192 Chapter 14: Insurrectionary Tendencies: The Viral Fever Comedies and Indian Media Akshaya Kumar IIT Indore Over the last five years, a Youtube channel, The Viral Fever (TVF), has gained enormous popularity across urban India. In the first episode of one of their recently launched shows entitled Barely Speaking with Arnub, the host Biswapati Sarkar – one of the most popular faces of the channel – interviewed Shahrukh Khan – one of Hindi cinema’s most popular stars. Sarkar was mimicking the loud and outrageous self-projection of Arnab Goswami, a popular television news anchor for the channel Times Now. The interview predictably satirized Khan himself as well as his associates in the film industry, but also lampooned Rahul Gandhi– a prominent politician– and Yousuf Pathan – an Indian Premier League cricketer. There was a seamless movement across films, television, social media and journalism in this brief discussion, which actually brought TVF and Khan together via their promotional campaigns. As was evident in the brief segment at the end of the video, Khan was promoting his upcoming film Happy New Year (2014) while TVF was promoting their channel and its new show. Incidentally, Khan also owns an Indian Premier League (IPL) team, which itself is a promotional cocktail of Cricket, Bollywood and the ancillary media industries. IPL itself is a rather curious cocktail: Since 2010, the Board of Control for Cricket in India has been fighting to prove that the Indian Premier League is comparable to a soap opera. The board has been attempting to show the Competition Commission of India that the IPL is not primarily a ‘unique format of cricket,’ but rather an entertainment programme. The BCCI contends that the IPL is just another sporting event ‘designed for commercial purposes and to attract television broadcasters.’ In fact, the cricketing body has argued that the IPL is an entertainment programme that competes with, among other shows, the talent show ‘India’s Got Talent’ and the drama ‘Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai’ (Sagar 2018) Designed by the BCCI as an ‘action-packed reality show’, IPL is a television extravaganza, only much better integrated and amplified in scale than the emerging web-based clusters, like TVF. Just as IPL does not aspire to be a unique form of Cricket, TVF does not aspire to be a unique form of audiovisual storytelling. As a part of the shared force-field of cross-promotional media franchises, they take modular forms – cricket and comedy, for example – and wrap them in what I shall term as the membrane of the popular. The reason behind TVF launching the cross-promotional series with the Arnub character was one of their most popular videos–Bollywood Aam Admi Party: Arnub Qtiyapa. In the show, Sarkar mimicked Goswami as ‘Arnub with a u’ and invited on his show panelists impersonating prominent political personalities, while literally speaking about Bollywood. It is entirely possible that this strange alchemy across various tiers of the media, Cricket and politics, seems utterly absurd to an outside observer. But at the same time, to Indian viewers increasingly familiarized with mixed codes, TVF shows only appear as a creative hybrid of News Television, Cinema, Cricket, Reality television etc. Instead of addressing a privileged inner circle, the mixing of codes drawn from the top layer of media references – heavily regurgitated across social media platforms, television channels, and web-based forums – builds solidarity with the celebrity circuit and an entire world of interpenetrating promotional frenzy that is mounted upon them. Instead of presenting TVF as a unique or representative case, I invite us to think of the modalities it