Richard Pryor once said that “there’s a thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at.” He meant it as advice for comedians. But those words apply just as much to comedy fans, who often have to parse that line in fractions of a second, making snap judgements on jokes they’ve only just heard and deciphered. Often, they’re not even aware they’re doing it. The decision—whether to laugh along to a risqué joke or sit in awkward silence—happens faster than you can think the words “is this punching up or down?” Nonetheless, the line exists. Much of Manjeet Sarkar’s best work revels in making that line visible, and in exploiting the tensions around those near-instinctive decisions.

One of India’s most prominent Dalit comedians, Sarkar uses humour to hold up a mirror to our caste-ridden society, nudging the Indian scene’s predominantly savarna, upper-class patrons to interrogate their own biases, both social and comedic. “Patrice O’Neal used to say, ‘I perform my comedy in such a way that 50% of the audience enjoys and the other 50% is horrified,’” he says, in reference to the discomfort that savarna audience members sometimes feel during his sets. “That’s what I try to emulate in my performances.”

It’s an approach that’s worked wonders for the 26-year-old comedian, who is currently gearing up for his fourth country-wide tour, titled Untouchable – One Last Time. His work has been covered in international publications such as The Guardian and Christian Science Monitor, and he was recently invited by the UN to perform at an event marking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, due to be held in Bangkok this December. Not bad for a boy from a small village in Bastar, the Chattisgarh district that is at the front-lines of the decades-long conflict between the Indian state and a Maoist insurgency.

A career in standup comedy was not on the cards for Sarkar growing up. His family’s financial precarity meant that he sometimes had to work as a child labourer (“I only went to school for the free midday meals,” he told DeadAnt this March). Only the second person from his village to go on to higher education, he enrolled in a college in Odisha’s Behrampur to study pharmacy. That’s where he discovered standup comedy sometime in 2017, thanks to YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. The history buff was watching speeches by Black radicals Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, when the algo spat up a bit by Dave Chappelle, which spoke of Black rights and anti-Black racism in America. Like many Dalit creatives and intellectuals before him, Sarkar saw parallels in the Black and Dalit experience, and he figured he could also do what Chappelle was doing—mining his story for laughs, all while shining a light on the scourge of casteism.

“I was curious and looked up ‘Hindi standup comedy’,” says Sarkar. Expecting to see a list of Kapil Sharma videos, he was pleasantly surprised to come across a clip by Varun Grover. “I knew he was the guy who had written the film Masaan. That movie gave me a whole different perspective about how you can leverage your art to talk about important things. And in the standup video, he was talking about Indian politics. I was just amazed. That year changed my entire life.”

Enamoured by the possibilities, Sarkar started looking for a way into the comedy scene. He was undeterred by petty issues like the lack of comedy events in Berhampur, or his lack of training and opportunity (I didn’t have any skills but I had opinions,” he says). He finally found an open mic—the only one in the entire state of Odisha, he claims—that took place once a month. The venue was over 200 km away. But those were just minor details. The fact that the next open mic was scheduled on the same day as an exam was a slightly more urgent hurdle, but Sarkar already knew that a desk job wasn’t for him.

“I borrowed a motorcycle from one of my friends and was heading to the venue,” he reminisces about that fateful day, conjuring up a scene that sounds straight out of a masala film. “There was a huge mob of students going towards the exam centre. I was the only one going in the opposite direction.”

I didn’t have any skills, but I had opinions.

Manjeet Sarkar

Excited and nervous, Sarkar managed to last only three minutes into his five-minute spot at Bhubhaneshwar’s Bocca Cafe. “I bombed like a motherf*cker,” he laughs. “But as a comedian, there’s always an intoxicating feeling to getting up on stage. Regardless of a ‘bomb’ or a successful set.”

Sarkar was hooked, and he began looking for his next fix. He moved to Mumbai, under the pretext of preparing for some competitive exams. What he was actually looking to study was standup comedy. He began hitting open mics across the city and networking with fellow comedians. He quickly realised that the Maximum City is best experienced with a maxed-out bank account, which he didn’t have. Between the high rents and the problematic practice of pay-to-play open mics, he was struggling to make his finances work. So he shifted base to Bengaluru.

This time, his excuse was that he wanted to get an MBA degree. But once again, his focus remained on comedy. He began hitting up stages across the city and quickly noticed that people weren’t as friendly or helpful as they were in Mumbai. He argues, though, that this is a pro, not a problem. “The first time I performed here, a comic came up to me and says, ‘yo, are you a Mumbai comic? You suck,’” he remembers. “I would ask for spots on lineup shows and they would tell me to first write some jokes and then come. They said they don’t care about whether I bomb or kill but they wanted to see some originality. Not hacks.”

Like most budding comedians, Sarkar spent his first couple of years in comedy emulating his contemporaries, making the same old jokes about Ola, traffic and LinkedIn. But as he gained experience and confidence, he started leaning more on bits that reflected his unique perspective and lived experience, embracing his identity as a Dalit man. “I started talking about growing up in a village and whether it got a laugh or not, I started feeling better as a comedian,” he says. “I was enjoying myself a lot more on the stage. That’s when I realised that my life is very different from [that of the other comedians]. They’ve lived a city life. I don’t know anything about that, I’ve never had those experiences. I can’t write about it even if I try to. So I decided to be very honest on stage.” 

Sarkar found nuanced ways of grounding his material in his Dalit identity, addressing heavy issues like everyday discrimination and caste atrocities, all while being funny as hell. “I don’t have to tell [the audience] I’m Dalit,” he says. “People will realise what I’m talking about anyway because these experiences are reserved only for the ‘lower-caste’ people of the country.” 

This was the eureka moment for Sarkar, who started to write bits around stories from his childhood, his school life, his experiences in college, and what it was like to move to the big city. He moulded all those jokes into a tight one-hour special titled Untouchable, which he then took on the road, tinkering with it constantly till he had a tight 90-minute set. The response was generally positive, but not always. In a country where people get offended at jokes about DJs and Royal Enfields, material that revolves around caste and religion (the two are essentially inseparable) came with its own risks.

“One lady got very offended about a joke I made about the Ganga,” he recalls. “She said, ‘Nikal jao yahan se. Main apne pati ko bula lungi. Hum Brahmin hai, koot denge tujhe (Get out of here. I’ll call my husband. We’re Brahmins. We’ll beat you up).’ And nobody in the audience saw anything wrong with what she said. I didn’t even know how to react because I was just shocked at the situation.” 

Sarkar wouldn’t be intimidated though, he quickly learnt to give it back to such audience members. The first time he went viral, it was thanks to a video in which he responded to a heckler by urging the mostly savarna audience to learn to take a joke… just like they had taken Dalit land. He was learning the power that came with having a platform and a microphone. “These incidents gave me the confidence to talk about these issues,” he says. “If you show any sign of fear, they will be the ones holding power. You have to be self-aware and know that you aren’t doing anything wrong.”

That uncompromising attitude—along with a remarkable skill for keeping the audience onside despite the discomfort—has served Sarkar well. His popularity has skyrocketed over the past year, not just in India but abroad as well: he had a tour of the USA and Canada lined up, which he had to cancel due to VISA issues and a certain ongoing diplomatic spat. He’s already planning to make it happen next year, along with potential dates in the UK and Australia. There are also murmurs of a book in the works. But fame and success are unlikely to blunt Sarkar’s razor-sharp edge. He says he will continue to use his truth to make his audiences grapple with uncomfortable questions about their privilege and unexamined prejudices. “I don’t want to make the people happy. They are rich. If they want to be happy, they can just open their bank account statements. Who am I to make them happy?”