Quotes from Varun Grover

When a new government comes, even the detractors want to give them a chance because they have been voted in by the people of the country.

My only success is that I am alive.

British comedian Imran Yusuf is fantastic and so is Shazia Mirza, also London-based.

We critique all politicians who are in power, whenever there's a talking point.

I've stopped many things such as healthy eating. What's the point? In this post-truth era, I feel increasingly powerless.

Self-censorship is the most devastating thing for an artist.

I am primarily a comedian. Sometimes I also do comedy about my cats. Now unless you find metaphors in cats, there is nothing political about those and I love doing such jokes as much as I love doing political content.

I think both comedy and dissent are liberating, for the listener as well!

People who are privileged can take more risks because of that safety shield that privilege provides.

Speaking in Hindi has helped me a lot as I can tell my stories with the exact idiom in which they come to me. I think it also helps the audience when I am speaking in a language that is non-elite, so to say, as my stories are also from that perspective.

In any show, not everybody is completely with us on all the topics we talk about. We talk about Hindutva, and we talk about the problems with Islam also. If there are Muslims in the audience, laughing at the jokes on Hindutva, they will have to confront the jokes on Islam too.

I like to dissociate myself from the person I was even three hours ago. It's a natural requirement to be a writer.

I am Hindu, upper-caste, male, and able-bodied. So everything is on my side. That gives me the extra cushion that Swara Bhaskar won't get.

I don't understand why people who have the most power, say people like Amitabh Bachchan, are silent on most issues.

The best jokes take something awful and make it silly.

If you start imagining an audience for yourself, you don't do justice to the job. You fall into that trap of a self-image.

You cannot have the same kind of character again and again in every season or every stage of your life. You change, people change.

I don't think stand-up comedy is becoming too serious, in fact, I wish it was. We are still mostly doing frivolous stuff.

Revolutions can be messy but they can't be perceived as unjust.

There's a lot of ordinariness, and people tend to play to the same regressive tropes - sexism, patriarchy, unkindness to the oppressed. Comedy shouldn't fall into these traps - by its very nature comedy is supposed to be edgy and anti-establishment.

My set on why I won't have kids, and especially the mention of how expensive it is to have kids nowadays, always gets a great response.

Comedy as dissent or any art form as dissent is going to be our last safety valve.

Sometimes people don't want to laugh because it's wrong to laugh at their own establishment.