East India Comedy: Channeling the Public Sphere in Online Satire

Abstract

After the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, a group of young stand-up comedians thousands of miles away in India—going by the name “East India Comedy”—uploaded a musical parody on their YouTube channel. Titled “The Donald Trump Song,” the parody altered the lyrics of a popular American song to add references to gun control and heightened sexism in the US, as the comedians sang: “We have no gun control, so you men can enjoy. Just don’t make out with any boys” (East India Comedy 2017a). Within a few weeks, the two-minute video had more than a million views. Such playful engagement with politics is a growing trend among the English-speaking, middle- and upperclass population living in the metropolitan cities of India, and such YouTube channels are enabling them to participate in a global “political public sphere” (Habermas 2012) not confined to national boundaries. In fact, several comedy collectives in addition to East India Comedy such as All India Bakchod and The Viral Fever have recently launched YouTube channels to cater to a thriving online audience with political satire. The popularity of these channels comes at a time of declining credibility for traditional news media in India because of growing interference from corporate and government institutions (Punathambekar 2015). Traditional media certainly persist in India, with more than 100 million print newspapers sold every day (Biswas 2012). Television outlets, too, remain plentiful; from only one television channel prior to the early 1980s, India now has more than 700 television channels (“Give” 2015). However, Internet penetration is 35% (“Internet” 2016), and by 2020 India is estimated to overtake the US in terms of the absolute number of online users (PTI 2016). It is in spaces like YouTube, therefore, that we might look to see this transformation from traditional media institutions to emerging forms of cultural production unfold, where the “channel” structures of existing media adapt and evolve to serve new media logics. This is a question not only of industry, but also of politics, as this transformation enables cultural genres such as comedy to support public dialogue, deliberation, and debate in ways that the channels of previous media institutions could not. Yet the phenomenal prospects of the Internet to expand the public sphere, and specifically the accompanying potential of YouTube channels to foster democratic dialogue and political critique, remain little explored in academic literature. One of the functions of a channel is to differentiate one industry player from others and create loyalty among the audience in an increasingly competitive market. A channel, in a sense, depends on boundaries that define what their interior contents will be, and perhaps more importantly, what they will not be, demarcating that content from that of other content creators in the market (at least in principle). Channels seek to maximize what Faye Woods (2014) in the context of British television called the “distinguishing difference” in order to develop and grow their niche audiences. In this chapter, thus, I seek to interrogate how and why the distinguishing difference of YouTube channels has become instrumental in contributing to the public sphere in a multi-channel environment. In other words, how have digital entrepreneurs and audiences leveraged these new channels as a way to distinguish themselves from each other as well as to critically discuss politics and culture in contemporary India? In what follows, I will briefly review the historical development of video channels in India, from the sole, state-owned “DD National” to myriad private channels, and then demonstrate how the emergence of digital channels has created new possibilities for the public sphere with a case study of East India Comedy’s (EIC) YouTube channel.