This year was wild. Ranveer Allahbadia’s question on India’s Got Latent, a parody show headlined by Samay Raina, shook the world of creators and comedians. Ranveer asked one of the contestants on the show, “Would you rather watch your parents have sex every day for the rest of your life or join in once and stop it forever?” The question (having done rounds on the internet well before this show) was probably crude, uncomfortable, deliberately provocative, and it sparked the familiar cycle of digital outrage, think pieces, and counter-arguments that define our current cultural moment.
It’s not the first such controversy. For years now, books have been pulled off shelves, art shows cancelled, concerts banned – ALL in the same, undistinguished vein of “being improper”. Some of these reveal a pattern of something deeper – an impossible position we find ourselves in: navigating a world where culture is contextual, but globalisation (fuelled by social media’s speed) removes all context.
The Death of Context
In a pre-digital world, Ranveer’s question would have existed within its immediate context; a late-night comedy show, an audience that chose to be there, a cultural setting where such provocations might land differently. The boundaries were clearer, not because they were better or worse, but because they were local. A joke told in a Mumbai comedy club stayed in that club. A book written for a specific community reached that community first.
Now, everything exists everywhere simultaneously. A moment designed for one cultural context becomes content for global consumption within hours. The nuance gets stripped away in transmission, leaving only the raw provocative core – decontextualised, defensible to some, indefensible to others.
Books get cancelled even before release, sometimes based on nothing more than advance reader copies or marketing descriptions. Authors find themselves defending work to audiences they never intended to reach, explaining cultural references to people who lack the framework to understand them. The global conversation flattens all context into a single, impossible-to-navigate moral landscape.
The Weight of Explanation
How can we think about comedy, offence, and cultural representation when everyone is tied down by the weight of explanation? Every creative act now comes with an implicit demand to be universally comprehensible and universally acceptable – an impossible standard that kills the very specificity that makes art meaningful.
Comedy, in particular, suffers under this burden. Humour often works through transgression, through pushing against the boundaries of what’s acceptable within a particular context. When that context disappears, when every joke must work for every possible audience, comedy becomes either toothless or toxic. There’s no middle ground for the kind of cultural specificity that allows for complex, nuanced humour.
Samay Raina’s show exists in a particular ecosystem – one where irreverence and boundary-pushing are expected, where the audience comes prepared for provocation. But in the global digital space, these expectations collapse. The show becomes content for people who never chose to watch it, judged by standards it was never designed to meet.
Boundaries in a Boundless World
And how can we begin to understand the boundaries and lines that separate the worlds? The internet promises connection, but it also promises confusion. Cultural codes were once understood by all the parties involved in a free artistic process – creator and audience inhabiting the same ‘worlds’. These provided clear frameworks for understanding what’s acceptable and what isn’t have become permeable, overlapping, contradictory.
What’s progressive in one context becomes regressive in another. What’s harmlessly provocative in one cultural setting becomes genuinely harmful in another. We’re left with the impossible task of creating content and telling stories that somehow respects every possible cultural boundary while transcending none of them—a creative straightjacket that serves no one well.
The result is a flattening of cultural expression. Either creators self-censor to the point of blandness, crafting work so inoffensive it says nothing at all, or they double down on provocation, using controversy as a marketing strategy rather than a creative tool. Nuance becomes a luxury few can afford. The Ranveer controversy exemplifies this: a crude joke becomes either “harmless comedy” or “problematic content,” with little room for the more complex truth that it might be both, neither, or something else entirely depending on who you are and where you’re standing.
Nuance requires time, context, and the ability to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously. It requires understanding that something can be simultaneously funny and offensive, that good people can disagree about cultural boundaries, that context matters even when it’s been stripped away.
But our digital discourse rewards simplicity over complexity, speed over thoughtfulness, outrage over understanding. The algorithms that govern our attention don’t optimise for nuance—they optimise for engagement, which often means amplifying the most extreme reactions while burying more thoughtful responses.
The big question then is; what happens to a democratic way of life? Where free speech helps individuals and communities thrive? And who defines what is acceptably free? Power dynamics shift uncomfortably when offence is so freely taken.
A Way Forward?
It’s impossible to have both complete cultural authenticity and universal accessibility. Instead, we might need to develop new frameworks for understanding cultural exchange in a globalised world.
This might mean accepting that not all content is meant for all audiences, that cultural specificity is valuable even when it excludes, that the attempt to make everything universally acceptable often makes it universally meaningless.
It might also mean developing more sophisticated ways of engaging with content from other cultural contexts; approaching it with curiosity rather than judgment, seeking to understand rather than immediately categorise as acceptable or unacceptable.
Most importantly, it might mean preserving space for the kind of cultural risk-taking that creates genuinely meaningful art and comedy. This doesn’t mean abandoning accountability or embracing harmful content uncritically. It means finding ways to maintain the creative friction that produces interesting work while building more nuanced, context-aware ways of engaging with that work.
The alternative – a world where everything is scrubbed clean of cultural specificity, where all edges are smoothed away to avoid giving offence, isn’t just artistically impoverished. It’s a world where cancel culture wins not by cancelling specific works, but by preventing them from existing in the first place.
Can we build a cultural ecosystem that leaves room for both the joke and the criticism, the provocation and the response, the specific and the universal, without demanding that everything collapse into a single, impossible standard.
Our globalised world may have removed the boundaries, but perhaps it’s time to consciously create new ones; not to separate us, but to give us the frameworks we need to engage meaningfully across difference. Only then can we begin to reclaim the nuance that makes culture worth defending in the first place.