Cracking Jokes on Body - A qualitative study on ‘The Kapil Sharma Show’/ শরীর নিয়ে কৌতুক - ‘দ্যা কপিল শর্মা শো’য়ের একটি গুণগত বিশ্লেষণ

Abstract

Humor is an important sense element of social interaction. A good sense of humor of an individual makes a distinctive quality within a person. On the basis of this distinctive quality people could be judge and remembered for a long. In contemporary consumerist society, if a person holds a good quality of sense of humor, then s/he became a skillful individual because an ability to create humor at any situation became commodity and individual would be able to use this skill to earn fame. Since long humor was an instrument for the entertainment industry to create popularity of their product like movies, daily soaps, and others. But in recent time we witnessed that humor had been changed in a revolutionary way, it became out and out ‘comedy’, separate entertainment activities were produced on comedy. Cracking joke is the most useful and popular method to produce comedy or humor. Cracking joke is not the new activity but the nature of jokes has been changed radically. In the highly competitive market of entertainment industry, people want to gain popularity or TRP of their show, hence they were targeting human bodies, irrespective of male and female, to get success. The most popular comedy show of Indian television, by the most talented stand-up comedian Mr. Kapil Sharma, named The Kapil Sharma Show have been adopted the easy road to success. On this show actors are cracking jokes on human body in derogative way in regular manner. Basically, they are producing some kind of values that are directly reproducing body shaming attitudes.

            On the above context, the present article analyses, in a qualitative way, the nature of jokes used in The Kapil Sharma Show by content analysis method. This article addressed the question of how and why ‘body’ has been used as tool by the actors of the TKSH to produced humor or comedy and conclude with a criticism of capitalism, as it is a strategy of capitalism to create a binary opposition on human body, particularly capitalism wants to form an  idea of ideal type body of human so that they could sell their products to the people who are dreaming to achieve the ideal body.