The Supreme Court has directed five social media influencers and comedians to apologise to the nation as their jokes are extremely insensitive. Among them, Samay Raina is the most prominent. The other persons mentioned in the order are Vipul Goyal, Balraj Ghai, Nishant Tanwar and Sonali Thakker (also as Sonali Aditya Desai). The order has elicited interest and worry about what their jokes contain and what the court order has meant.
Samay Raina is a current YouTube star and stand-up comedian in his late 20s whose content is predominantly in the form of stand-up comedian. He is now known since he won the comedy show ‘Comicstaan 2’ in 2019. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Raina creatively coupled his comedy with internet chess matches, inviting such personalities as Grandmasters Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen, and Bollywood actor Aamir Khan to participate in streaming matches.
In 2024, Raina introduced a talent show on his YouTube channel titled India’s Got Latent, which is known in pop culture as dank or dark humour. Certain parts of the show received high levels of criticism, with a joke about incest being the single most criticised and as a result, all of the episodes were removed from his channel.
The Supreme Court case was specifically occasioned by a joke that he made in one of his live-recorded shows. Raina passed comments on a fundraising campaign undertaken on behalf of a child who had Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), stating whether the parents who obtained 16 crore Indian Rupees as a cost of a life-saving injection would spend them on the child or not.
The joke, which was attended by laughter among the viewers, led to a petition filed in the Supreme Court by an organisation working with SMA patients, which claimed that the comedians mocked at people with SMA and other disabled individuals.
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