A video from 2019 resurfaced where stand-up comedian Agrima Joshua attempted to make jokes at the expense of a Chhatrapati Shivaji statue and how Indians operate on the question-and-answer website Quora.
The outrage and vicious trolling soon seeped to Joshua’s twitter handle, where angry trolls left distasteful comments to express their rage. This is when the young comic tried to reach out to Aaditya Thackrey, son of Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackrey through social media. She alleged that she was being hounded by trolls of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) IT cell masquerading as Shiv Sena workers. “Now, I am pretty sure the Shiv Sena has better things to take care of in Maharashtra right now, than some comic doing her job,”she added in the tweet from July 10th.
Within an hour of Joshua’s tweet, Shiv Sena MLA Pratap Sarnaik demanded her arrest in a video he shared on twitter. By the next day, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader and Maharashtra’s Home Minister, Anil Deshmukh, wrote that he had asked the Commissioner of Police Mumbai and Inspector General Cyber Cell to “take legal action expeditiously”.
While Joshua received support on social media from fellow comics and fans, including Sumukhi Suresh, Kunal Karma, and Swara Bhaskar, no political leader or party stepped up in her support and by yesterday evening, the comic apologised for the video. She also named the NCP, Shiv Sena, Congress, and MNS in her apology, addressing her apology directly to them.
The Habitat, the venue where Joshua performed, was vandalised by MNS party workers. Party workers, who even went live while ransacking the cafe. “Violence can't be the solution for anything. Every art form can be criticised but in a civilised manner, said Balraj Singh Ghai, founder of the venue.
Indian stand-up comedians are no strangers to such controversies. While the attacks on Joshua were threatening of violence and were misogynistic and casteist in nature, there have been several instances in the past when stand-up comedians were viciously trolled. Here are some of them:
-
Kenny Sebastian - the stand-up comedian was recently trolled after an abusive comment was posted from an instagram handle allegedly masquerading to be him. The comedian was also on the receiving end of several casteist slurs after he spoke against the TikTok ban by India.
-
Kunal Kamra - Host of the indie podcast and show Shut Up Ya Kunal has been on the receiving end of social media trolling since he began to engage in political humour. But recently, he put out a video where he attempted to teach popular YouTuber Carry Minati the art of “roasting”. Not only did this end up being one of the most disliked videos on YouTube, an ocean of Carry Minati fans flooded Kamra’s social media, ruthlessly trolling him.
-
Sumukhi Suresh - The troll made a sexist remark, questioning the ability of women to do humour. The comic responded to him wittily, much to the satisfaction of her fans.
-
Urooj Ashfaq - the young stand-up comedian was trolled for talking about the fear of sexual assault in a comic set. The troll accused Ashfaq, who spoke about her fear of taking a cab at late night alone, of normalising a rape joke. “If you make rape jokes and laugh at rape jokes then you empower it,” he said. Ashfaq chose to not engage further on the subject.
-
AIB - the group was on the receiving end of social media outrage when it shared a photo of a doppelganger of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with snapchat’s dog filter on. While many found the humour distasteful, others found the outrage disproportionate to the misdemeanor.