Dark Comedy as Social Critique in Mahesh Dattani’s ‘The Big Fat City’ Anjana P College

Mahesh Dattani’s The Big Fat City (2014) unfolds within the cramped, deceptive comfort of an upper-middle-class Mumbai apartment, a space where laughter and unease coexist in dangerous proximity. Through the framework of black comedy, Dattani constructs a biting social critique of urban India; its apathy, performative morality, and obsession with image. The play is unsettling precisely because it is funny; it forces the audience to laugh, but that laughter echoes back with discomfort. In using humour as a tool of exposure rather than escape, Dattani transforms the stage into a mirror reflecting the decay of ethical consciousness in an age of spectacle and moral fatigue.

Black comedy, as a genre, thrives on contradiction. It takes the tragic and makes it comic, not to trivialize pain, but to reveal the absurdity that underlies modern existence. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque suggests that laughter can destabilize hierarchies and expose societal pretensions. Dattani’s play employs a similar strategy, where the comedic tone becomes a form of rebellion against the dead seriousness of moral hypocrisy. The apartment setting, where most of the play unfolds, amplifies this tension: it is both a physical space and a...