Chris Rock to Kunal Kamra: My Transformation into a Comedy Uncle
Personal Essay: ‘You have arrived at the footsteps of Indian uncle-dom when, watching someone in the public sphere do something of note, you think to yourself: “That could have been me.” In my case, the “what-if” pursuit was stand-up comedy.’
About 25 minutes into Kunal Kamra’s latest comedy special, I laughed the hardest I had in a while. Kamra was talking about how tweeting something in the heat of the moment could have legal consequences for months to come. He imagined a stenographer of the Supreme Court having to transcribe one of his tweets, while trying to maintain the decorum demanded by the court. The result: “Let’s all forget yesterday’s talk, just you come swing from my cock”
The special was titled Uncle Logic (2024), described as “an attempt to understand the least constructive and most heard people in our communities – uncles.” After I had watched it in full, my mind went into a rabbit hole on the theme of the show. What, exactly, I wondered, is the hallmark of being an Indian uncle?
No, it’s not the mansplaining of basic things to people, who have zero interest in listening to you. Neither is it exposing your flesh in public to allow better access for scratching. It’s not swivelling your head to continue uncomfortably staring at someone on the street without interruption.
In my humble opinion, you have arrived at the footsteps of Indian uncle-dom when, watching someone in the public sphere do something of note, you think to yourself: “That could have been me.”
This observation could arrive in any pursuit that you have explored in your life. Take cricket, for example: Whether they played at school or in college, you probably have a friend or colleague who thinks they just missed out on a spot on the Indian team. Any empty passage or corridor is just an excuse to break into a bowling motion. An iPad mini is just the right size to practice defending a short ball while you wait for a meeting to start.
Then there’s music. Put enough engineers born after 1990 in a room with a guitar and a bottle of Old Monk, and within half an hour, they’d probably be belting out, “Give me some sunshine”.
Somehow, I maintained a firewall between the comedies of India and abroad. The two worlds seemed too disconnected from each other, and taking them together felt like my father mixing curd rice and pizza (Yes, he actually does this).
(For those born before 1990, the song is probably “BC Sutta”).
I’m not immune to these tendencies, either. In my case, the “what-if” pursuit was probably stand-up comedy, an art form of which I had anointed myself as a connoisseur. My qualifications included:
Downloading and listening to multiple comedy specials on Winamp, including Chris Rock and George Carlin (Piracy ki jai!).
A set of Chappelle’s Show DVDs, gifted to me as a teenager by my uncle who lives in the US (NRI ki jai!).
Using humour to deal with the crippling insecurity that is a by-product of being 5’1” at age 16, with glasses and braces.
Using humour as a crutch lasted with me all the way into college. After hearing one of my jokes, one of my inebriated classmates, invoked his inner like Sherlock Holmes to say, “So he starts with the punchline first, and then works backward.”
Humour was one of the ways I was dealing with being in a hyper-competitive environment at my law school in Bangalore. The university had a small student body of 400 hyper-ambitious people, with 80 in a batch. Every batch produced a Rhodes scholar, some civil servants, McKinsey consultants, hotshot litigators or at the very least people who were expected to make partner at a large law firm before they hit 33. Everyone could hustle. Everyone could make roll up their sleeves, and make “a Benz out of that Datsun”, and Kanye West would say.
I quickly realized that the extent of my ambition only extended to passing without losing a year. I didn’t think of myself as the future of upholding one of the pillars of Indian democracy. I paid as much attention to the lofty principles we heard in constitutional law class as Rohit Shetty would in a physics class. Although the rigorous schedule of classes, exams, and projects meant a lot of work, I still spent much of my time doing a whole lot of nothing.
I tested my lungs and liver on an almost daily basis. I took advantage of the newly setup wi-fi connection in the hostel. Our hostel was a precursor to the blockchain, an elaborate network of hard disks that carried gigabytes of content kept trading hands. There was music, movies, and Anime… amongst other things.
I added some comedy to the mix, too. I downloaded and devoured both of Dave Chappelle’s comedy specials. I would rewatch Killing Them Softly religiously, observing how Chappelle was able to thread the line from slapstick to revelatory in a matter of minutes. I also got my hands on Eddie Murphy’s Delirious: his bit on phone conversations with Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor have been permanently etched in my head, like the memory of the first time I tried Chicken 65.
Somehow, I maintained a firewall between the comedies of India and abroad. The two worlds seemed too disconnected from each other, and taking them together felt like my father mixing curd rice and pizza (Yes, he actually does this). I would involuntarily belly-laugh at comedy in Tamil movies, like that Vadivel classic of “Dubai calling”. My family would also go see Tamil comedy plays that my uncle performed in when the troupe visited Bangalore. My only tryst with comedy north of the Vindhyas was an incident that my father relayed to me—it was a conversation after class with one of his North Indian B-School students who seemed a tad homesick and had appreciated my dad’s humour through the lecture. “Sir you are very funny,” he had said. “You remind me of Jaspal Bhatti!”
These disconnected comedies only started to converge for me around 2010, when I was spending more time in Mumbai for an internship. A store had opened in the Phoenix Mills mall, the first location I knew dedicated to stand-up comedy. It was a corner of the mall, where one had to walk through the ticketed entrance up to a bar upfront. You could buy an overpriced beer or drink before going in to watch people perform. The venue had seating enough for a large Marwari family, and a ticket would usually give you access to three or four comedians doing 15-minute sets. Here, I saw some of the original AIB members, and some who would be a part of the East India Comedy troupe. The setting and the pricing forgave some of the material. I was sure that one of the performers regurgitated a joke on stage that I had loudly cracked minutes ago in the interval about “Never being able to see a thing in Andheri”.
I could literally do that.
All of it seemed underwhelming in the moment, compared to the legendary comedians I had seen online. My complaint—if it can be articulated in a way that makes sense—is that the comedy in Mumbai was, perhaps, too accessible. Most of the material presented was whining about the minor inconveniences that we face—we, meaning, people like myself, who were already at positions of privilege in urban India, or were flirting with it. Also, since Hindi was my fourth language, I found the sets a bit difficult to follow.
It would take moving to Mumbai again a few years later to bridge that language gap. The ‘scene’ grew larger in these passing years. More comedians popped up, who had built a following on YouTube. There were some people who were now pursuing stand-up as a full-time profession, and many had migrated to Mumbai from around the country to do so, too.
This felt like a great time—if there ever was one—to throw my proverbial topi in the ring. I also had the three key attributes needed to take such a risk:
In hindsight, I’m not sure if I would have been able to tread the comedic fine line essential to success, especially at a time when India was coming into its own as being the #1 super power for taking offence.
Young
The ability to drink Old Monk regularly with no consequences / Dumb
Broke
However, I chose not to test the waters, partly due to years of conditioning that I would be better-placed taking risks in a corporate setting, which led me to quit being a lawyer to work in startups. I also felt a fear that, doing what I liked to do as a living might actually make me dislike that very thing.
In hindsight, I’m not sure if I would have been able to tread the comedic fine line essential to success, especially at a time when India was coming into its own as being the #1 super power for taking offence. Like that one time when I was seated next to an uncle on a domestic flight. I had my laptop open, writing something—like I am right now—before he snuck a peek at my document. I was working on some material about how I found the ham-fisted PR for Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister quite funny. The CM’s promises featured a quote, saying, “The image will aim to be “80% development and 20% Hindutva”.
I proposed, instead, a special gelato from Uttar Pradesh. 80% Gelato and 20% Gaumutra!
Uncle on the next seat was not impressed. “I do not think you should make light of one of our great leaders. I don’t like seeing it”
“Arey look out the window then,” I responded.
Alas, a life in commerce would not allow for this level of bluntness. Commerce would mean threading a line that meant no politics, no caste, no religion, and no punching up.
In the USA, ‘punching up’ is often the status quo of comedy. Trump had been elected president, and the absurdity of the election was best summed up by Chappelle at his monologue hosting Saturday Night Live, just a few hours after the results. Hillary Clinton’s loss, he asserted, was not completely unexpected. “I know the whites. You guys aren’t as surprising as you used to be.”
We couldn’t do this in India, could we?
Or so I’d thought, until I saw Kamra specials on YouTube, a few months after moving out of India. He was fearless and funny, and he cracked jokes about people and attitudes that were too touchy for anyone else to talk about. Like an increasing tendency to frame any inconvenience caused by an idiotic move by the government as “a cost that all nationalists will willingly pay”. Such as waiting for hours in a line at an ATM during demonetization being nothing compared to the sacrifices of soldiers on the border.
There was also Kamra’s infamous encounter with Arnab Goswami. Goswami: a darling of new urban India, a man who feels furious anger at the system the way only someone with a Worli penthouse can, and shares this anger with the world at a volume that makes the mute button redundant on your TV. A methodology that I am sure he would endorse wholeheartedly—until Kamra dished him a taste of his own medicine on an Indigo flight.
There were other significant Indian comedians, too, such as Varun Grover, who made a joke about not being worried about violent critics as long as Kunal Kamra was around.
Unlike most other Indian comedians, however, Kamra focused squarely on politics. He even had a comedy podcast that featured everyone from the BJP’s youth wing president (the grandson of a prime minister) to student leaders in JNU, who had come in the spotlight because of their protests. Like other comics gaining national visibility, Kamra also hosted a steady stream of shows in many of India’s biggest cities. Many of his shows, however, were cancelled due to being labelled an ‘anti-national’.
Meanwhile, the larger rise of stand-up comedy in India was also visible online. OTT companies were hosing money into the system to get more eyeballs and subscribers, so viewers were drowning in new comedy specials by local artists. There were so many that you wouldn’t know if I was telling you the name of a special, or reading a bumper sticker. Dilli se hoon banchodh?
All the uncles had the hubris that only being an uncle can command, a smile that assumes: People are dying to listen to me. It’s a self-belief that you are funny only because that clerk who used to report to you once said, “Aap Kapil Sharma jaise ho Saab”.
And yet, despite having more comedic chops in his fingernails than some of this bunch, Kamra wasn’t given a special on any OTT platform. His material is still only on YouTube because Google is probably the only monopoly that almost no government in the world can regulate.
When the pandemic hit, it was a confusing time for many, except for the constant factor (for those who could afford it) of a lot more screen time. Including me. When I wasn’t on Zoom calls, I was watching content online. Some movies, some reality TV, and the occasional comedy special. I don’t know if it was a slide into my mid-thirties, or fatherhood, but I could sense some changes in my taste. I found it harder and harder to laugh at new material of comics that I used to love. Dave Chappelle. Chris Rock. Louis CK. Performers who were past the peak of their careers, past middle age, bordering on old. Rich beyond their wildest dreams. And dare I say it, pretty unfunny.
My opinion of course is subjective, but comedy is a brutal exercise. Either you make people laugh or you don’t. Chappelle has been doing callbacks to a lame trans joke from before the pandemic. Rock, post-divorce is the personification of your uncle’s WhatsApp group with his male batchmates. They—along with every anti-vax comedian you can think of—have all turned into whiny uncles.
Which is what I thought of when I saw Kamra’s Uncle Logic. Even my bias couldn’t make me say it was better than it actually was. The title in itself did not give me a heads up that significant parts of the show would feature interviews of random Indian uncles sharing their views on depression, drugs legalization, and open marriages. Ceding so much screen time to uncles on the street is a brave choice. A few of the subjects were funny, and a few were just obnoxious.
All the uncles had the hubris that only being an uncle can command, a smile that assumes: People are dying to listen to me. It’s a self-belief that you are funny only because that clerk who used to report to you once said, “Aap Kapil Sharma jaise ho Saab”.
Kamra was good in bits in Uncle Logic, but he also seemed more world weary. All the stresses of choosing to be politically funny seemed visible on him. Seeing someone embody all of their life choices—which had gotten them to this point—was a sombre feeling. It reminded me that, most definitely, this could not have been me. I doubt I would have had the commitment to stick it out while also owning my art—or been half as funny while doing it.
The only needle I can thread is having aged considerably in the pandemic, and occasionally, looking like a person that I cannot abide by. Like Kamra, who, in specific moments, does seem to look like our Home Minister.
Well, I could do that.
***
Deepak Sridhar was born in and has spent most of his life in Bangalore. He began writing in earnest while unemployed during the pandemic, and has written two books: Home for the Hallidays and One and half. He has been accumulating comedic material with stints as a corporate lawyer, biryani delivery boy and full time Bangalore bar uncle. His book is titled One and half: A lighthearted look at Bangalore through the years. You can Deepak him on Instagram: @hallimims.
