Punit Pania deserves his flowers. For years, the Mumbai comic has been plugging away on the margins of the Indian English-language standup community, never quite fitting into that narrow, increasingly sanitised scene. His brooding, chatty style doesn’t provide easy payoffs for audiences bred on the classic setup-punchline one-two. There’s none of the feel-good urban millennial self-celebration that many Indian comics love to peddle. Pania’s jokes are just as much about making you think as they are about making you laugh, and that tendency is more than evident on his debut special No Country For Moderation, a requiem for the Great Indian Dream and a twisted love letter to standup comedy itself.
There are plenty of laughs on offer here, but they’re likely to be the kind that are accompanied by a vague sense of discomfort. Pania deals in the laughter of awkward agreement and discomfiting revelations. Instead of hoots and cackles, the audience shows their appreciation for this set through applause and even long stretches of silence. Having performed the special live over a hundred times, Pania has the tension-and-release timing down just right, keeping the audience on their toes.
Pania’s work is very politically engaged, and there’s lots here that takes aim at the Indian right wing. That’s not really what his set is about though. Musing on the nature of political comedy, Pania stresses the need to avoid falling into the trap of hate. Our politicians deserve disdain, he emphasises, but not hate. His focus here is a slightly broader vision of politics than “my-party-strongest” tribalism or the successes and hubristic failures of individuals (even as that stuff does make frequent appearances). We can sense a genuine concern for society at large—riddled by inequality, hypocrisy, volatility as it is—that he tries to assuage with his unique brand of dark humour.
He ponders—often with despair, contempt, or glibness—over ideas of tolerance, of consent, of religion, scientific temper and rational thought. The intersection between art and entertainment. The hypocrisy of uncles. Unemployed goons. The futility of young love. Nowhere is the bitterness, the disappointment he feels, more pronounced than in the uncomfortable, recurring bit he does about domestic violence. At its core, No Country For Moderation is the comedy of disenfranchisement and dissatisfaction, of yearning for something better.
The thing with this kind of material—which confronts socio-political realities head-on—is it almost feels novel now, even though we’re six decades on from Mort Sahl bringing satire firmly into the standup comedy orbit. For understandable reasons, most Indian standup comedians tend to steer clear of any kind of controversial subject matter. You have a handful of ‘political comedians’ who, to borrow a line from Pania’s set, are more political than comedian.
At its core, No Country For Moderation is the comedy of disenfranchisement and dissatisfaction, of yearning for something better.
And then you have the other lot, who run for cover at the mere hint of an insinuation about politics. That in-between space, the most fun usually, is largely empty. Pania goes against the grain of prevailing self-censorship, trying to claim that space for himself. And though the results are mixed—with uneven patches taking some of the venom out of the special’s refreshing bite—it’s admirable that he’s trying at all.
While the special is anchored around these social concerns, running in parallel is also a sort of treatise on standup comedy. Pania doesn’t really want to do the ‘commercial’ material that comedians rely on for brand sponsorships and easy income. As he remarks, Indian comedians have three kinds of jokes: my dad used to hit me when I was a kid; my mom is middle-class; and I am single. (An exaggeration, sure, but not really an outlandish one.)
Pania enjoys pushing back against such lazy tropes. He jokes that he hates his father because he wasn’t beaten up as a child. He speaks, tongue firmly in cheek, about his own comedy being primitive: comedians in Delhi meanwhile practise a more evolved form of comedy, wherein they get by purely on the basis of making funny noises. In a long section on “political jokes”, Pania offers an explanation of the world as he sees it, and the battle between meaningful art and frivolous entertainment. At the end of it, he implores the audience to come for his shows, to tell their friends about it; his love for standup comedy is evident.
Through the medium of a standup set, Pania is ruminating publicly over the very nature of the art-form and his own role in what it means. All while existing in a fraught political landscape. It’s a tall ask, and he does falter every so often, prone to occasional sermonising, meandering stream-of-consciousness, and bumping into dead-ends. Tonally, there’s a tug of war between the sincerity with which he believes in his ideas, and the scorn with which he delivers the words. But the ambition of the show, and Pania’s inherently self-reflexive approach to comedy, is worthy of admiration. He has aimed big, and while he doesn’t quite get there at the first time of asking—this is the kind of lofty stuff artists spend entire lifetimes on—he provides enough to think about, much to laugh about.
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