We’re all going to become some sort of hybrid between Chinese and Indian. They’re the two largest populations in the world.
And since we’re going to mix anyway, why not start mixing now? Ladies: take some chances, sleep around a bit. If you see that Indian comedian that you really want to have sex with, I say go for it! And while we’re at it, maybe we should just start mixing races now that would never normally mix, just to see what we’ll get, like hooking up a Jamaican with an Italian. They could have little Pastafarians. I’m Indian, I could hook up with a Jew, and we could have little Hinjews. Get a guy from the Philippines with a girl from Holland—Hollapinos. Girl from Cuba with a guy from Iceland—little Icecubes. A French and a Greek—Freek. A German and a Newfie—little Goofies.
It’s gonna happen. We might as well help it along.
MY DAD had a few sayings, and one that has always stuck with me is this: Only a fool makes the same mistake twice. It’s true about boxing, and it’s true about comedy.
In 1995, I made a joke about a Punjabi hockey team called the Toronto Maple Sikhs. Overall, it was a pretty innocent joke—or so I thought—about how the team wouldn’t wear helmets, just blue-and-white turbans. To be honest, I’d only picked the word Sikh because it was a one-syllable word that sounded like Leafs. The Toronto Maple Hindus just wouldn’t have worked at all.
Even though I’d meant the joke without malice, it was taken very, very seriously by some Sikhs. The issue became so heated that I even received death threats over it, and it was at that point that I realized I’d touched a nerve without even intending to do so. I decided to do something about the stir I’d caused, so I got in contact with some elders from the Sikh community in the Toronto area. What I wanted to know from them—from these people for whom I actually had a lot of respect—was whether they felt that I’d done something wrong in my jokes, if I’d truly offended them. My biggest fear was that my audience would misunderstand me, and I wanted to be clear to this community that my comedy has never been about hatred.
So I met with these serious-minded elders from the Sikh community, and in particular a man named T. Sher Singh. After talking with him a while about all sorts of things, it was clear to me that this was a brilliant man and a sweet human being. He was someone I could trust to be fair and open-minded. I put my question to him: “Have I done anything wrong?” And T. Sher Singh reassured me that I had not. Then he went even further. He said that on behalf of his community, he wanted me to know that he didn’t consider those who’d issued threats against me to be part of his community—and he was firm on this point. His people are peaceful and law-abiding, he insisted, not hoodlums who issue death threats. And I said, “Cool.” I figured I was in the clear. I haven’t seen him in years, but he’s a brilliant and sweet man.
Shortly after my meeting with these elders, I was at a nightclub called Calypso Hut up in Brampton. I was just standing there when three young guys rolled up on me. I’d already had death threats phoned into my house, so I was feeling a bit nervous when these three Punjabi guys surrounded me. Apart from physically intimidating me, they also launched directly into an attack. They were militant and abusive from their very first words, saying that they’d seen me on TV and that I’d not only better watch what I said but should watch my back as well.
One of the three jabbed me, and without thinking much about it, I aimed an upper-cut right at him.
Before I could really see it coming, one of the three jabbed me, and without thinking much about it, I aimed an uppercut right at him. Then I hit another guy with a left hook, shoved the one who was issuing the threats out of the way and ran. I ran straight out of that club and never looked back. These were thugs, not fair fighters, and that’s the thing that bothered me the most about them. Just the day before, I’d received a whole education about the Sikhs and their religion, so I knew that these were secular young punks claiming that they were acting in the name of their Sikhism when in fact they were going against everything their faith stood for. I’d never set out to offend a deeply religious person, but these guys were just common, dumb thugs.
Shortly after that, I decided that I didn’t want to put myself in that sort of situation ever again. I’m a fighter by nature, but there’s nothing enjoyable about self-defence, and there’s nothing enjoyable about violence. In the interests of keeping the peace, I chose to never again do jokes with anything that might be interpreted as a religious undercurrent. And I’ve been true to my word ever since.
This wasn’t the last time I was to encounter a backlash over my comedy. I was just beginning to make inroads on TV, and my face was starting to get out there. Before the mid-’90s, there really hadn’t been many Indians on TV, and I think my sudden appearance on the scene and the fact that I talk honestly about race and culture made more than a few Indians nervous. We’re a proud race, so I can understand that people were caught off guard at first. The funny thing is that I wasn’t saying anything that my community felt was outrageous—it’s just that I’d taken the chance of saying it in public. I think a lot of Indian people were thinking, “Who the hell is this kid?” And second, they were thinking, “He’s gonna make us look dumb.” Looking back, I now understand what made people so nervous. There is a fine line between laughing and being laughed at, and my own people wanted to be sure that I understood that difference. I do. I always have.
With time, the Indian community came to realize that ethnic jokes could be reinvented—that we could laugh at ourselves with authority, unlike those who’d laughed out of ignorance in the past. Slowly, over time, my comedy entered the mainstream. I developed a real following, and people—red, white, brown and black—were all enjoying it. Then the Indian community relaxed a bit. My people kind of sat back and claimed me as their own. “That’s our Russell,” I would hear. “He’s one of us.” In some ways, I’m glad they were cautious, because it meant I had to earn their trust. When you’re the first at anything, you’re going to be the first to run into problems, and that’s what happened to me when I decided to take on comedy about my own people. But no matter what, I get the badge of merit: I get to say that I was the first, and nobody can take that away from me.
IN JUNE 1995, I met my dear friend, the British stand-up comedian Junior Simpson. He came to Toronto on vacation with his then girlfriend, Cheryl. I met him by chance at the Nubian show at Yuk Yuk’s. He was auditing the show to see if he could get a spot on it. We ended up hanging out and hitting it off. I took him around to a few clubs and got him some spots. He told me I should come to England, where he would hook me up with some work, or at least introduce me to some people who could get me some work.
So in September of ’95, after taping my Comics episode, I went to England to see what was happening. The first show that Junior got me on was a show for a black audience in Redding. I did okay, not great, but I was just trying to figure out my footing. I did a few more shows, and once I got the hang of it over there, I kept going back to England and making pretty good loot too … well, at the time, it was considered pretty good loot. I’d be making two hundred pounds a show over there, whereas I’d be making two hundred dollars a show over here. There were no Indian comics there at the time, so it was fresh and new to the crowds. There’s also a huge Indian population over there that was not being serviced. I was doing the mainstream circuit—clubs like Jongleurs and the Comedy Store. Things went very well because the demographics of the UK are very much like the demographics of Canada. It was just like home, but with a different accent. The other comics on those shows were guys like Keith Fields, Sean Meo, Jeff Green and Junior Simpson.
I had secured a British agent, John Keyes, and he started getting me more and more work. John was a little Jewish guy who would take any gig anywhere for any price. I remember one Saturday night in ’96, I did five shows in one night at three different venues. First, I did the opening spot at the Comedy Store in London. They would have three comics on at the beginning of the night, then they’d have a break and have
two more comics in the second half. Every club did that, and every comic had twenty minutes. There were no headliners. So I did the opening spot at the Comedy Store, then took the tube over to Camden, did the closing spot of the early show, then broke out of there and did another show somewhere around Golders Green. Then I came back and did the opening spot on the late show at the Store and then the closing spot back at Camden.
I would stay with my family in South Harrow whenever I went to England—with Aunty Val and Uncle Ron, their daughter, Charlene (a.k.a. “Madwoman” or “Newman”), and their son, Darren, who was and still is the best. Darren and I are basically the same person: we have the exact same interests, except for his love of Elvis and my love of KISS. That “stani bastard” really put up with a lot. I would sleep in Darren’s bed and he slept on the floor. His room was tiny. It was smaller than my walk-in closet now. Both of us would sleep in there, but he was the world’s loudest snorer. We developed a system: I would just tap him on the shoulder and he would turn over, because he would snore only when he slept on his back. He would work from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, come home, have a nap and then drive me to whatever gig I had. Sometimes, when it was late at night and we’d be on the M40 motorway driving back from Birmingham to London, he would be so tired that he’d fall asleep in the driver’s seat and I would steer from the passenger side. He did all that driving for a good solid few years. None of my career in England would have been possible without Aunty Val and Uncle Ron, who let me stay in their house for free, fed me, did my laundry, or Darren, a guy who’s more like a brother than a cousin. Between them and Junior, so much became possible. I didn’t realize the connection that Junior and I had until I was best man at his wedding. When Junior gave his speech, he talked about how much I reminded him of his late brother. I hadn’t known this before his speech, and there was not a dry eye in the house after he spoke, not even my own.
My cousin Darren and me squaring off to Marquess of Queensberry rules.
I continued going back and forth to the UK for almost six or seven years, at first for a couple of weeks, then it turned into three weeks and then a month and then longer. I still played gigs back home in between the UK gigs. From England, I also ended up working in places I never in my life thought I’d perform in: Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Africa—and let’s not forget Denmark. I should point out that the Danes were the most flat- out racist of all the people I met. One guy told me to my face, “We don’t like your people over here.”
“We don’t like your people over here.”
“Canadians?” I asked him.
“No, Pakistanis.”
“Oh, well, I’m Canadian.”
To which he replied, “I guess that’s okay then.”
The one place I really loved going to was Ireland, both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The first time I went to Northern Ireland, I did a show in Belfast. I think it was late ’95 or early ’96. I called my mom to tell her I was performing in Northern Ireland, and at the time my mom was working with this Northern Irish woman, Margaret McGee. So my mom says, “Oh, be careful! Don’t tell them you’re Catholic over there.” I quickly learned it wasn’t me they didn’t like, it was the English. I also got the feeling that when they looked at me, they weren’t thinking, “Oh look, I bet he’s Catholic.” Nevertheless, I was still nervous about going there. My first gig in Belfast was at the Empire, an old church that was converted into a pub. We had these tiny-ass hotel rooms at the Regency Hotel, which is right across the street. The show was hosted by Paddy Kielty, who was becoming a huge star in Ireland. He was just on fire. I had an English girl named Jo Caulfield opening for me and she got booed off. This made me nervous, but when I went up the crowd loved me and I got an encore. It wasn’t that Jo was terrible—it’s just that she was English.
Every time I went to Northern Ireland I’d have a great time, I’d get an encore, and then we’d do Derry the next night—Londonderry. You knew better than to call it Londonderry when you were there; you’d call it Derry, the way the locals do. I love the Irish. They were great. Cool, smart, edgy. They remind me of Canadians in that they’re kind of the outsider country that’s associated with the bigger country. They have an edge about them. They know what’s going on and can see everything.
I played the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland in the summer of 2000 and I hated it. Not Edinburgh—the festival. The show was called “Russell Peters: Comedy Chameleon,” but I wanted to call it “Russell Peters: Stand-Up Chameleon. I was playing a one-man show for five weeks, seven nights a week, at 11:45 P.M. On Mondays and Tuesdays, there would be two, maybe three, people in the audience. Playing Edinburgh was considered a big deal back then, but to me it was terrible.
Back home in Canada, my standing rose because I was in the UK all the time. I was no longer a viable option for Yuk Yuk’s to book. So where a lot of Canadian comics were starting to feel trapped playing the Yuk Yuk’s Canadian circuit—same bars, same cities, same shitty pay—I was over in England, getting laid and getting paid. The comics outside the Yuk Yuk’s group were playing even shittier gigs. If Yuk Yuk’s had taken O’Toole’s on a Saturday night, the outsiders would take Dave’s Bar and Grill and play for twelve people who didn’t pay to see their comedy and didn’t give a shit that they were standing there doing their act. But because I had played all of the shitty gigs in Canada, it really helped my stand-up in the UK.
Those crappy shows made me fearless. I was like, “What are you guys gonna do? I’ve played worse gigs than this.” However, in the UK the audiences were spending money, treating it like a night out. They were getting drinks, having food and really taking in a show. They were all “hip hip hooray” and excited, whereas in Canada it was more like people sitting there with their arms crossed: “Go ahead. Make me laugh, fuckface.” The deck was a little bit more stacked against you in Canada. On my trips back home I’d stock up on Cadbury’s chocolate and Thornton’s toffee for Mom and good booze for dad—Chivas Royal Salute, Johnnie Walker Black, Gold or even Green.
In the UK, Indians refer to themselves as Asians, unlike in North America, where we generally think of Asians as being Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and so on. In early 2000, I hosted an Asian stand-up special for the BBC, called Masala Malai Mix or something equally retardedly named. Anyway, the show was basically showcasing new South Asian comics on TV. They really liked the way I hosted it and offered me a talk show called (another dumb name) Network East Late on BBC Two. It was a revamp of a Saturday afternoon show called Network East, which they decided to turn into a late-night chat show on Thursday nights with a younger, hipper edge to it. My co-host was Laila Rouass, who was this really hot chick.
We recorded the show at the Sound Republic Bar in Leicester Square. It was a good idea, but the producers had their heads up their asses. Just because it was the Asian programming unit, they made the show everything Indian, and I was like, “Come on, man. Indian people don’t do this much Indian shit in their lifetime.” So all the guests were Indian … basically, if you were Indian and had worked as an extra somewhere, you’d be on the show.
I understand they were trying to showcase our culture, but at the same time they weren’t thinking broadly enough, and it really bothered me. The first season was a little painful. My first guest was Aamir Khan, a big Bollywood star who had that movie Lagaan out at the time. I had never watched a Bollywood movie in my life, so I didn’t know who he was. The producers gave me the movie to watch, and I remember falling asleep before the opening credits finished—it was that boring to me. (I know other people didn’t find it boring, and it actually went on to set all kinds of records in India and was even nominated for an Academy Award—but hey, what do I know?)
Thing was, when I interviewed him on the show, he was really into himself. He acted like a fucking prick—and I’m not afraid to say that either. During commercial breaks, a lot of the girls would start screaming and I leaned in to him and I sa
id, “That’s gotta be pretty cool, huh?” trying to bring him back to reality, or at least relate to him as a man and not just some celebrity. He just ignored me. That was my first experience interviewing somebody, and I didn’t like it.
It wasn’t until the second season that I found my legs on that show, and I started to have a bit more fun with it and loosen up a little. And much like my live act, where I’m only as good as my audience, my interviewing was only as good as my guests, and let me tell you, we had some pretty uninteresting guests. You can only do so much with people with no personality.
My favourite guest was this Indian woman who did some sort of holistic medicine, like pressure points and stuff; she was a lot of fun and really funny. I don’t remember her name, but she was like the holistic healer for celebrities like Liz Hurley and Princess Diana. She was pretty connected in that world. I remember she was showing me a pressure point on my leg. She said that if you kept rubbing this one part of your leg, it would stimulate your libido. And if you rubbed another part of your leg, it was good for your bowel movements—it’d loosen you up. I remember making a joke, saying, “All right, guys: if you’re trying this at home, don’t screw this up, because you don’t want to be with your woman and rub the wrong part of your leg—you’ll shit your pants instead of getting a hard-on.” She was the most fun interview that I did.
We did two seasons of six episodes. I was asked to come back to host a third season, but I couldn’t because I had started appearing in a Canadian sitcom, Lord Have Mercy. My love affair with the UK ended in 2002, when I realized that I was falling into the circuit over there, doing the same gigs over and over again. It was no different than being back home and playing Barrie, Sault Ste. Marie, Timmins, Sudbury …
Call Me Russell Page 17