I went straight back to Turansky’s classroom. He had a surprised look on his face. When they close the drapes and kick you out, they don’t let you walk around to say good-bye.
I told him what had happened and that they were suspending me while they waited for the lab results.
He shook his head. “They can’t do that.”
What happened next was surreal. Turansky enlisted a group of sympathetic teachers to preemptively protest the constitutional violation Mr. Andrews was about to perpetrate. That the ash was associated with Hinduism made the situation even more radioactive. Did the school really want to mess with this?
It turned out they didn’t. In the end, they backed down—way down. I received a written apology letter from Mr. Andrews and Ms. Rosen stating, unequivocally, that they were wrong. They also called my parents, expressing remorse and asking forgiveness.
From then on, I was untouchable at that school. And, believe me, I took advantage of it.
When I entered high school, I came in as a cool eighth grader. But when my freshman fall started, it felt like I had regressed back to fifth grade, back to the kid who wasn’t invited to the roller-skating party. Quitting the football team didn’t help. And then, telling on my roommate sunk me deeper. But by spring semester, I came out of it and thrived again. If you really examine it, I just had one really bad semester, and three unsuspecting fourteen-year-olds paid the price. And for that, I’m sorry.
As graduation approached, it was time to make a decision. Still having only ever seen a brochure, I chose the highest-ranked college of the three. I chose Colgate.
CHAPTER 3
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Race in America: A Case of Mistaken Identity
Before I go on, let me talk a little bit about race. I wouldn’t describe my life as being defined by racism. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Mine has mostly been a life of racial acceptance. That said, to truly understand my story, it’s important to have a little perspective about where I stand in the racial body politic.
Indians (real Indians) have always occupied an odd position in America, thanks to Christopher Columbus’s enormous screw-up. When Columbus was looking for a shortcut to India, he sailed west and landed in the Bahamas. Rather than admit that he was horribly lost, Columbus doubled down. Despite finding neither elephants nor spices, he declared victory to his crew! Welcome to India, motherfuckers! This mistake set in motion one of the longest-running cases of mistaken identity the world has ever known, one that endures to this day. Because if you’re going to claim that you found India, you’ve naturally got to call the people there “Indians.” And though Columbus would never set foot in North America, like a virus, his mistake spread north, where all of the natives there would come to be known as “American Indians.” Interestingly, his mistake was almost a whole lot worse, because when Columbus landed in Cuba, he thought he had found China. Had Columbus’s name for those people stuck, Fidel Castro would have been the father of the Chinese revolution.
As a kid, when I told people I was Indian, one out of ten would sincerely ask me, “What tribe?” I always said Cherokee since they seemed the most badass. When my friends and I played the game cowboys and Indians, guess who always played the Indian? I would have liked to have played the cowboy once in a while, but being the Indian just sort of made more sense.
I was always jealous that they were called “American Indians” because I truly felt that that name more accurately described me than the name “Indian American.” I’ve been to India three times and I identify with it, but I was born and raised here, so I’m American first.
Indians in America had a good thing going. We were doctors, computer programmers, lawyers, diamond brokers, deli owners, motel owners, and cabdrivers. Indians studied hard, worked hard, and reaped the benefits. To me, being Indian was cool. India is the world’s largest democracy, and it has a thriving film business. Our ancestors invented meditation, chess, yoga, peaceful resistance, and sitting cross-legged. Oh, and we invented Tantric sex. We’ll hump you for days but never come. (I never understood that one.) Sure, we were portrayed as asexual nerds on TV, but that always set the bar low, so you only had to be half cool to outperform expectations.
And then 9/11 happened. After that, Indians were stuck in another case of mistaken identity, though this one was nightmarish. It began on September 15, 2001, when some dipshit in Arizona, in an attempt at revenge for 9/11, mistook a Sikh Indian gas station owner for a Muslim and shot him dead. Oops. (I’ll tell you more about that fun post-9/11 time later.)
Before 9/11, Indians were defined by the peaceful legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. After, because of our appearance, we were stuck in between. We kind of looked like the bad guys, and yet the bad guys also hated our guts—as evidenced by the 2008 Mumbai Massacre, in which Pakistani terrorists mowed down 164 Indian civilians. Before 9/11, no one was afraid of Indians. After, some of our less sophisticated citizens looked at Indians and wondered, Are those guys dangerous too? We’re like the koala bears that get slaughtered because some grizzlies killed a kid in town. Maybe it’s just safer to kill all of the bears.
Sometimes, racism is just the natural expression of tribalism. Humans are more comfortable spending time with people who look like them. That’s what makes the American race experiment so challenging. By accepting minorities from all over the planet, America is swimming against deep, ancient tribal currents. Some of us are attempting to make a new tribe—a multiracial, American tribe. But when a small minority of one group of immigrants starts shooting and blowing the rest of us up, we all revert to ancient, darker instincts.
During college, I brought my (white) girlfriend home for Thanksgiving. In a private moment, my lovely, sweet, amazing grandma pulled me aside and said, “How come you never date Indian girls?” I told Grandma that I would date an Indian girl if I met one that I liked. She just sighed and said, “Well, it’s okay to marry a white girl; just don’t marry a black girl.” Was my dark-skinned grandmother racist? It’s the only racist thing I ever heard her say, but yes, that’s the definition of racism. But look, there are almost no black people in India, so . . . We excuse that generation, don’t we? The point I’m trying to make by selling out my grandma is that racism in America is far more complex than the picture that the media paints, where all white people are racists and all minorities are innocent angels. Sure, there’s plenty of racism coming from white America, but there’s also lots of racism in minority communities. So none of us should get a free pass.
Let me be superclear. All racism is not alike, and Indians don’t have to deal with the same challenges that African Americans do. When I was in high school, I took the Calculus 2 Advanced Placement class but only got a 3 (out of 5) on the final test, which meant I didn’t get college credit and had to retake it at Colgate. Since I had just taken the class, the redo was easy—so easy that I stopped going to class and would only show up for quizzes and tests, which I aced—100 percent. The math teacher was convinced that I was a prodigy and apologized for how easy his class was for me. One day, he asked me to accompany him to a math conference in New York City. He wanted to show off my mind. I demurred, telling him that I loved math, but only as a hobby. All Indians are good at math? Racism!
In 1964, a year after my dad arrived in New York, he and his (Indian) buddy took a cross-country road trip from NYC to California, along the southern route. When they went into a Georgia diner, the waitress told them that they didn’t serve blacks there. When Dad informed her that they were Indian, the waitress apologized, profusely, and brought them dinner. Fucking nuts!
Indians are not discriminated against when it comes to housing or education, and we’re not being shot by the police at routine traffic stops. And that’s a bit unfair, considering that African Americans (and Jews and whites) paid with their blood in the civil rights movement. They fought hard and won critical rights for all minorities, including the right to marry whomever we wanted, t
o vote, and to be educated alongside everyone else. That’s important to remember when you think it’s okay to be antiblack, all of you new immigrants.
CHAPTER 4
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Colgate to Chicago: Making Strangers Laugh
Okay. Back to the story. As my parents and I drove to Colgate, they ribbed me about the number of cows we’d seen on the way. Those weren’t in the brochure. Since I was going there no matter what, I hadn’t bothered to visit after accepting. When we pulled onto campus . . . Wow. Colgate is located in hilly Hamilton, New York, a small town three hours north of New York City. Founded in 1890, Colgate’s got stone buildings, a beautiful quad, and ivy-covered walls, and it’s built on a huge hill. In 2010, The Princeton Review ranked Colgate the most beautiful campus in America. I agree.
A small school of around 2,750 students, Colgate is the epitome of having it both ways. Academically, it ranks in the top twenty schools in the country, but it is also a famous party school. As the legend goes, in the seventies, Playboy ranked the top party schools in America. Florida State was ranked number one. Next to it was listed Colgate,* with the asterisk explaining, “Colgate is the real number one, but it’s a professional drinking school, so it can’t officially top our list.” I say that not to brag, but to give you some sense of the environment that Broken Lizard was born in.
As beautiful as Colgate was, I arrived hell-bent on leaving it. In my mind, Colgate was merely a way station. I was going to get good grades and transfer to Brown, where I thought I belonged. In addition to being in the Ivy League, Brown was also in Providence, a good two hours closer to Boston, where my high school girlfriend, Lyssa, was in school. Freshman fall was fun, but I didn’t really engage. Weekends were spent in Boston with Lyssa, or with her visiting me. Still, I fell in with a group of freshmen and formed some cool friendships. When all of my friends decided to head down the hill to fraternity rush, I tagged along for the fun of it. Truthfully, I was anti-fraternity at the time. The way fraternities had been portrayed in the culture had made them seem elitist and dorky to me. And when my pals all put in bids at the same house, Beta Theta Pi (or Beta), I put in a bid too, as an insurance policy. When my first-semester grades averaged a B-, Brown let me know that my brown magic act wasn’t Ivy League material, and they rejected me a second time. Beta Theta Pi, however, accepted me, so I was now a fraternity pledge and about to be part of a new tribe.
The American fraternity experience in the eighties and nineties was highly influenced by the hilariously subversive John Landis film Animal House. Whether it was chugging entire bottles of whiskey, toga parties, road trips, or Blutarsky’s grade point average of 0.0, the film was a pushed-for-comedy view of the American Greek system. Our fraternity had about a hundred guys and was devoted to a philosophy of relentless, hilarious personal comedic insult. We called it “the House of Pain.” We did all of the things you would think. We drank competitively, smoked tons of grass, and had lots of parties—cocktail parties, beach parties, toga parties, and parties without themes. We had a dinner called “Beef and Blow,” where we prepared funny, insulting limericks about one another and delivered them as we gobbled roast beef and pounded immense amounts of cheap red wine. It was creative, silly, and often brilliant. That sense of humor, specifically as it relates to rhythm, the willingness to go dark, and the evolution of jokes over weeks, months, and even years, had the most influence on Broken Lizard’s collective style of humor.
Hollywood portrays fraternities as all-white, wealthy, racist, raping gangs of alcoholics. Movies need villains. And while it’s probably true that fraternities used to be like that, so, too, were a lot of America’s institutions. Our house had five Indians, three African Americans, five Asians, and multiple Jewish guys, Catholic guys, and WASPs. After we graduated, four guys came out as gay. The first one to come out was an enormously popular guy named Andy, who remained enormously popular afterward. At the time, the word “faggot” was used liberally both in our house and everywhere else in America. On the night he came out, I asked Andy how much I had used the word. He said I had used it some but not as much as others. By the time the other three guys came out, we had all transitioned away from that word, entirely. Does that fit the “fraternity stereotype”?
I spent my first two years at Colgate splitting time between majoring in pre–World War II German history, minoring in philosophy, smoking grass, drinking Milwaukee’s Best, hitting on beautiful preppy girls, and acting in plays. I fell hard for the place.
Because of race-blind casting in the theater, I was often (enough) cast in the lead, and like a lot of young, egocentric fools, I started to actually consider a career as an actor. Up until then, I had planned to be a heart surgeon, like the wisecracking Hawkeye Pierce from M*A*S*H, but that dream went up in smoke when I got a C- in organic chemistry my freshman year. My physician parents weren’t terribly surprised.
“If you are going to be a doctor, you have to want it with every fiber of your being. And getting a C- in organic chemistry suggests you probably don’t,” my father said dryly.
Then my mother jumped in with some life philosophy. “One-third of your life is spent sleeping, one-third working, and one-third with friends and family. You better love your job if you’re going to spend that much time doing it.”
I’ve since talked to my parents about the moment I told them I was going to try to be an actor. My dad said that he and Mom thought it was a terrible idea, but they pretended to be supportive because they had decided that I was going to be an experiment. They were just going to let me do what I wanted, and then we’d all see what happened. They had the instincts of Indian tiger parents, but they suppressed them. I made it slightly easier by telling them that if it didn’t work out in a couple of years, I’d apply to law school.
But was a career in acting a real possibility? I felt like I had some talent, but getting laughs from friends in a school play wasn’t enough to justify making such an enormously high-risk career bet. So I decided to give myself a test. Most Colgate juniors spend a semester studying overseas. I decided to head to Chicago, where I planned to perform improv comedy on real stages, in front of real audiences. Only if I could get strangers to laugh would I be willing to give acting a try. And if I couldn’t, then my plan would be to follow in my sister’s footsteps and go to law school.
So, the fall of junior year, I enrolled at Loyola University Chicago, where I took classes during the day. Now all I had to do was figure out how to break into the Chicago comedy scene. I had a small in, through my high school friend James. Before I go on, I should tell you that James didn’t owe me shit. In high school, James and I had been in tons of plays together and had formed an incredibly close friendship. When he started dating a charming, ridiculously beautiful girl named Lahna, the three of us hung out all the time, including going to Prince’s film Purple Rain. Lahna and I were boarding students, so we hung out in the evening, without James, which then turned into a months-long affair. Terrible, I know, but we were sixteen and we fell for each other. Since Lahna and James were in love, you can imagine how humiliating and awful it was for James when he inevitably found out. I apologized and apologized, and after about a year, he amazingly started to forgive me. The trauma of this event burned into me the most important lesson of my life: Don’t mess around with friends’ girlfriends (or wives). What can I say? High school was a time of intense learning for me. You don’t come out of the womb fully baked.
James was taking classes and performing at the Improv Olympic (the iO), a theater started by Del Close, one of the early members of The Second City. Del was a legend in comedy circles, known for being one of the early shapers of the style of sketch and improv comedy that would go on to dominate in shows like Saturday Night Live and SCTV. Just glancing at a list of his students tells the whole story: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, John Candy, Tina Fey, Shelley Long, Bob Odenkirk, Tim Meadows, Jon Favreau, Andy Dick, Jeff Garlin, Stephen Colbert, Dave K
oechner, Chris Farley, and many, many more.
If you want to see Del, watch the film The Untouchables, where he plays a crooked city alderman who tries to bribe Kevin Costner. Del was brilliant, odd, and intimidating. When he died, legend has it that he bequeathed his skull to the Goodman Theatre to be used in future productions of Hamlet.
Del taught a mixed class, which included rookie improvisers like myself, as well as top-level guys like James Grace, Dave Koechner, and Chris Farley. Farley was a brilliant improviser and was always the funniest, most talented person in a room full of funny and talented people. Watching Chris perform night after night was truly something special. The Chris Farley I knew in Chicago played it supersmart, combining his immense physical gifts with a razor-sharp brain that always seemed to be one step ahead. Chris played leading men, detectives, teachers, and scientists, not just the big men. This is only my opinion, but the true scope of Farley’s brilliance wasn’t used enough on SNL. Yes, he was amazing on the show, but he was pushed, too often, toward jokes about his weight. (Only my opinion; don’t kill me.) And the reason is because of the difference between stage and screen. The stage has embraced non-type casting, so actors of different races and weights can play any role. On-screen, the worlds we create are so real that it feels strange to cast against physical type. And so, in the movies, the handsome white guy gets the girl, the black guy is street-smart, the Arab guy is a terrorist, the Italian guy is mobbed up, and the Indian drives the cab. Kevin Heffernan, who shares Farley’s gift of girth, told me that one of his reps once told him never to lose weight because “fat is funny and funny is money.” Types.
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