Anirban Dasgupta has been a standup for 10 years – almost as long as that artform has been booming in his native India. And now, he’s run out of things he’s allowed to say. Unless, unless … Dasgupta’s show finds the 34-year-old addressing politics and religion by circuitous routes, the kind of stealth approach required, he tells us, to keep the Indian authorities at bay. If that means that most of the political jokes here are directed against figures safely distant from 21st-century power, it also brings a sly and subversive impetus to proceedings, offsetting the gentle manner implied by the show’s title, Polite Provocation.
His political gags are, ostensibly at least, non-topical: their target is Mahatma Gandhi. They may have a contemporary edge, with one or two punchlines rebounding on India’s current powers-that-be. But a fair portion are just poking fun and asking if Gandhi was a freedom fighter – or just a freedom wait-er? On religion, Dasgupta has less to say: there is a choice quip about his country’s two faiths (“Hindus, and ‘watch out for Hindus’”), and an anecdote about being caught in traffic at a recent Ganesh festival.
