The tragedy of Indian comedy

One of modern India biggest drawbacks is gender discrimination, something so acute that even Narendra Modi had to address it from the Red Fort. Kapil Thrives on laughing at women. He's relentlessly mean to his TV Wife and, in a reversal of roles for most families, is always trying to keep his wayward Grandmother, who has a thing for young hunks, in line.

How we laugh tells us a lot about ourselves. The outpouring of grief at Robin Williams's death all over the world, especially in the US, allowed us to remember a man whom we could laugh with. His dazzling array of accents in stand up comedy and his happy-sad characters in movies reminded us of the best in us, a hurricane, as David Letterman put it, to the rest of the world's morning dew. How we laugh every night at Kapil Sharma's co-stars on Comedy Nights With Kapil shows us the worst in ourselves-our sexism, our cruelty to those who are different and our obsession with class. What does it say about us that we find a slight young man from Amritsar, who makes rude comments about his pretty wife, his swinging daadi (played by a cross-dressing Ali Asgar) and his infantile spinster bua, hilarious? A lot. Here's why I think India finds the desi version of The Kumars at No. 42 funny.

He embodies The Everyman's struggle with English No matter how rich or how thin you may be, if you still don't know that the 'k' in knowledge is silent, then you don't have what Kapil Sharma would like to call status. Making fun of English is one of his shticks and it embodies one of middle India's deepest in-securities. Even if you're a sourpuss like me, there is something oddly funny about his loose translation of "She's kidding". Yes, you guessed it, it is woh bachche paida kar rahi hai (she is producing babies).

He comes from a small town and what India likes to call a "modest" background Middle India is uncomfortable with starva-tion and poverty. It understands relative deprivation. It understands going to Mumbai as an outsider and standing outside Amitabh Bachchan's house in Juhu and being told by the guard to scram. It understands going to Canada in droves from Punjab, so much so that when God created the world, he "should have given Canada to Punjab". It under-stands overcoming all that and standing next to Virat Kohli joking like old friends, with pappis and jhappis, on national TV.

He wallows in nostalgia Pre-liberalisation children cannot understand an analog world. They cannot understand poor TV reception because the antenna on the roof was pointed in the wrong direction. They cannot compre-hend deadpan All India Radio news readers. They cannot fathom a Diwali without patakas. Kapil brings it to them, with a dose of bathos: every time he would ask for fire-crackers, he says in a child's voice on his show, he would get a slap from his father. Not sur-prisingly he is very popular with the parental demographic, especially those fond of telling their children of the struggle they endured.

He breathes sexism One of modern India's biggest drawbacks is gender discrimination, something so acute that even Narendra Modi had to address it from the Red Fort. Make your sons accountable for where and with whom they spend their time, he told par-ents. Kapil thrives on laughing at women. He laughs at their propensity to speak English to the underclass (women always speak in Eng-lish to therickshaw-wala and panipuriwala, he says), their fickleness and even their body hair. He's relentlessly mean to his TV wife and, in a reversal of roles for most families, is always trying to keep his wayward grandmo-ther, who has a thing for young hunks, in line.

In any other nation Comedy Nights would be offensive, or at least reduced to late-night television. In India, it is embraced and perpetuated in mainstream movies where award-winning actors make lewd jokes dressed in women's clothes and laugh all the way to the bank, in high heels. May Babaji ka Thullu strike me dead but the only reason I am grateful to the show is this-at least it keeps Navjot Singh Sidhu's witticisms off Indian cricket.