Why I Love Hansa Parekh...

When I became a father, people asked me the usual question: “So, what will you name her?” I said, quite seriously, “Hansa Parekh.” There was a moment of stunned silence, then everyone burst out laughing. Apparently, this was either too lame or too meta for them.

But for me, Hansa wasn’t just a sitcom character from Khichdi, she was an emotional landmark. I adored her since school days. She represented a kind of cheerfully oblivious optimism that no syllabus or sociological theory could ever teach. I often wondered: does anyone actually behave like this in real life? So detached from logic, yet so self-assured?

Years later, when I stood in front of a classroom full of Gen Z students, I had my answer. They were all... a bit like Hansa. Confidently wrong, beautifully incoherent, and mesmerising in their ability to treat life like an abstract painting that nobody asked to interpret.

Why do they take blurry selfies and call it “aesthetic”? Why are half their Instagram stories just ceilings and soft light? Why do they write “I’m fine” and follow it with a clown emoji? Why do they say “slay” when they’re clearly losing?

As a professor (and a trained sociologist, no less), I was supposed to have answers. But the more I studied them, the more I realised: they’re not broken. They’re fluent in a dialect of humour that the rest of us just haven’t evolved to speak. It’s not nonsense; it’s absurdism. And it’s not new. We just didn’t notice it when Praful was butchering English, and Hansa was confidently nodding along.

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Let me explain.

Comedy is a cultural mirror. If you look carefully enough, it tells you everything about a generation’s anxieties, illusions, coping mechanisms, and existential dead-ends.

Millennials; my people; grew up watching Khichdi and Sarabhai vs Sarabhai. These shows were absurd, yes, but they obeyed certain rules. Hansa may not know the meaning of “stationary” (or was it “stationery”?), but the joke made sense. Praful’s logic was idiotic, but it followed a rhythm. And Sarabhai vs Sarabhai? That was satire in high heels. Maya’s aristocratic disdain (“It’s catastrophically middle-class!”) or Rosesh’s poetry (arguably a form of emotional terrorism) was all part of a structure. Absurdity, yes, but controlled absurdity. There was a plot. There was a punchline. There was closure.

Now fast forward to Gen Z. Their idea of humour looks like a mental breakdown set to lo-fi music. They’ll post a grainy photo of a sock on fire with the caption “mood.” They'll make memes that require five layers of cultural knowledge to understand. Their favourite jokes have no punchlines, and the ones that do? They’re bad on purpose. The joke is that there is no joke.

Living in the Absurd: Camus, TikTok, and the Grimace Shake

This isn’t laziness or confusion. It’s philosophy. Albert Camus, that old French grump, once said that life is absurd and the only way to respond is to embrace the absurdity. Gen Z didn’t just read Camus ; they turned him into a meme template. They are Camus with Wi-Fi.

Think of the “Grimace Shake” trend. It starts with someone drinking a fast-food milkshake... and ends in total chaos. Bodies on the floor. Strange music. No explanation. That’s not just humour; that’s existential performance art.

A recent study even confirms this ; over 99% of Gen Z students find absurd memes funnier than conventional jokes. Not just entertaining ; funnier. Because conventional jokes rely on structure, and Gen Z doesn’t trust structure. They’ve grown up watching institutions fail, algorithms decide their future, and news turn into punchlines. For them, chaos is comforting. Meaninglessness feels familiar.

From Rosesh’s Poetry to Skibidi Toilet: The Journey from Punchline to Pandemonium

If Sarabhai vs Sarabhai aired today, Rosesh Sarabhai wouldn’t just be a punchline ; he’d be a TikTok legend. His poetry, which sounded like a dictionary melting in a microwave, would be the perfect audio track for Gen Z content. In fact, “Momma ka purse, jaise hospital ki pyaari koi nurse,” would probably trend with cat videos, glitch effects, and dancing anime characters pasted in the background. No context. Maximum impact.

This is the thing about Gen Z comedy: it doesn’t care for context. Or resolution. Or logic. It thrives on anti-humour; jokes that refuse to be jokes. It’s chaos, wrapped in irony, wrapped in pastel filters and VHS overlays.

Millennials used absurdism to shake up the norm. Gen Z uses absurdism because they don’t believe norms exist anymore.

Ba Bahoo Aur Baby: The Emotional Buffer We Didn’t Know We Needed

Now, let’s talk about the cousin everyone forgets at the family gathering; Baa Bahoo Aur Baby. It didn’t go full Khichdi-crazy, nor did it have Sarabhai’s bourgeois critique. Instead, it offered us something unexpected: feelings. Actual, sincere, ghar-ka-khaana feelings.

It had absurd moments, yes, but they were seasoned with emotion. Think of it as dal with a little extra hing, not a pizza topped with jalebi. It walked the fine line between generational conflict and dramatic comedy, giving us laughs with tears; not the “I-laughed-so-hard-I-cried” kind, but the “Oh-no-the-burnt-milk-scene-reminds-me-of-my-mum” kind.

For Millennials, it provided a mirror to their evolving roles within the family. For Gen Z, if they happen to watch it, it’s vintage content. Something so grounded, it feels surreal. Which is, ironically, very on-brand for their humour.

How to Speak Gen Z: A Brief Glossary for the Chronically Confused

Let’s pause for a moment and talk language. Millennials gave the world words like “adulting” and “hangry.” Gen Z gave us “rizz,” “skibidi,” “gyatt,” and phrases like “it’s giving delulu realness.” Most of these aren’t even real words. And that’s the point.

These are not meant to mean something. They’re meant to feel something. Think of them as linguistic jazz; nonsense that somehow carries the weight of an emotion you can’t describe.

Their memes work the same way. Blink and you’ll miss it. A blurry photo of a frog, overlaid with text that reads, “when the vibes are gone and so am I.” Or a video that starts as a cooking tutorial and ends with the person being chased by a rubber chicken in slow motion. This is not just comedy; it’s semiotic protest.

You ask them, “What does this even mean?” They look you in the eye and say, “Exactly.”

Absurdity as Armour: Laughing Through the Apocalypse

But let’s not get too smug about it. The truth is, Gen Z has every reason to laugh at nothing. When you grow up with school shootings, climate emergencies, political meltdowns, and social media telling you to monetise your trauma; what else do you do?

You take the world’s nonsense and give it back. But with filters. And frog emojis.

Absurdity isn’t just a style; it’s survival. If Khichdi made fun of dysfunction, Gen Z lives in dysfunction and turns it into art. A meme about the world ending isn’t a joke. It’s a coping mechanism. Like Camus said (and I paraphrase), “We must imagine Gen Z laughing at a dancing hot dog while the world burns.”

The Comedy of Incoherence, the Coherence of Comedy

When I named my daughter Hansa Parekh (well, almost), I was paying tribute not just to a character but to a worldview; one where absurdity didn’t need permission to exist. Where people could be delightfully illogical and still be loved. Where not knowing the difference between stationary and stationery didn’t disqualify you from joy.

Today, Gen Z has taken that torch and thrown it into a kaleidoscope. Their comedy doesn’t try to fix the world. It just tries to survive it. They don’t search for meaning in humour ; they find freedom in its absence.

So the next time you see a meme that makes no sense, or a student who insists on presenting a blurry GIF as a thesis argument, don’t sigh. Just remember: they’re not confused.

They’re fluent in a dialect of absurdism the rest of us are just beginning to hear.

And who knows? Maybe one day my daughter will grow up to take a blurry selfie, caption it “Hansa-core,” and I’ll finally understand what Gen Z really meant.