The PG Joke That Put An Eff In Family

Daniyal S is a creature of the internet in the purest sense. A catfish for kicks and a long-term LARPer for kinks, his “hormonal adolescence” has self-professedly “bled well into adulthood”. I know him from Quora, where I once saw him engage in battle with someone who loved Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2021). Don’t ask how but my online acquaintance with him stretches from recommendations around the weirdest films to exist to discussing SOPs for university applications.

But there’s something else, too, among the things Daniyal gets off. He’s seen Omegle Chat on its way out and can be found lurking on shady dating apps and even goods and services websites. A little while ago, he told me about how he spotted someone he knew on a platform like that, and he had to mess with them.

“I hit him up,” he sends with a string of LOLs. “He wanted to dirty-chat. I suggested that I play his older sister. ‘We can make it cousin,’ he tried to negotiate after failing to make me settle for someone else he knew. ‘Sister,’ I repeated.”

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He told me he enjoyed it when he could shift the power balance by forcing another man to get off on a twisted power dynamic.

Graphic by Tanya Chaturvedi

This is the sort of thing that happens behind closed doors on the internet. Outside of that, suggestion of incest is all around us. Netizens regularly turn incest into an Alabama-stereotype punchline (a supposedly humorous suggestion that rural families in the southern United States are inbred). Content creators often engage in parasocial baiting with content where weird familial dynamics (most often between parents and children) are teased for ‘engagement’—the perversion smacks of something else that’s broken in our culture.

Earlier this year, comedians on Truth or Drink, a series by the YouTube channel OG Crew, cracked a joke that went relatively unnoticed in the Western world. “Would you watch your parents have sex for the rest of your life or join in once and stop it forever?” A couple of weeks later, podcaster Ranveer Allahbadia showed up at India’s Got Latent, the YouTube roast-comedy show by comedian Samay Raina. He repeated the OG Crew joke—the first misstep in a vanilla guy’s vanilla career.

The guillotine of internet cancellation fell over Allahbadia, Raina and others present on the show, including comedian Apoorva Mukhija. Multiple complaints were filed against the duo, several state police departments got involved in the investigation and Raina ultimately took the show off YouTube.

Ever since Raina and Allahbadia, so far poster boys of the emerging emotionally detached edgelord identity, have found themselves beleaguered, TV debates and online opinions have swirled and clashed gutturally over their right to express. Or the lack of it. The joke’s had a discombobulating effect on the cults of both men. Whether Allahbadia—an emblem of the conformist manosphere, where his expressions and vigorous head movements are the most unconventional thing about him—will earn redemption from the custodians of liberalism remains to be seen. That Raina will achieve unerasable sainthood among the higher echelons of dark comedy is a foregone conclusion.

Dark comedy. Those young today seem to believe that offensive humour is an internet-era flex. That the incest joke is somehow the aspirational move to perform dominance. A chance to land the blow while you have your 15 seconds. But when a mainstream podcaster, whose brand thrives on relatability—a palatable blend of self-improvement, celebrity chit-chat and hustle culture—leans into it, it becomes a cause for concern.

But, no, offensive humour isn’t anything new. Shakespeare did it, Chaucer did it. Other ancient books that aren’t advisedly nameable, did it. All over the world.

Culturally, incest tropes have to do with possession and transgression, and when it appears in male centric humour or fantasy, it strips women of any agency beyond their biological relation to the man in question. They become instruments for shock value, and the humour is derived from fouling something ‘pure’ (that is, familial bonds) with something ‘profane’ (sex, or dominance).

In that contamination, the woman’s role is often purely physical, either as a passive object or a violated symbol. “The woman is seen as the seat of ‘purity’. So, if she becomes ‘impure’, the family line becomes ‘impure’. And even though a lot of mythology completes destroys this [idea], we still manage to hold on to it in this way,” notes writer-cultural commentator Vijayendra Mohanty.

In 2019, Google Trends reported that the third-highest number of searches for incest as a porn category came from India. We’ve given navel-gazing another, even more literal, meaning. And who can deny that the bhabhi—the female figure that’s inarguably second in the sacred pecking order of motherly objects—occupies a position of primacy in the weird heritage of Indian eroticism? To what extent that is an outcome of the sexual repression of Indian men, and the subsequent access that they permit themselves to lech at the closest ‘available’ female in their immediate surroundings, is anybody’s guess. (Another unspeakably nauseating cultural trope masquerading as a family-space joke is how the wife’s sister is like half a wife.)

Spotlighting the vulnerability of women and children in households across India, researcher Supreet Dhiman talked poignantly of rape and sexual abuse in families, in a July 2018 TEDTalk delivered at Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER) Bhopal.

“The age when one is most vulnerable to become a victim is seven to 18. These are school children. The age when one is most vulnerable to become an abuser is age 12 to 30. These people are in schools, colleges and corporate houses,” the Mohali resident who, in 2017, started the online portal End Incest where anonymous victims of sexual abuse at the hand of family members could report their stories, says in a research paper.

The reason crass incest jokes persist in male spaces is often because they let men toy with the idea of uncontested power over the female body. In 2006, reigning figurehead of bombast Donald Trump laid bare his most problematic instincts, remarking that if his then-25-year-old daughter Ivanka weren’t his child, he would “perhaps be dating her”. But this is not to suggest that the two-time President of the United States’ capacity for drivel reflects the juvenile depths his emulators are reaching.

Except that it is. Despite being played for laughs in the media, the remark—and Trump’s history of problematic offhand comments—is a clear display of power and impunity. It teeters on the edge of unchecked authority, an assertion of dominance that comes at the expense of our collective discomfort.

And if you thought his weird comments about Ivanka were one-off, let me replay the 2004 incident where he agreed when Howard Stern—no stranger to controversy himself—asked if he could call her “a piece of a**”.

This is exactly the sort of shock jock behaviour that thrives in the attention economy, where controversy guarantees visibility. In early 2024, Raina fell out with content creator Kusha Kapila over jokes made over her divorce—in particular her sex life and body—on Pretty Good Roast Show, hosted by comedian Aashish Solanki. Slut-shaming her was indefensibly and unequivocally crass.

“This problem is not new—it’s just that people are becoming more shameless,” says Mohanty on whether the culture of placing women’s bodies at the intersection of shame and violence is alarming. “A huge part of this is the attention economy where all that matters is that people look at you; it doesn’t matter why they’re looking at you.”

The would-you-rather-watch-your-parents joke is nothing new, even if Allahbadia did seek a sort of initiation into the dank cult when he pressed copy and paste on that joke. Comedian-author Kanan Gill got to it first in the Indian context—posing the question to actors Jackky Bhagnani and Lauren Gottlieb on a chat show in 2015. But when Allahbadia repeats it on a platform already notorious for its problematic content—consider the comments made about Kapila—the discomfort is amplified.

That is why where humour around incest is concerned, the waters are murky beyond the grasp of those coming away with the message of empowerment gained from extreme boundary-pushing. It’s a desensitising drill, where the pretext of dark or dank humour, or the ‘would-you-rather’ game, trivialises the horror of coercion and abuse. “In the US, dark humour emerged among people from Black communities, who spoke truth to power in that language. Here, it is being used by the privileged against the underprivileged. It’s devoid of the cultural context of oppression,” says Mohanty.

With a Rick and Morty or a Game of Thrones (considering strictly contemporary reference points), incest is floated as ‘morally’ repugnant humour that exists for the sake of and within the confines of surrealism, fantasy and narrative hypothesis. But the context-less incest or incest-adjacent joke, often wanders off into unsafe territory. It plays out as a test of who can go furthest in disregarding taboo rather than any genuine engagement with the idea of desire.

Allahbadia’s ‘joke’ isn’t discomfiting because it challenges any moral codes. It’s so because this moment in the pop culture timeline is an embarrassing reflection of the impressionable male mind’s need for transgression. Like the Kapila episode—where she later admitted to feeling “dehumanised”—showed, chasing clout in these spaces almost always comes at the expense of degrading women.

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