Indian stand-up has developed a curious reflex. The split-second a comic drops a line that’s even a shade darker than ‘cute’, they launch into the great Indian Apology Dance: hand-to-forehead slap, tongue pressed to lip, palms fluttering like traffic cops, a volley of ‘no-no-no, I’m just kidding.’ It’s the comedic equivalent of hitting undo before the punchline’s pixels have settled. And it’s everywhere—from open-mics in Andheri basements to arena sets by marquee names with Big Platform comedy specials.

Here’s why that reflex strangles perfectly good jokes. Comedy, at its most deliciously unsettling, is a game of tension and release. The set-up tightens the screws; the punchline snaps them loose—sometimes into darker territory than the room expected. The milliseconds after that snap are where laughter lives. Short-circuit the silence and you vaporise the laugh. When a comic rushes to tidy up (‘I didn’t mean it like that, guys!’), the audience never gets to feel the full shudder of recognition. They’re denied the pleasure of deciding, on their own, whether the joke was wicked, brilliant, or both.

The giants of discomfort know this. Dave Chappelle will drown you in three seconds of pin-drop quiet before the laugh detonates; Hannah Gadsby lets tension linger so long it needs its own play-off music. Daniel Sloss lets the hush tighten like a noose, and Anthony Jeselnik relishes your butt clench as he snipes into a dead baby joke. Even in our homegrown rooms, the rare comics who power through—think Varun Grover riffing on politics, or Daniel Fernandes on death—earn bigger, longer laughs because they trust the audience to catch up. The silence isn’t a threat; it’s a seasoning.

So why do so many Indian comics still flinch? Partly cultural conditioning: we were raised on embarrassment-proof Bollywood humour where a naughty line is always followed by an ‘arre yaar, bura na maano, mazaak tha.’ On stage at a live show, they seem to think that ‘if I’m being cute, almost like even I didn’t think THAT would come out of my mouth, then how much trouble can I really be in?’ Partly of course, it’s social-media dread—nobody wants a two-second clip yanked out of context and served cold to Twitter’s outrage army. But comedy has never been risk-free; that’s the job description. The stage is the lab. If the experiment bombs, fine. If it kills, don’t immediately perform CPR on the audience’s feelings.

Here’s the radical proposal: embrace the awkward hush. Let the joke marinate in the room’s collective throat. Force the front row to shift in their seats. Trust yourself—and your listeners—to ride out that micro-storm. The line you second-guess today might be the tag that becomes legendary tomorrow. In a crowded market where every punchline is battling algorithmic attention spans, the boldest move isn’t crowbarring in another quip; it’s letting the last one breathe.

So, dear comics, holster the tongue-bite, park the jazz-hands clean-up, and stand in your own discomfort. Dark jokes aren’t glass dolls; they don’t shatter when you stop cushioning them. Sometimes the funniest thing you can do is absolutely nothing.