“All the podcasters that have had the President on, they don’t do their court jester. […] They just suck up to him. That’s not the job of a comedian.” In one of the more revealing moments from his recent appearance on Conan O’Brien’s podcast Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, Zach Galifianakis spoke about what he believes comedians are supposed to do when they sit across from powerful people. “You are to challenge. You are to make uncomfortable. […] That is the job of the court jester. Period.”

It is a compelling sentiment, especially coming from someone whose entire comic persona—whether on Between Two Ferns or in stand-up—has been built around awkwardness, disruption and puncturing public image. He didn’t drop the charade in front of former President Barack Obama either. He joked about Obama being “the last black president” and mocked the birther conspiracy by asking whether he’d build his presidential library in “his home country of Kenya”. Obama took it in his stride.

Historically, the jester has occupied a strange moral space, tolerated precisely because he says what others cannot. The fool survives because power finds him entertaining enough to spare. But that arrangement only works when power still believes in the performance.

Indian comedians rarely have the luxury of choosing whether to challenge power.

Over the last few months alone, multiple comedians have faced direct legal consequences for jokes involving public figures. Hyderabad-based comic Anudeep Katikala was detained by the police after clips of him referencing a political figure and his family circulated online. Days later, comedian Sarat Uday’s Bengaluru show was disrupted by supporters of another political figure for similar reasons. These incidents arrive in the long shadow of Kunal Kamra, whose career has repeatedly intersected with police complaints, political outrage and show cancellations because of his material about those in power.

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Even observational humour eventually collides with politics here because politics itself is so deeply embedded in public identity—language, religion, caste, region, celebrity, fandom. The “court jester” model assumes a stable court where satire is an accepted part of democratic theatre. Indian comedy operates in something far more volatile: a space where jokes are frequently interpreted not as ridicule, but as insult, provocation or ideological attack.

This is partly why Indian stand-up has always carried an undercurrent of fear alongside rebellion. You can trace it from the early censorship battles around AIB to venue shutdowns, FIRs, police visits and the growing dependence on disclaimers before sets. Even comedians who avoid overt political material often self-edit instinctively, aware that virality has collapsed the distance between a room joke and a national controversy. The internet, which once liberated stand-up from television gatekeeping, has also made every audience potentially infinite—and therefore potentially hostile.

The increasing tendency to treat jokes as matters requiring police intervention fundamentally alters the role comedy can play in public life.

And yet, despite all this, comedians continue to prod at the edges.

This is perhaps where Galifianakis’ idea becomes unexpectedly useful in India—not as a romantic image of comedians bravely “speaking truth to power”, but as recognition that discomfort is built into the art form itself. The history of stand-up has always been tied to this friction. Lenny Bruce was arrested repeatedly on obscenity charges in the 1960s for material that now reads almost tame. Richard Pryor turned racial trauma, addiction and state violence into stand-up at a time when polite culture preferred silence. Neither man was simply “controversial”; they expanded what comedy was allowed to talk about.

Indian comedy is still negotiating that boundary in real time.

This does not mean every joke made in the name of free speech is automatically profound, necessary or even good. Some jokes are lazy, some cruel, some politically empty. 

But the increasing tendency to treat jokes as matters requiring police intervention fundamentally alters the role comedy can play in public life. The problem is no longer whether comedians should be allowed to make “good” or “bad” jokes. Stand-up has always had plenty of both. The problem is that the consequences surrounding comedy are steadily becoming institutional rather than cultural—moving away from criticism, disagreement or public backlash and towards complaints, disruptions and police action.

That shift changes the texture of comedy itself. In America, Galifianakis worries comedians have become too comfortable around power. In India, comedians are still calculating what challenging power might cost them.

That distinction matters. Because once legal consequences begin shaping comic instinct, stand-up slowly stops being a space for experimentation and starts becoming a risk-assessment exercise and space for self-preservation.