'Suno Re Kissa': In 1991, Manoj Bajpayee & Piyush Mishra Took Satire To Prime Time

Before the arrival of satellite television in India, Doordarshan was the singular medium through which the country encountered its own plurality. It was public broadcasting with a mandate that extended beyond entertainment, often balancing cultural programming with social commentary. Shows like 'Bharat Ek Khoj', 'Turning Point', Surabhi, and 'Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi' exemplified the range, from historical epics and science-based educational films to cultural deep-dives and satire, each pushing the limits of what television could do for a mass audience. What united them was a seriousness of intent to provoke thought, depict social realities, and to carry forward traditions of theatre, literature, and oral storytelling onto the screen. In hindsight, that moment feels like a rare intersection where television was both accessible and intellectually ambitious, and where primetime could be educational without being didactic.

When Prasar Bharati began uploading 'Suno Re Kissa' from its archives last year, it reopened a window to a very particular moment in Indian television. First aired in 1991 on Doordarshan, the show was built like a staged play set before a camera with songs, skits, satire, all stitched together in the idiom of street theatre. Conceived by Barry John and written by Piyush Mishra, it brought together a young ensemble that included Manoj Bajpayee, Divya Seth Shah, Poornima Kharga, and Mishra himself — actors who would later carry their craft into cinema and theatre with national significance.

What strikes you in watching 'Suno Re Kissa' today is how little it hides its theatrical DNA. The form draws directly from nautanki and other popular performance traditions, making liberal use of chorus calls, direct address, interjected songs, and comic interludes. Each device functioned as a way of breaking down social distance; of bringing the audience into a civic conversation. One episode follows the story of a poor woman tricked into giving up her child to a wealthier woman with infertility. The premise is spare but dense with commentary on the hierarchies of class as well as the ways myriad of ways that patronage disguises exploitation. It also unpacks the vulnerability of women’s bodies in a society that often treats them as transactional.

Here, music carries as much weight as dialogue. A lament becomes a form of protest; a way of making private grief public. Skits puncture respectability with humour, ensuring that a particular critique cannot be dismissed. Even pauses and asides are charged — the actors make it impossible for the audience to remain passive. The show stages social mechanisms and asks viewers to see themselves implicated in them, preserving a mode of theatre that had always been about collective witnessing.

Seen from today’s vantage point, the format of Suno Re Kissa feels surprisingly familiar. Its skits, songs, and satirical takes on everyday hypocrisy anticipate the kind of work that internet collectives like AIB would later popularise on YouTube. Both share a faith in short, sharp sketches as a way of holding up a mirror to society — accessible enough to draw in wide audiences, but sharp enough to leave them thinking. Where one emerged from the performance of street theatre and the other from the dynamics of social media, the underlying impulse was similar: to use humour, parody, and performance to make social critique digestible without diluting its edge.

And now, in the present climate of short-form digital culture, that same impulse has taken a new shape. We live in an era of Reels and Vine-like shorts, where humour is no longer bound by linear logic but by leaps of absurdity, in-group reference, and sensory overload. Makers mine the oddities of daily language, conjuring surreal mashups, or riffing in niche aesthetic memes grounded in subcultures like “corecore,” which splice together environmental dread, viral imagery, and sonorous despair in under a minute. These reels peppering our scrolls with hyper-local humour, ironic callbacks, and aesthetic disjunctions invite us into micro-worlds of shared familiarity, self-aware fragmentation, and satire that is at once playful and unnerving.

Suno Re Kissa is an early sketch of what would later become the grammar of Indian sketch comedy — theatre stitched into satire and critique. In its echoes, you glimpse the first imprints of a form that has evolved quite a lot but still shapes how we laugh and think about ourselves.

Watch it below:

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