Doctoral Fellow in Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters"

April–September 2025

'Media' and its 'Materials': Stand-Up Comedy as a Site of Contestation of Class-Caste-Religious-Gender Dynamics in 21st Century India

The focus of Dhritii Dutta's research project lies on the curious interplay of space and time in constructing communities through the lens of urban-performative humour and stand-up comedy repertoires.

Stand-up comedy, during its formative era, used to reflect a typically American humorous temperament and was mainly known to build on prior cultural legacies (a blend of classic Vaudeville/minstrel/burlesque comical characteristics filled with resonances from televised sit-com shows) before ending up as a global cultural phenomena in the late 1990s. Even after establishing itself as a global cultural phenomenon, this broadly improvisational art form retained its theatrical nature, drawing resources from quotidian exchanges, the status quo and wider sociocultural and political events and circumstances.

Dutta's research intervenes in the broader landscape of global stand-up comedy and part of its journey in India. The genre of performative-improvised humour serves as a tool to obtain a coherent understanding of the sociopolitical mores pertaining to Indian society and, by extension, a tool to explore the reception of the status quo in 21st century India, of the 'state' and its 'enemies', of majoritarian complacency, of Hindutva and its warrior ideologues, savarna culture and various other material consequences of cultural urbanisation, where the latter also pertains to the surge of corporate culture, spaces and most importantly a gentrified community in and around certain urban/cosmopolitan hubs of today's India. This project maintains a curious outlook on the allied discourses pertaining to the notion of 'materiality', 'embodiment' and 'affect' attached to the medium (as in, the art form) and its sociocultural implications. How such processual notions of materiality correlates to our unorthodox views on literary practices and travels across cultural barriers is another aspect of this project.

Dhritii Dutta is currently pursuing her PhD at the department of Performance Studies, University of Hyderabad, India. She has obtained a BA in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and completed her MA at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi. Her academic training in literature has been crucial to her navigation through multidisciplinary research methodologies that prompted her towards an unorthodox re-visioning of literary practices and their adaptations across media. Her MA in Arts and Aesthetics, through its variegated disciplinary foci inspired her interest around various loci of sociocultural anthropology, visual arts and performance studies. Her current research interests revolve around the thriving scenes of stand-up comedy in India as a tool to study the post 1990s caste-class-cultural transitions. She is fascinated by the endless potential of humour, both as a performative and literary device, which resonates within her current project and takes into consideration a global cultural phenomenon via its local implications.