On March 23, Shiv Sainiks belonging to the party’s Eknath Shinde faction smashed equipment and tossed around chairs in a comedy venue in Mumbai’s Khar that had hosted a show at which stand-up comic Kunal Kamra made jokes about their leader.

But they could not stop the jokes going around on social media.

As the mob threatened Kamra for his claimed insult to Shinde, who is one of Maharashtra’s two deputy chief ministers, the violence provoked a flood of cartoons and memes pointing to the tragic absurdity of the situation.

The Habitat, where the show had been recorded some weeks earlier, announced on Monday that it was “shutting down” the studio, or rather, whatever was left of it. Later, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation dispatched officials bearing hammers to bring down an allegedly unauthorised shed erected at the entrance of the Unicontinental hotel, which houses The Habitat.

The mob was attempting to target Kamra for a 45-minute video titled Naya Bharat that he released on YouTube on Sunday. It contains a satirical song about Shinde’s political flip-flops and has since garnered over four million views.

Police cases have been registered against the comedian as well as the Shiv Sainiks.

Some of Kamra’s fellow comedians and social media content creators expressed their solidarity with him by responding to the situation with wisecracks of their own.

Many creators referenced Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s comments on the importance of free criticism in a democracy during his recent chat with American podcaster Lex Fridman.

In an X post, artist and writer Anurag Minus Verma noted that the attack on the studio settled a political dispute that the country’s top jurists and election officials have been poring over for years.

News satirists made mocking videos about the plight of those trying to make a living out of comedy in India.

Others had a field day with the story as it kept developing.

An X account that frequently parodies the ruling party’s penchant for blaming India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru for all things wrong with the country posted a meme depicting another historical ruler who has dominated the headlines lately.

In keeping with how the Bharatiya Janata Party frames its proposals to make sweeping changes in India’s legal, electoral, economic and cultural realms, some social media users called for a similar intervention in the country’s stand-up landscape.