Syed Shamsil surveys me with a quiet curiosity even over video call. Is he observing me for fodder for some future comic act? I cannot dismiss the thought. After all, he is the Bitkel Bangali, notorious for making everyone and everything within his immediate habitat fodder for his comic acts.

His YouTube channel has 1.05 million subscribers, and he has 435K followers on Instagram. Decent numbers for someone who burst onto the scene five years ago and is quite the sensation, especially this election season. So much so that he was recently the standout invitee at a television panel discussion on politics, the theme being “Politics has been reduced to a joke”.

When he started out, Shamsil says, he did not expect his brand of bitkel humour to become so popular. Bitkel is Bengali for odd, peculiar, out-of-the-regular. Does Shamsil think the average Bengali is bitkel? The mock-serious reply, “If you are asking, chances are, you are one.”

And then he adds, “Bitkel is a typically Bengali state of being. A bitkel Bangali is one who questions, observes and laughs. He refuses to behave exactly as expected.”

If you think Shamsil is being only laudatory here, you have not seen his comedy routines. He caricatures all the types we see around us — the Bengali who pretends not to be fluent in Bengali, the argumentative Bengali, the Bengali debating all sides into oblivion, the moralising tuition teacher, the content creator cagey about his earnings, the cricket commentator with his hyperbole, and the news anchor auditioning for a job.

Shamsil lives in Bajralalchak in Haldia. No one in his family has ever been in this line of work. His father is in the transport business and the previous generations of male members were fisherfolk in West Midnapore.

Shamsil says his inspiration is the late Raju Srivastav. He is all praise for the way he owned his acts from scripting right through to the performance itself. He did a stand-up gig in a Digha hotel in 2018 and never stopped after that. Now, he does gigs and also creates content for his YouTube channel.

Poila Baisakh is around the corner. Does Shamsil have anything to say about Bangaliyana? The 34-year-old goes all coy and humble, he does not know exactly what Bangaliyana is. He says, “It is a very good question.” And then he adds by way of aside, “When I cannot answer a question that is the line I use.” And then by way of another aside, “Because that is the most Bengali thing to do.”

Jokes apart, Shamsil is well aware how “Bengali” is suddenly a much contested thing, and Bangaliyana so impossible to detect and define. Nevertheless, he says, “It begins with a love for the Bengali language and its culture. And true Bangaliyana is also about the ability to love and respect other languages and cultures.”

And just when you are processing all that gravitas, he breaks into a grin and you cannot help but wonder who he is ribbing. It is only later that I realise that for the Bitkel Bangali humour does not arrive with a punchline; at times, it comes disguised as sincerity.

The sharpshooter is clear about his mission. He says, “To make people laugh. Everything else is optional or accidental.” He refuses to over-intellectualise humour, will tell you there is a potential hazard in doing so — it might get crushed under its own weight. There is a moment when he seems to be on the brink of some profundity. But then, he breaks off midway as if abandoning the idea. His explanation: “I myself might not understand it!”

The talk drifts, as it inevitably must, to Tagore. The comic artiste admits, almost apologetically, that there is too much to know and too little he knows. Nevertheless, he says, “Tagore had a sharp sense of humour.” He goes on about how humour today is not as simple as it once was. “Not because people are less funny, but because they are more easily offended.”

There is a quiet frustration here. Shamsil says people are becoming serious. And in trying too hard to be serious, they end up becoming more comical. “Whether to call it a criticism or a diagnosis, it’s up to you,” he adds.

What if Poila Baisakh were a stand-up set? Shamsil says he would just watch it, all the rituals. The haal khata crowds, for instance, people gathering at shops, drawn as much by tradition as by the promise of sweets. There is a fondness in the way he describes them.

On Poila Baisakh, he says, “everyone suddenly becomes intensely Bangali”. People start protecting linguistic purity fiercely. English words become suspect. A casual “how are you” can provoke outrage.

Shamsil has been there, experienced it. “This contradiction — becoming fiercely Bengali for one day, and remaining hybrid the rest of the year — is perhaps the most bitkel trait of all,” he believes.

Perhaps that is what being a bitkel Bangali truly means — never a fixed identity, always a moving one. In Shamsil’s bitkel observation, “Always a little out of place, and at home because of it.”