New Indian Nuttahs: Comedy and Cultural Critique in Millennial India (Palgrave Studies in Comedy)

This book takes a journey into the new and exciting created by a the wave of Indian comedians today, described affectionately here as the New Indian Nuttahs, and looks at what these tell us about identity, “Indianness”, censorship, feminism, diaspora and millennial India. It provides a unique analysis into the growing phenomenon of internet comedy and into a dimension of Indian popular culture which has long been dominated by the traditional film and television industries. Through a mixture of close textual readings of online comedy videos and interviews with content creators and consumers in India, this book provides a fresh perspective on comedy studies in its approach to a global South context from a sociocultural perspective. As a protean form of new media, this has opened up new avenues of articulation, identification and disidentification and as such, this book makes a further contribution to South Asian, communication, media & cultural studies. Acknowledgements 8 Contents 11 List of Figures 12 Chapter 1: “New” India and the Nuttahs 13 1.1 The Trajectory of Comedy 13 1.2 The Circuits of Comedy 17 1.3 Social Media: A Theoretical Background 20 1.4 From the Silver Screen to a Smartphone 21 1.5 Notes on Method 24 1.6 A Brief History of Comedy on the Indian Screen 26 1.7 Outline of Book 28 1.8 India, Globalisation, and Media 30 Bibliography 31 Chapter 2: Riffing India Comedy, Identity, and Censorship 33 2.1 Internet Comedy and Its Dimensions 33 2.2 Freedom of Expression and Offence 35 2.3 Intertextual Parody 39 2.4 A Riff on Comedy and Censorship 50 2.5 A Note on Changing Media Choices 54 2.6 Concluding Remarks 55 Bibliography 56 Chapter 3: Women in Internet Comedy 59 3.1 The Females of Funny 60 3.2 The Feminist Critique 61 3.3 Gender Politics in Comedy 67 3.4 Concluding Remarks 70 Bibliography 72 Chapter 4: Down to Brown: A Footnote on British Asian and South Asian American Comedy 73 4.1 The Current Representation of South Asians 73 4.2 British Asians: A Snapshot 76 4.3 Desis in the United States: A Snapshot 78 4.4 Concluding Remarks 84 Bibliography 85 Chapter 5: The Currency of Comedy 87 5.1 Comedy, at What Cost? 87 5.2 Digital India and Its Impact on Comedy 89 5.3 From Silly to Satire, Mundane to Meaningful 91 5.4 Future Research Directions 92 5.5 The Future of the Indian Laughscape 94 5.6 Concluding Remarks 96 Bibliography 97 Index 98 Front Matter ....Pages i-xv “New” India and the Nuttahs (Kavyta Kay)....Pages 1-20 Riffing India Comedy, Identity, and Censorship (Kavyta Kay)....Pages 21-46 Women in Internet Comedy (Kavyta Kay)....Pages 47-60 Down to Brown: A Footnote on British Asian and South Asian American Comedy (Kavyta Kay)....Pages 61-74 The Currency of Comedy (Kavyta Kay)....Pages 75-85 Back Matter ....Pages 87-88