India Comedy and Cricket: The Two National Religions Compared

India comedy and cricket share audiences, intensity, and the specific devotion of a country that treats both as existentially important

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

India Comedy and Cricket: The Twin Religions

India has several official religions and one unofficial one: cricket. The IPL, in its eighteenth season, is watched by audiences that dwarf any other sporting competition in Asia, generates television rights deals that cause other countries’ cricket boards to experience feelings of inadequacy, and is treated by its audience with the devotion, irrationality, and passionate disagreement about basic facts that characterise all serious religious practice. India comedy and cricket are natural partners because cricket is the subject about which Indians are most passionately irrational, and irrationality — observed with affection — is comedy’s native territory.

IPL: The Comedy That Manages Itself

The IPL is a comedy writer’s gift that renews itself every April. The franchise auction, in which cricket boards spend amounts of money on players that cause economists to sit quietly and breathe for a moment. The strategic selection decisions that are so puzzling that fans immediately attribute them to causes ranging from betting influences to personal vendettas to the alignment of planets. The commentary, which delivers insights like “the ball is in the air… it’s gone” with the gravity of a war correspondent. The celebrity franchise owners in the VIP box, performing reactions calibrated for the broadcast camera. The DRS system, which was introduced to reduce umpiring errors and has instead introduced a new category of errors, disputed at greater length and with more technology. ESPNcricinfo covers all of this with admirable seriousness. India comedy covers it with admirable levity.

The WhatsApp Cricket Commentary: India’s Real Punditry

The most sophisticated cricket analysis in India is not produced by television channels or newspapers. It is produced by WhatsApp group chats, in real time, by people who are also watching the same match and whose confidence in their tactical assessments is inversely proportional to their professional expertise in cricket strategy. The family group chat during an India-Pakistan match is a masterwork of simultaneous hope, despair, attribution of supernatural agency to individual deliveries, and the specific anger of a man who called the wicket before it fell and is deeply offended that no one noticed. This is India comedy and cricket at its most natural: unscripted, passionate, and completely certain about things it cannot possibly know.

Cricket and Political Comedy: The Overlap

Cricket and Indian politics overlap constantly in ways that generate India comedy material. Politicians attend matches in team jerseys. Team selections are criticised with the confidence of people who have never managed a professional cricket side. The BCCI wields power comparable to a constitutional body without any of the constitutional accountability, which is itself a satirical premise so precise that no exaggeration is required. And the specific comedy of India losing a match to a team that, in the run-up, every WhatsApp uncle had declared would be crushed — this comedy is renewable, eternal, and emotionally expensive for the uncles.

Read India Cricket Comedy at GeniéKnows.in

GeniéKnows.in covers India comedy and cricket with the affection of devoted followers and the precision of people who have noticed that the affection is itself funny. Read us alongside Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat for cricket satire that is as good as the cricket is exciting, which in IPL season is very good indeed.

More India comedy and cricket: Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

Also sporting: The Onion | The Daily Mash