A devotee says this, out loud, about God's brother, God's son and God's queen:
No doubt, Śrī Baladeva is the Supreme Lord — but of what use is that to me? I have nothing to gain even from Pradyumna. Then what to speak of others? Having obtained the wealth of the merciful sidelong glance of Śrī Kṛṣṇa, I have become so haughty that I do not regard Satyabhāmā, the foremost among Kṛṣṇa's beloveds.
That is a vīra-bhakta, and the verse is canonical — Rūpa's Sindhu 3.2.54, quoted approvingly.
Jīva Gosvāmī then has to explain why it is devotion and not insolence, and his explanation has two parts. The pride is play, not real pride; otherwise it would not be rasa but virasatā. And:
This verse was spoken to an intimate attendant of Satyabhāmā, in a secluded place. If it had been spoken in public, it would have been a source of embarrassment to Śrī Kṛṣṇa.
[RESONANCE] Because everyone who has been inside a close team, a family, a trade or a long friendship knows this exact rule and has never seen it written down.
The affectionate insult is not a lesser form of insult. It is a different category, and what makes it that category is not the speaker's intent, not the words, and not the target's feelings. It is that everyone present reads it as play by default.
Jīva's ruling is the cleanest statement of that rule I have found anywhere, and it is in a seventeenth-century Sanskrit commentary on devotional aesthetics.
The vault holds the case as dhurya-dhira-and-vira-bhaktas, tagged [n=1 OBSERVED], with the observation that virasatā everywhere else in the book is produced by incompatible combination — salt in nectar — and here would be produced by an audience.
The Cluster J follow-up settled the other half. Text 27 lists five circumstances under which incompatible rasas do not produce a counterfeit, and every one is about how the element is narrated: remembered, described as detrimental, differently held, compared, interposed. None is about who is present.
So the formal machinery has a rich vocabulary for presentation-dependence and no factor for audience at all. Jīva's clause is a commentator's ruling standing outside a system that had five chances to include it.
And the system does have a category for the act — dāsya-uparasa, a servant displaying excessive impudence in the presence of Śrī Kṛṣṇa, graded the best class of counterfeit. The taxonomy condemns the boast; the commentator saves it with a fact the taxonomy cannot represent.
A practice sustained by a default reading fails not when someone takes offence, but when someone arrives who has no reason to read it as play.
That reframes the usual account. Affectionate-insult cultures are normally described as failing through escalation, or through someone being thin-skinned. This says the failure mode is compositional: the group grows, or a newcomer appears, and the default reading is no longer safe — with nothing about the words, the intent or the relationship having changed.
Which makes it a prediction about group size and turnover rather than about temperament, and that is testable. It also explains why the same joke is fine for ten years and career-ending on a Tuesday, without anyone having to have changed.
Promotion criterion: two documented cases where an in-group verbal practice broke on the arrival of a reader rather than on the reaction of a target. Comedy writing rooms and surgical teams are the likeliest places to find them.
Set against Irony and Insinuation, where Campanella survives a mixed audience because those who know will understand the irony. That is the opposite exploit — irony needs the mixed room, the play-frame needs the homogeneous one — and the pair should produce a single rule about interpretive defaults that covers both.