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.
One might wish for more satirical bite – or even more satirical bark, from a comic with a low-key demeanour. His mild cynicism can feel general rather than localised. But, in front of a majority Indian and British-Indian audience, there are a few satisfying jabs at the current state of Dasgupta’s homeland – and at the UK too, whose undignified decline this citizen of our former colony delights in witnessing.
There’s some excellent writing, too, on new parenthood and – even more so – in a closing section that recounts Dasgupta’s improbable origin story. This bizarre tale of communal living (“There was traffic inside my house …”) and his extended family’s one-in-one-out approach to births and deaths provides the Mumbai man with a bulletproof finale to an engaging set. If his arrival in the UK was long delayed, on this evidence, Dasgupta was worth waiting for.
At Soho theatre, London, until 2 November
