"Every revolution is a tiny joke."
Samay Raina did not write this line in a notebook. He arrived at it the hard way. It came through a police case. It came after a public apology he did not fully mean. He came up with this line, also with the inherited wisdom of a community that has spent decades knowing exactly when to stand and when to leave.
The line is a deliberate inversion of George Orwell's essay Funny, But Not Vulgar. In that 1945 piece, Orwell wrote, “Every joke is a tiny revolution” He means that humour, by its nature, challenges authority, punctures pretension and disrupts the comfortable order of things.
Raina takes that idea, holds it up against his own experience with the Assam police following the India's Got Latent
controversy and flips it completely. If Orwell had been sitting where Raina was sitting, he suggests, the line would have read very differently.
The joke is the quote. And, the quote is the joke. That is the point.
What it means
On the surface, the line is about defeat. It’s about a comedian being forced to apologise for something he said on his own show, under the threat of legal consequences serious enough that apology became the rational choice. Raina, often considered a rebel for defying what’s ‘right’, does not pretend otherwise.
He is not reframing surrender as victory. He is being honest about what happened. He finds, within that honesty, something worth laughing at.
The deeper meaning is more interesting. Raina is not saying that revolution is impossible. He is saying that, in certain conditions, the revolutionary act is sometimes to survive rather than resist.
He speaks about the fight, which is structurally unfair, with real and severe consequencesand where the system holds all the cards. The idea is to live, move on and come back with a microphone and a special. That was exactly what he did.
There is also something in the word "tiny". Both Orwell's original and Raina's inversion use it. A tiny revolution. A tiny joke. The diminutive is not self-deprecation. It is accuracy.
Neither jokes nor revolutions are always grand. Most of them are small. Most of them are quiet. Most of them are just one person deciding, in a small moment, to say something true rather than something safe.
Or, as the case may be, deciding that the truly honest thing to say right now is nothing, and coming back to say it later, when the room is safer.
Where it comes from
Samay Raina is a chess commentator, YouTuber and stand-up comedian who built one of the most distinctive comedy ecosystems in Indian digital media. His show India's Got Latent, a mock talent show with deliberately absurd, often dark humour, became a cultural phenomenon.
Then, a single episode featuring Ranveer Allahbadia sparked national controversy. The Assam police registered a case. Political outrage followed. Samay issued a public apology.
His stand-up special, Still Alive, released long after the controversy, is built almost entirely around processing what happened. It’s the special that he did a world tour with.
He does not speak through bitterness. He speaks through the specific kind of humour that emerges when someone has genuinely been through something. And, they decide the best response is to be funny about it.
Raina's family is of Kashmiri Pandits. They are part of the Hindu community forced to flee the Kashmir Valley in the early 1990s during one of the most painful forced migrations in modern Indian history.
His family, like hundreds of thousands of others, did not leave because they wanted to. They left because staying was no longer survivable.
You only fight when the fight is fair," Raina says in Still Alive. "Otherwise, you f*** off from there. Kashmiri Pandit wisdom.”
This is not cynicism. It is ancestral intelligence passed down through generations. They have learned that surviving an unwinnable situation is not cowardice. It is the precondition for everything else.
His family survived. He was born. He became a comedian. He made a show. The show got him into trouble. He apologised, survived and made a special about it.
That is the revolution. It just looked like a joke from the outside.
Another perspective
Orwell, in the same essay, also noted that the truly dangerous joke is not the one that attacks from outside the system. It’s the one that makes the powerful laugh at themselves. The moment of self-recognition that the powerful cannot quite control.
By being the one laughing at his own situation rather than raging against it, Raina achieves something Orwell might have recognised. He has made the absurdity of the situation visible without giving anyone the satisfaction of a martyr.
The line "every revolution is a tiny joke" is funnier if you know what it cost him. It’s darker if you know where his family came from. Both are true simultaneously. That is what makes it work.
How to apply it today
Takeaway 1: Not every battle is worth fighting at full force. The ability to distinguish between a fight that can be won and one that will only destroy you is not a weakness; it is a skill. It takes clarity and ego-discipline to develop that skill.
Takeaway 2: Survival is the first act of resistance. For Raina's family, leaving Kashmir was not giving up. It was the decision that made everything else possible.
Takeaway 3: Humour, used with precision, can say the unsayable. Raina cannot say everything he experienced as a direct statement. But, as a joke inside a special, he can say all of it.
The joke survived. Which means the revolution survived.
Funny, But Not Vulgar by George Orwell
It’s the essay that started it all. Orwell argues that genuine humour is inherently subversive. He says that the most dangerous joke is the one that makes authority look ridiculous..
It’s a memoir of the Kashmiri Pandit exodus. It’s one of the most important accounts of what Raina's community went through.
It’s a novel about a man whose life is destroyed by a single joke made at the wrong moment in the wrong political climate. Published in 1967 in Czechoslovakia, it remains the definitive literary examination of what jokes cost under systems that do not tolerate them.
It’s not about comedy. It’s about what happens to people who suppress their authentic responses to survive hostile conditions.
