Digital Comedy as Democratic Participation: Reimagining Public Discourse Through Humour in India’s Digital Age

This interpretative review develops Digital Communicative Comedy (DCC), a framework for understanding how online humour in India functions as democratic participation. Integrating comedy studies with Habermas’s communicative action and public sphere theory—alongside critiques by Fraser and Young—and digital media research on platform affordances, the paper argues that comedic texts can articulate validity claims (truth, rightness, sincerity) through humour, inviting audience uptake and deliberation in networked publics. Focusing on Indian stand-up and short-form satire, the review theorizes how platform logics (algorithms, monetization, moderation) mediate visibility, risk, and discursive quality, and how cultural specificity strengthens comedy’s civic legibility. The paper argues that digital comedy, as illustrated by comedians such as Kunal Kamra, Varun Grover, and Vir Das, provides new avenues for civic participation that circumvent traditional gatekeepers, generating an atmosphere for democratic discourse. The paper outlines an analytic template for coding comedic validity claims and proposes research designs to test democratic outcomes (cross-cutting interaction, issue reframing, civic intent). DCC thus reframes digital comedy from “mere entertainment” to a participatory discourse repertoire within South Asia’s evolving public spheres.