The Chakyar Could Insult the King
The Indian comic was protected for two thousand years. Now he is the only target he has left.
I was driving home from work when I came across a YouTube clip of an Indian comic I had never seen before. It ran a little over four minutes and I watched all of it, first at a traffic light and then down in the parking basement with the engine switched off, which is what a person does when something has caught him without pleasing him.
My face stayed still the whole way through.
What I was watching was a man on a stage showing a room something that had gone wrong inside him, and a room that had come there carrying the same thing. The laughter was real enough. It was the laughter of recognition between people who had found each other in the dark.
I have been inside a comedy hall twice in my life, Russell Peters in Delhi one February and Eddie Izzard when he brought Force Majeure to India a couple of years after that, and what stayed with me from the Peters night has nothing to do with any particular joke. What stayed with me is that the room was laughing at themselves.
There were thousands of us in that hall laughing at Indians, at our accents and our fathers and the way we haggle and the way we conduct a wedding, and Peters stood outside all of it and pointed, and every single person in that building was inside the thing he was pointing at. Nobody in that hall was exposed, because everybody was. You could turn your head and find a stranger four seats away laughing at the same sentence, about the same thing, which happened to be both of you.
Set the clip on my phone beside that evening and the difference shows up immediately. One man exposed on a stage, and each person watching him privately matching their own damage against his, everybody arriving at the laugh alone by a separate road and a different private memory. The surface is identical and the architecture is inverted. A room laughing at itself is plural, and a room laughing at one man’s wound is a set of people who happen to be sitting near each other.
Before I go further I should say the thing that weakens my position, which is that everything else I know about this form arrived through a screen that chose it for me. Peters and Izzard reached me first as finished arena specials, filmed after a decade of touring and edited by professionals, the top slice of two long careers. What I have of the Indian comics is a stream of clips selected by a machine that has learned which four minutes travel furthest, a machine that watched a hundred million thumbs and worked out that a man confessing a wound holds one for longer than a man landing a joke. So some part of what I have been diagnosing is the pipe rather than the person coming through it.
The feeling stayed anyway, and I have carried it long enough now to write it down.
What I think I was watching
Russell Peters stood up there and did accents. Chinese fathers, Indian uncles, the whole business, and there is a long argument about whether that was fair, and I am not going to settle it here. What I noticed was where he was standing. He was outside the material, looking at it, reporting it back with a kind of appetite. He had been married more than once and things had gone wrong in his life the way they go wrong in everyone’s, and none of it was on that stage asking to be held.
Eddie Izzard was up there the whole time. Every minute. The mind moving in front of you, following its own thread into the Roman Empire and back out through a supermarket. A person full enough of his own material that the audience was company rather than supply.
Neither of them was looking for another lonely person in the room.
That is the sentence I kept arriving at on the drive home. The comics I watch now are lonely apart from being alone. Those are two different conditions and they have started to run together.
Alone is a fact about the number of people present. Lonely is a fact about what happens when they are.
The show that should demolish my argument
I have to deal with Hannah Gadsby before I go further, because Nanette is the best thing I have seen in this form and it is built entirely from a wound.
She stands there and takes apart her own life, the assault, the shame, the years of making herself small in Tasmania, and I sat in front of a laptop in Delhi feeling that this was both true and funny and that I had no idea how she was doing both.
By everything I have said so far that show should collapse, because it is a performer holding up her own damage to a room of people carrying the same damage. The reason it works instead is something she says out loud inside the hour, twice, in two sentences that took me a long time to connect to each other. The first is that when self-deprecation comes from a person who already lives in the margins, it stops being humility and becomes, in her word, humiliation. The second is her description of the trade she had been making: that she had been putting herself down in order to speak at all, in order to seek permission to speak, and that she would not do it any more.
Read the second one as a description of a transaction and it opens up. She is saying that a comic in her position was allowed to hold the microphone on one condition, which was that she hand over a piece of herself first. Self-deprecation was the entry fee. The audience paid attention and she paid with her own dignity, and the exchange had been running so long and so smoothly that nobody in the industry had thought to name it. Gadsby named it and then refused to complete the payment, and that refusal is why she keeps walking the room up to the moment where the joke should arrive, the moment where a laugh would release everybody at once, and withholding it.
Something else is going on in that hour, and it took me longer still to see it, which is that Nanette is composed. She has taken a subject, what it costs to grow up a lesbian in a small town in Tasmania, and built the entire hour around it as a spine, with every part of the show placed where she wants it. She stands far enough outside her own material to shape it, and what she hands you at the end is a story, with a beginning and a middle and a door out of it.
And in all that hour she never once hurts you. She walks a hall full of strangers through an assault and through years of being made small, and you come out the other side held, because she has charge of that room from the first minute to the last and took responsibility for the people in front of her before she opened her mouth.
That is what I had been reaching for on the drive home without finding the words for it. What I keep watching instead is a fact laid down bare, bone showing where the flesh has been torn off, with nothing built around it and nothing shaped and nothing made. The man sets it on the table and the room is left to deal with it.
The wound is the material in one case and the exhibit in the other.
So my quarrel was never with pain on a stage. It is with a performer who has made nothing out of his own, and then hands it to four hundred people to carry home for him.
Two thousand years of protected laughter
Bharata set down eight rasas in the Natyashastra, and hasya, the comic sentiment, is one of the eight. Shanta came later, through Kashmiri commentators. Comedy was given a seat in the architecture of Indian performance before the building went up. This is Sanatan Dharma doing what it does, which is to find a place inside the structure for the thing other civilisations leave outside it.
The character who carried hasya was the Vidushaka, and the Natyashastra describes him in its thirty-fifth chapter without a shred of flattery, as dwarfish, big-toothed, hunchbacked, bald and tawny-eyed. He was the hero’s constant companion and he was almost always a brahmin, which is the detail everyone skips past on the way to the jokes, and it is the whole licence. His birth let him move through every level of that court and speak across all of them. He made the hall laugh with his appearance and his manner, and then he did his second job, which was to deflate every person around him with a wit that had teeth in it. The king’s closest friend was a man whose function was to puncture the king.
In Kerala the arrangement went further and got written into the rules of the room. The Chakyar performing Koothu held the right to criticise the king to his face, naming what the sovereign had done and saying what he thought of it, while the sovereign’s job was to sit there and take it and the audience was expected to listen and accept the criticism.
Then comes the enforcement, which is the piece that turns a courtesy into an institution. If anyone objected to the Chakyar’s comments while he was performing, the art form ended in those premises. Permanently. Not that performance and not that season, the Koothu simply never came back to that hall again. So a king had exactly two options, which were to absorb the insult in public with a straight face, or to lose the art from his court for the rest of his life and his son’s.
The joke was protected by consequence.
The Vidushaka in Kutiyattam had one more job worth noticing, which was that he took the Sanskrit and turned it into everyday Malayalam for the people sitting on the floor, explaining the difficult passages and adding his own commentary as he went. He was the bridge between the language of the elite and the ordinary person in the hall. The comic was the one holding the door open.
Tenali Ramakrishna sat in Krishnadevaraya’s court in the sixteenth century as one of the Ashtadiggajas, the eight great poets, and they called him vikatakavi, the clown poet. He wrote serious religious verse and he also held the comic licence, and nobody at Vijayanagara appears to have thought those two things were in tension.
In Kashmir the Bhands performed Pather for two centuries, and their material was the ruling class, the clergy and the conditions of ordinary life. Under the Maharaja they were exempted from taxes and from begar, the forced unpaid labour that fell on everybody else. Sit with that arrangement for a second. The state exempted the satirists from tax and from forced labour, and the satirists spent their season mocking the state. Somebody in that court had worked out that a kingdom needs a mouth it does not control, and was willing to pay for it out of revenue.
Across all of it one thing holds, which is that the Indian comic pointed upward. His material was power, and power was structurally obliged to receive it.
The Bhands are down to seven of their eighty traditional stories now, and more than a hundred groups have stopped performing since the conflict years began.
What India imported, and what it left behind
Europe had its licensed fool too, and at the Feast of Fools they went as far as electing a clown to sit in the bishop’s chair for a day and crowning the jester king. The Church spent eight centuries trying to stop it, from the Council of Toledo in the seventh century to a parliamentary ban at Dijon in 1552.
The form that reached us from the West came from somewhere else entirely.
It grew after vaudeville died. Vaudeville had been family entertainment with rules. When it collapsed, comics moved into nightclubs where nobody was enforcing rules, and by the mid-fifties Lenny Bruce was on those stages opening himself in front of strangers more completely than any comic before him. Carlin came through that door. So did Richard Pryor, who started out doing a clean Cosby-shaped act and then, in the early seventies, turned and made his own life the material.
That is the form India imported. The comic as autobiographical evidence. The self as raw material.
It arrived here without the things that were holding it up over there. A century of therapy in the culture. An individualism that treats the private self as the most interesting subject available. And a free speech tradition sturdy enough that Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trials became a national argument about the constitution rather than the end of his career.
We took the form. The substrate stayed where it was.
The aperture
Here is the mechanism, and I want to describe it without pointing at anybody.
An Indian comic who aims upward can draw a complaint from any direction at once. The complaint can be filed in a city he has never visited, by a person who was not in the room, on behalf of a sentiment he did not know existed. Shows get cancelled. Venues get nervous. The law cited most often in these matters is Section 295A, which turns a deliberate insult to religious feeling into a criminal offence.
That section was written in 1927, inserted by the colonial government through the Criminal Law Amendment Act of that year, after the Lahore High Court acquitted a publisher in the Rangila Rasul case and a demand rose for a specific law against wounded religious feeling. The British obliged. So the instrument most often reached for against Indian comedy today was drafted by a foreign administration a hundred years ago to keep a subject population quiet, and we kept it on the books after they left.
The mechanism sits open to everyone. Complaints have come from every quarter of Indian life, from every community, in every direction, and anybody with a grievance and a police station can use it, and everybody has.
What matters for this essay is what the existence of all this does to a young person holding a microphone with an hour to fill. The upward aperture closes, and a comic still has to speak, because speaking is the entire job and he has sixty minutes and a room that paid to be there.
So the knife turns around.
What is left to point it at is his own body, his own failures, his father, his marriage, the girl who left, the degree he never finished, the family that does not understand him. None of that draws a complaint. Nobody has ever filed an FIR on behalf of your father.
Which brings Gadsby’s description of the trade back around. Putting yourself down in order to be given permission to speak is what I have been watching on my phone for two years and calling a personality problem. It is a form doing what forms do when the opening narrows. The pressure has to go somewhere and it goes into the only material that stays safe, which is the performer himself and the people who raised him.
I owe a generation of young comics an apology for the first half of my thinking.
What the research says about the people holding the microphone
Gordon Claridge at Oxford ran a study in 2014 with 523 comedians, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. They scored high on all four scales of a standard measure of psychotic traits in healthy people, which sounds worse than it is and I will come to that.
The striking result was a combination. High scores on extraverted impulsiveness and high scores on introverted anhedonia at the same time.
Introverted anhedonia includes a reduced capacity to take pleasure from intimacy.
So the profile is a person who goes outward with tremendous force and struggles to take pleasure from closeness. Lonely apart from being alone, measured on a scale and published in a journal.
Claridge was careful about what this means, and I will be careful too. He pointed out that these traits in their lesser form are the healthy versions of moodiness, social introversion and the tendency to think sideways, and that this cognitive style is what produces the humour in the first place. The thing that makes a comic funny and the thing that makes him hard to reach are the same equipment.
The second piece of research is about the rest of us.
Rod Martin built the Humour Styles Questionnaire in the late nineties after noticing that the question of how much humour a person has matters far less than the question of what they use it for. He found four styles. Affiliative humour, which draws people together. Self-enhancing humour, which holds you steady in difficulty. Aggressive humour, which is used at somebody’s expense. And self-defeating humour, which is used at your own.
More than a hundred and fifty studies have run on it since.
Affiliative and self-enhancing humour track with better wellbeing. Self-defeating humour tracks with worse.
A closed aperture manufactures self-defeating humour. That is its only remaining output.
And an audience sits in that room for ninety minutes practising the same style, laughing in the places where a person is diminishing himself, and then walks out to the car park.
What laughter is for
Robert Provine spent years following people around shopping centres with a notebook, recording who laughed and when, and what he found has almost nothing to do with comedy.
People are thirty times more likely to laugh in company than alone.
Most laughter follows ordinary remarks between people who already know each other. Not jokes. Remarks. He collected twelve hundred episodes of laughter and found that in over ninety-nine per cent of them, the laugh fell at the end of a phrase or a sentence, the way punctuation falls. It was riding on the speech rather than responding to its content.
Speakers laughed about forty-six per cent more often than the people listening to them.
The person who laughs most in a conversation is the person talking. In a comedy hall, one person talks and three thousand listen, which leaves the entire room in the position that laughs least.
Something else can happen in a large room, and it happened to me in Delhi.
Robin Dunbar’s group at Oxford went after the physiology. Laughter releases endorphins, and since you cannot measure endorphins without a lumbar puncture, they used pain threshold as the proxy. Pain thresholds rise measurably after laughter. Dunbar’s argument is that laughter got co-opted early in our history as a form of group chorusing, a way of bonding groups that had outgrown the size physical grooming could hold together. The mechanism is not far from what chanting does to the vagal system in the morning practice.
His group also checked whether scale ruins it. They studied a community choir singing first in small groups of twenty to eighty, then as a single mass of two hundred and thirty-two, and the effect on pain threshold held up in the large group as well as the small.
A hall of three thousand can chorus. Size is fine.
Peters got a chorus out of that Delhi hall because he handed every person in it the same thing to laugh at, and the thing was all of us. That is chorusing with extra steps. Nobody in that room was alone for a second.
A man laying out his private damage produces something different, whatever the size of the room. Each person in front of him is doing something individual and internal, arriving at the laugh by a private road. Three thousand people can sit through that evening and every one of them can drive home having laughed alone.
So laughter is a bonding chemistry, it runs best in conversation, it favours the person speaking, and it fires most reliably between people who already know each other over remarks that were never meant to be funny. A large room can still reach it, provided the room is laughing at something all of it shares.
A phone at a traffic light reaches none of it.
The room with one fewer person in it
The average Indian household held 5.32 people in 1981. By 2011 it held 4.45. Urban households fell faster than rural ones. By 2011, fifty-six per cent of urban households in India had four members or fewer.
I want to be accurate here, because the collapse of the joint family gets announced every few years and the data is more stubborn than the announcements. The nuclear share of Indian households sat at roughly seventy per cent in 2001 and roughly seventy per cent in 2011. Single-person households moved from 3.6 per cent to 3.7 per cent in the same decade.
The joint family did not fall over.
Something quieter happened. There is about one fewer person in the room.
One fewer person to laugh with, over nothing, several times a day, in the way Provine describes and the way every one of us remembers from a house that had a mama or a chacha or a nani in it who was funny without ever intending to be.
I wrote something harsh in my notes on the drive home. I wrote that you go to a comedy club regularly when you do not have a brother or a sister or a son or a daughter who can make you laugh.
I want to soften the accusation and keep the observation.
A person who books a ticket for a comedy show on a Saturday is doing something completely reasonable, and nobody chooses the conditions that make it appealing. There is a bar, there are lights, somebody else is carrying the evening, and the week has been long. The instinct underneath it is correct. The body is asking for a chemistry it used to receive at home and receives less of now, and it has gone to the only place that advertises it.
The building sells you ninety minutes of the substitute.
You take it home and it has already worn off by the time you park.
The comic who stopped
Zakir Khan came out of Indore with nothing and built the largest standup career this country has produced. In August 2025 he became the first Indian artist to perform an entire show in Hindi at Madison Square Garden.
On the twentieth of January this year, on a stage in Hyderabad, he told the room he was taking a break. Health, and personal reasons. Three to five years, possibly until 2030.
His reasons belong to him and I will leave them there.
I only want to place two facts next to each other. He reached the top of the mountain in August. He put the microphone down in January.
Anubhav Bassi and Zakir both came up the hard way, and what they share is an eye. The capacity to watch a small thing closely enough that the room recognises it. That is a different faculty from the one that opens a vein, and it does not run out of material, because the world keeps producing small things.
What I would say to four different people
To a young comic, if this ever reaches one. Your wound is real and it is yours and you are allowed to bring it on stage. The question Gadsby asks is the only useful one. Have you finished with it, or are you still inside it and asking four hundred strangers for help through the mechanism of a laugh. You will know the answer and the room will not.
To a parent. The laughter your child needs happens over nothing, between people who already know each other, several times a day, and the research on this is unusually clear. It lives at your dining table and it has no price. If your house has gone quiet, a ticket will leave it quiet. Somebody in that house has to become funny again, it will probably have to be you, and you will be bad at it for a while.
To a young person going to these shows. Go. There is nothing wrong with the evening. Just notice which of the four styles you spent ninety minutes practising, and notice what you are carrying when you walk out.
To an officer sitting in an office where these things get decided. The Chakyar’s protection was a rule with a consequence attached, and it held for centuries in a society considerably less free than this one. A section drafted in 1927 by an administration that wanted a quiet subject population is doing work today that nobody designed it to do. Whoever wants Indian comedy to point upward again, the way it pointed upward for two thousand years, has to rebuild something like the Chakyar’s rule. The alternative is what we have, which is a generation of gifted young people with a microphone, an hour to fill, and one permitted target.
Themselves.
I still think about that clip in the parking basement.
The man was good. That is what I could not get past. He had timing and he had an eye and he could hold a room, and he was spending all of it taking himself apart in public.
In a hall in Delhi one February, a Canadian stood in front of thousands of Indians and pointed at all of us at once, and we laughed at ourselves together for two hours, and I walked to my car lighter than I had arrived.
The man in the clip has the same equipment. He has nowhere to point it.
Two thousand years ago there was a man in a hall in Kerala who could look at his king and say aloud the thing everybody present was thinking, and the king had to sit there and take it, and if the king so much as objected, the art would never be performed in that hall again.
Somebody built that rule on purpose.
We are the ones who let it lapse.
The only miracle in the world is you standing on your own two feet.
Hari Om Tat Sat.
Arjun is a 30-year practitioner in the Bihar School of Yoga tradition. He founded OMJOOMSUH in 2022 as a for-profit wellness platform rooted in the Vedic sciences.
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Sources
- Natyashastra, chapter 35, on the Vidushaka; and the eight rasas of chapter 6. G. K. Bhat, The Vidushaka in Sanskrit Drama.
- Chakyar Koothu and the right to criticise the king: Kerala Tourism and Kerala Culture.
- Kutiyattam and the Vidushaka’s role: Sahapedia.
- Tenali Ramakrishna, Ashtadiggajas of Krishnadevaraya’s court.
- Bhand Pather, tax and begar exemptions, and the decline from eighty stories to seven: The Caravan.
- Section 295A, Criminal Law Amendment Act 1927 and the Rangila Rasul case.
- Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, 2018. Analysis in Sheila Lintott, “Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette: Connection Through Comedy”, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2020.
- Claridge et al., “Psychotic traits in comedians”, British Journal of Psychiatry, 2014.
- Martin et al., Humour Styles Questionnaire.
- Provine, “Laughter Punctuates Speech”, Ethology, 1993; and Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.
- Dunbar et al., “Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold”, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 2022.
- Census of India household size, 1981 to 2011.