The sublime and ridiculous: humor and performance of citizenship in the Indian parliament

Abstract Parliaments as ‘deliberative chambers’ exemplify the tension that is at the heart of representative democracies: the politicians must negotiate, legislate, and govern amid ideological clashes. In such a performative space, humor becomes a means to navigate the tightrope between decorum and dissent. This paper examines the role of humor in citizenship debates during 2004 and 2024 in the Lok Sabha (the lower house) of the Indian Parliament, through an interdisciplinary analysis of televised sessions. Informed by the studies in politics, performance, and humor, this paper treats parliamentarians as representatives who embody the citizens’ capacity to speak, decide, and adjudicate on collective affairs. In this sense, each parliamentary act is simultaneously an exercise of the representatives’ political agency and a surrogate enactment of a citizen’s claim to citizenship. Humor enables articulation of grievances and anxieties, overall affect, that remain subdued in formal legal language. Comic performances embedded in the deliberative democratic practice in the parliament foreground the fault lines of citizenship law and complicate the state’s efforts to render belongingness legible and governable. The paper establishes humor as a significant mode of political performance in contemporary deliberative democracy.