Down to Brown: A Footnote on British Asian and South Asian American Comedy

Abstract

The long-standing influence of South Asian people in British and North American culture is, of late, getting more traction, particularly as discourses of race and representation are becoming more prominent on social media.

This chapter moves away from the internet comedy of India, as a central object of study, to its diasporic counterparts as located in Britain and North America, and explores the trajectory of South Asian comedy in these contexts. It closely examines how earlier iterations of South Asian-based comedy were more intersectional in their approach compared to contemporary narratives which are increasingly being disidentified by South Asian users as limited, specifically in the content creators’ problematic reliance on brownvoice as a mode of representing Indianness to a global audience.