Anuvab Pal
On the Oscar controversy and Chris Rock’s routine at the award ceremony: The Motion Pictures Association of America has a lot of old white people who like movies about old white people that like movies about old white people, like King’s Speech or whatever. So unless you change the demographic of that, you have to make different movies for these people to like.
It doesn’t inherently mean that they are racist. I firmly believe that the story should be far more important than the race, like the Coen Brothers set there movies where there are no black people, that doesn’t mean that they don’t make great movies. It just means that their world doesn’t have people like that. Same goes for Madmen, Downtown Abbey, etc. To me that doesn’t mean they are being racist. Of course for a very successful comedian to point that out is important. But at the same time, you can’t just do a show to satisfy people, then it becomes like an Indian award show, where someone shows up, and to satisfy them you give an award. If you want credibility, sometimes things are bound to get cruel. It was hard hitting, and no one better than Chris Rock could have done that — to go out there and compare it to the 60s and 70s. You couldn’t have had Louis CK do that. And also they got him specifically for that reason as the nominations were so white, and there was so much criticism, which is equally tokenistic and that’s equally problematic.
The topics he would like to talk about, he kind of digressed and made it an award specific comedy:
Stand ups are saying what they want to say, either at the stage show, or through their Youtube channels. But as far as the award specific issues go, I don’t think that we’ll ever do that — suppose some year, the Bollywood awards are accused of corruption, they will hire Kapil Sharma to take it head on, I doubt whether we will ever have that. We just have to accept that we live in a different country. Either you live here or you leave.
Sorabh Pant, East India Comedy
We tackle these serious issues in a fun way on regular basis with EIC Outrage. From the beef ban to Modi’s trip abroad, the Susan Jordan case to sexism in engineering colleges. It’s a very tough thing to pull off a serious issue in India as here, jokes often come out as rants. Pulling out a comic angle is difficult at times like these, but researching the issue in depth and investigating further will tell you where the joke lies.
The Oscars have always been about high ideals, with blacks and transgender community boycotting it for the lack of representation, in India we are still raving about Suraj Pancholi winning the best debutante award. Oscars have always been a platform for people to voice their concerns, Marlon Brando did not accept his award way back in the 70’s due to lack of representation of the Native Americans in the industry. Bollywood needs to talk about issues that matter without being superficial.
Stand up Comedian Kunal Rao:
Chris Rock was great. Each of his routines are extraordinary, and I am not surprised that he was a hit at the Oscars this year. India has the ability to spark a stand up routine out of anything — there are so many topics that one can take inspiration from! There’s hunger, poverty, racism, corruption and I am only getting started. I am a social commentator over a political one, so I do a lot of routines about the new generation — I think they are a distracted bunch. If there was any topic that I had to talk about, it would be about being responsible and making a difference.
