Kunal Kamra: The stand-up comedian, satirist, and the man who won’t shut up

In ‘Naya Bharat (New India),’ his latest comedy special that has stirred up a hornet’s nest with its indirect reference to Maharashtra deputy CM Eknath Shinde as ‘gaddar’ (traitor), Kamra performs an autopsy. On us. On our institutions like the CBI and the ED. On the fragile state of dissent. And on the illusion that things will fix themselves if we just wait and watch.

After podcaster Ranveer Allahbadia, better known as ‘BeerBiceps’, sparked controversy over his remarks about parents and sex on Samay Raina’s show, India’s Got Latent, a lot was said about the ‘limits of comedy’ in today’s India. About where the red lines are. About what’s off-limits. But in his latest special, Kamra flips the question: Why aren’t more comedians taking risks?

The clips from his 45-minute-long show have gone viral on social media. If you have already seen the show in its entirety, you’d notice that there is an edge to his delivery, sharper than before. He plays with fire and walks barefoot across coals. This isn’t the Kamra of early YouTube days, riffing on cab drivers and middle-class quirks and absurdities. This is a man who’s been banned from airlines, dragged to court for contempt, trolled relentlessly, and yet — has refused to shut up.

Speaking truth to power

Born and brought up in Mumbai, Kamra, 36, who shifted to Pondicherry three years ago, has spent the last few years being both India’s most controversial comic and its most defiant one. ‘Naya Bharat’ was supposed to be just another show — sharp, irreverent, and deeply political. But in today’s India, a joke is never just a joke. And it is apparent that Kamra’s stakes are different now.

The question worth asking, not just in India, but anywhere where democracy is under threat, is: what should a stand-up comic do in a time of political suppression, state-sponsored hate and corporate indifference and incompetence? The answer, Kunal Kamra suggests, by doing what he does: tell the truth. No matter how uncomfortable. No matter how unpopular. No matter who it offends. And especially when the backlash is along the expected lines.

Also read: How Vir Das punches in the face of power in Emmy Award-winning show, ‘Landing’

A college dropout, who worked as a production assistant in Prasoon Pandey’s ad film production house Corcoise Films for 11 years, Kamra started his stand-up career in 2013, when he was 25, with a show at the Canvas Laugh Club in Mumbai. He started out cracking jokes about everyday life — cabbies, bachelorhood, ridiculous ads and hypernationalism — but everything changed when Shut Up Ya Kunal took off in 2017. The YouTube show did what news channels wouldn’t: put politicians in the hot seat, catch them in their own contradictions, and ask real questions without sugarcoating. His chat with JNU’s Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid blew up overnight, proving that people weren’t just hungry for laughs — they wanted someone to call out the powerful.

But speaking truth to power has consequences. Kamra’s satire on demonetisation, nationalism, and media bias brought death threats. His landlady asked him to vacate the house he had been living in over “political issues.” In 2020, Kamra’s mid-air confrontation with Arnab Goswami got him banned from multiple airlines. His tweets about the Supreme Court landed him in contempt cases, but he refused to apologise, saying the real problem was the court’s double standards, not his words.

Playing with fire

In ‘Naya Bharat’, Kamra steps up with material that’s incendiary — directly taking on the godmen of corporate India (including Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, Bhavish Aggarwal, Anand Mahindra, Sudha Murty and Narayana Murthy, and the high and mighty of the ruling party, from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Shinde. He riffs on poverty, unemployment, concentration of wealth, corruption, lack of tech and innovation (it took a country like Japan to make something as basic as a mixer that took pressure off grandmothers), bigotry, the fickleness of our leaders, and the frivolous inanities of business honchos on social media.

There is something deeply classical — even Shakespearean — about Kamra’s position. The court jester, after all, was the only one allowed to mock the king. But even the jester knew his place. Kamra, however, mocks not just the king, but the court, the ministers, the sycophants, and the entire theatre of the absurd that is Indian public life today. And he does it with no illusions about the consequences.

At a time when satire is being systematically smothered, Kamra’s persistence feels almost reckless. But if you ask him, it’s just common sense. He talks about everything politicians would rather you forget — rising authoritarianism (he sings a song Tanashah O Tanashah to the tune of Baadshah O Baadshah, the pièce de resistance, which he dedicates to Modi; that must entail having a spine of stone and a nerve of steel, isn’t it?), crackdowns on free speech, the state of Indian democracy and economy. If stand-up is meant to be observational comedy, then Kamra has chosen to observe what others ignore, what the powerful want erased.

Hitting out at businessmen like Aggarwal of Ola, with whom he had an online tiff on X earlier, Kamra said, ‘Indian businessmen don’t take responsibility for their wrongdoings’ and have a ‘fetish’ to build India, when they cannot even build a decent bike. Instead of fixing the reported issues in their bikes, Ola Electric has launched new colours. “Maybe a different shade will fix the problem,” he joked. “What did I say that made him so angry? It’s simple, you manufacture two-wheelers, and neither of the wheels works.”

In one of the songs in the last 15 minutes of the comedy special, Kamra satirises the state of Indian economy by reworking the Hindi adaptation of We Shall Overcome — Hum Honge Kamyab —into Hum Honge Kangal (We Will Be Paupers). The parody is steeped in pointed commentary, featuring altered lyrics such as “Mann mein andhvishwas, desh ka satyanash” (Blind faith in our minds, destruction of the nation), a sharp twist on the original hopeful line, “Mann mein hai vishwas, poora hai vishwas (the heart is full of faith, complete faith).”

The sense of unease

In India, the stage has historically been a safe space for social critique. From the naatak mandalis (troupes) to the hasya kavi sammelans (poetic soirees), satire has always had a role. But today, when many mainstream comedians draw on apolitical riffs or bland punchlines designed to go viral without causing offence, Kamra stands out like a sore, necessary thumb. He’s not just doing stand-up; he’s standing up.

When he tears into specific people like Sudha Murty ('the embodiment of simplicity who now simply goes to Rajya Sabha' — an indictment of the kind of people who preach middle-class values while sitting atop billion-dollar empires), the idea is not to make it personal. He does it to cut through the fog. To put real names to real problems. CEOs who sell bad scooters. Billionaires who are neech and nirlaj (mean and shameless) and who hoard land or engage in excessive show of wealth. Politicians who project power but evade accountability. He tells jokes. But in doing so, he teaches us something about courage. About how you don’t need a newsroom or a party or a hashtag to speak the truth. Sometimes, all you need is a mic. A room full of people. And the guts to say the thing everyone’s been avoiding.

Also read: Vir Das, on Mind Fool India Tour, proves why his comedy is fearless and unmissable

In that moment, comedy stops being entertainment. It becomes memory. And Kamra becomes the conscience of a country that would rather not look in the mirror. But needs to. Because the joke, in the end, is not just on us. It’s about us. And someone had to say it. His comedy is not the light-hearted froth of the variety-show circuit nor the manic grins of the everyman comic. Kamra is something else — a dark satirist, a bruised idealist, a chronicler of a Republic in cognitive dissonance.

What Kamra is doing is far more radical: he’s trying to make you worry. About the state, about yourself, about the speed with which humour has become subversive in a nation that used to laugh far more easily — or perhaps, used to ignore far more comfortably. When Kamra makes fun of nationalism, he does it because the idea has become so hollowed out that the only thing it can now contain is punchlines.

Also, Kamra speaks in the exact registers we claim to hate but can’t help but confront. His comedy is a mirror held up to India’s upwardly mobile, politically indifferent, WhatsApp-swiping middle class, many of them senior citizens (or buddhe/oldies as he calls them) — that great Indian demographic too scared to speak up, too smug to care. He isn’t there to entertain them. He’s there to call them out.

There’s a quality to Kamra’s comedy that owes as much to activist tradition as it does to performance. You watch him and realise that this isn’t stand-up as stand-up used to be. This is stand-up as journalism, as dissent, as documentation. At a time when satire is being weaponised against itself — ridiculed, trivialised — Kamra is making sure it still bites. Once the chuckles fade and the show is over, what he leaves behind is not laughter. It’s a sense of unease. An unease that doesn’t go away with a scroll or a swipe.

So, where does Kamra go from here? More FIRs? More cancellations? More threats? Probably all of the above. But also, more comedy. More pushing the boundaries of what can be said, what can be laughed at. Because if there is one thing Kamra has made clear, it’s this: he will not be silenced. In a world that is increasingly allergic to truth, humour is one of the last defences left. And Kunal Kamra, for better or worse, is determined to keep that defence alive.