A student is filming a “Get Ready With Me” before heading to a protest where he fully expects to be tear-gassed and caned. Another has just finished outrunning the police and is proudly posting their Strava stats. Batman is weaving through a crowd. Superman isn’t too far behind. Mahatma Gandhi has also made an appearance, prompting one Instagram user to comment, “Things are so bad, Season 1 characters had to make a comeback.“ A police van rolls up, and the caption simply reads, “My Uber is here.”
If you came across these reels without context, you’d assume Instagram had collectively lost the plot. It’s chaotic. It’s absurd. It’s also one of the biggest student protests India has seen. That’s what’s been impossible to look away from.
The humour doesn’t exist because the issue is any less serious. The protests are taking place against the backdrop of allegations surrounding one of India’s most important entrance examinations, with students demanding accountability from the government after a crisis that has reportedly claimed multiple young lives. And yet, they’re also making some of the funniest videos on the internet.
At first, it feels like a contradiction. It isn’t.
Every generation protests in the language it knows best. For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, that language just happens to be memes, trending audios and niche internet humour. The same people who process heartbreak, bad days at work and existential dread through reels were never going to abandon that language simply because they picked up a placard.
The one thing humour has always done well is strip power of its mystique. It has shaped protests for decades. Only now, it takes over our algorithm.
But there’s another reason the humour feels so significant.
While students are making Batman edits and joking inside police vans, they’re also being tear-gassed, caned and detained. At the same time, sections of the mainstream media have attempted to frame the demonstrations as violent, with some channels even referring to the protesting students as “terrorists”. One (now deleted) broadcast aired what appeared to be AI-generated or stock footage of someone vandalising a car—a clip that looked so amateurishly edited that it was mocked almost instantly online.
The students’ response wasn’t to issue long rebuttals. They made memes.
A viral GTA edit with protesters moving like stiff video game characters, wasn’t random internet humour. It was a direct parody of that broadcast, turning what many saw as a laughably fake attempt at discrediting the movement into the butt of the joke. The internet has always had an unusual way of fact-checking. Sometimes, it doesn’t argue with misinformation, it ridicules it.
That’s perhaps what’s most interesting about these protests. The jokes aren’t distracting from the movement—they’re documenting it, amplifying it and, at times, even defending it. A “Get Ready With Me” reel before heading to a protest highlights the brutality that peaceful students can expect from the armed forces. A dinosaur showing up at a protest site travels faster than a television debate. A teenager who may never watch a twenty-minute speech from Jantar Mantar will happily send a meme to a friend. The humour isn’t replacing the politics; it’s becoming the vehicle that carries it and reaches audiences traditional political messaging often doesn’t.
If anything, it also reveals something about this generation’s relationship with fear. Previous generations often projected a more solemn image. Here, students are joking about what shoes they’ll wear because they might have to run from the police, only for the very next reel to show those same students being lathi-charged. The contrast is jarring, but that’s precisely the point. The humour doesn’t erase the violence—it exists alongside it.
Perhaps that’s why one Instagram comment has resonated with so many people during these protests: “This is the most unseriously serious generation.”
It’s difficult to think of a better description.
This is a generation protesting alleged corruption, mourning lives lost and demanding accountability over a scandal that could shape their futures. They’re also making Instagram trends, Marvel cameos, GRWMs and memes from inside police vans. None of that makes the movement less serious. If anything, it makes it more resilient.
Because the one thing humour has always done well is strip power of its mystique. It has shaped protests for decades. Only now, it takes over our algorithm. It makes the powerful look ridiculous. It makes fear a little less frightening. It reminds the people on the other side of the barricade that they don’t get to decide the mood.
Maybe that’s what protest looks like in 2026. Not because this generation takes politics less seriously. But because it refuses to let the people it’s protesting against dictate what dissent should look like.
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