Recently seen on social media and in public:
I don’t think Kamra is funny.
Sigh. Yes. Quite. Nor, to be honest, do I. Varun and Veer are among the rare few with actual comic timing. The rest mostly oscillate between Twitter-thread one-liners and wedding-sangeet banter dressed up as political insight. If anything, Kamra reminds me of that one drunk colleague at an office Diwali party who, despite being the only one saying something worth hearing, delivers it with such slurred chaos that you just wish he’d pass out quietly.
But that, you see, is entirely beside the point.
I didn’t find Charlie Hebdo particularly clever either. Edgy? Occasionally. Sensitive? Only by accident. But I don’t recall suggesting the appropriate consequence for mediocrity was automatic weapons. If that were the bar, there would be a neat, if somewhat fatigued, queue forming outside Kapil Sharma’s studio. It would wrap politely around to Karan Johar’s office, with a slight detour to Ekta Kapoor’s, every third person carrying a metaphorical pitchfork marked “Crimes Against Taste”.
Because this isn’t about comedy. Or taste. Or your personal chuckle threshold.
The issue is timing. More precisely, the sanctimonious theatre of those who choose this precise moment, while the man is being threatened, hounded, and treated as a national security risk for mocking a public official, to clear their throat and announce they never found him funny anyway.
It’s the rhetorical equivalent of telling someone their biryani is dry while they’re explaining how they were beaten with the rice cooker.
Your opinion may be technically accurate. But your timing reveals something far more illuminating. Intent. Alignment. Cowardice wrapped in the velvet of so-called nuance.
Now, to the fallacies parading about in this little circus of deflection of finding Kamra’s humour not up to their standards.
If you’re right-wing: Congratulations. You’ve deployed a textbook red herring fallacy. You’ve veered off from the actual issue — state intimidation, silencing of dissent, policing of taste, appropriation of the sole spokespersonship of culture, amongst other similarly distasteful (and I use this word deliberately) things — and redirected the conversation to Kamra’s comedic stylings. It’s misdirection, plain and simple. And it shows your intent behind it — to create a narrative that distracts from the issue. You see, the question isn’t whether he’s funny. The question is whether a functioning democracy should behave like an aggrieved uncle at a wedding roast, without reference to the quality of the roast.
If you’re liberal: Ah. Of course. You, dear brunch-table, Margarita-sipping intellectual, are indulging in the motte and bailey fallacy. You begin with the noble fortress of “I support free speech”, only to sneakily retreat to the soggy trench of “But Kamra’s not even funny, so…”, loudly tut-tutting for the benefit of anyone in earshot. It’s cowardice in a kurta. Add a flourish of concern trolling, that oh-so-performative anxiety where you murmur, “I just worry this isn’t the right tone,” and you’ve completed the full yoga pose of spineless centrism.
In either case, bhakt or woke, Tricolour or craft beer, you’re not making a point.
You’re manufacturing an alibi.
You are not some great protector of taste or arbiter of culture.
You’re just an asshole.
