blurred line between a joke being literal and one being said for effect? This line that allows you to indulge in the former, while using the latter as a shield to perform the joke without guilt, with an iron-clad smugness and a martyr-like shamelessness that wields the freedom of expression as a weapon, not a shield.
Our desires are not intrinsically well behaved. Humour allows this misbehaviour to find a language. We must not mistake this for edginess. It is a mere expression of what we find most comfortable. The edge is where there is freefall. India’s Got Latent is just foaming rapids.
What feels prickly is the way gender is so neatly, lopsidedly split in the show. The presence of a woman feels heavier, more emphatic, than that of men, even as women are barely there, as contestants or judges. Seven out of the forty-nine judges — out of whom Raina and Balraj Singh Ghai are recurring — so far have been women. Their presence is often related to their bodies. The jokes being cracked and diverted on Poonam Pandey, Rakhi Sawant, Uorfi Javed, Bharti Singh are on their appearances, their bodies, which they themselves have ascribed fame to, but whose consequences they have to endure, surrounded by men. They do so by either turning the joke on its head or walking out, as Uorfi did when a contestant likened her to retired pornstar Mia Khalifa.
In 2018, when Aayushi Jagad and Sumedh Natu made a video on how women are portrayed in AIB sketches, they made a salient point. That unless the sketch was about being a woman, they would just not be featured. (Comedians were reached out to for comment but were either unwilling or uninterested in furnishing one.) Watching the Uorfi Javed episode, where she was the only woman on stage throughout the hour — there seems to be a woman contestant in the deleted footage, available for subscribers — during which she barely speaks, produces a strange question: Is this what people like? Years ago, when Ranveer Allahbadia was asked about his entirely male crew that he posted a video of, his response, “launda energy”, gestured at a world where men find solace only in the company of men. So Raina calling a woman ugly is him extending the rudeness he would in the company of men to women. The disproportionate price women pay for being considered ‘ugly’ is a question that gets pushed aside in this quip. Humour cannot take on the burdens of social justice. But should it exacerbate it?
Raina asks Bharti Singh, a comedian who has become the collective target of Indian fat shaming, about the jokes cracked on weight and height, to which she retorts, “Mote logon ki vajah se hi housefull lagta hai,” (Fat people make housefulls possible). The camera cuts to a heavyset man in the audience who performs an adaab with his hand; she continues, “Yeh aur teen-char log baith jaaye toh housefull lagega.” (If he and three or four more like him sit, then the place will look housefull.) You endure this comedy by joking about it, playing both the butt and barrel of the joke. So when Tanmay Bhatt comes on as a judge, weight is brought up again, this time Raina making himself the punchline while also gesturing at Bhatt’s radical weight loss, “Tanmay bhai,” he introduces the comedian, “making me look fat!”
There is an episode of India’s Got Latent, with Rakhi Sawant, that shows how differently men and women navigate spaces, how they are conscious about taking space, and once taken, leave that space. While one of the male contestants who keeps rambling needs to be told to reply with shorter anecdotes, another contestant, Khushi Saini, a woman, in the middle of her storytelling, stops, and asks, “Time hai na?” (There’s time, right?) These are moments when you realise that there are spaces that produce a flatness where gender gets expressed neatly. This is what is, perhaps, comforting. That Raina has provided this space.
It is undeniable that Raina is a man whose humour flows like a breath — unlaboured, inherent. You do not see the gap between thought and speech, as though he isn’t trying to be funny; he just is. His comebacks, his responses, the way he finds a hook and keeps tugging at it from different angles is a masterclass in inhabiting a moment, turning every suspicious exhalation into a choked laugh. He is also an easy presence, lassoing every man onto his stage with “bhai” or brother, initiating them into some vague brotherhood, whose membership is not neatly outlined. But those who know, know.