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Browner than
thou by BOSS SAMBOSA
Peters is arguably North America’s premier East-Indian comic. This Brampton, Ontario native has been doing Desi comedy for thirteen years, a tenure that earns him pioneer status in the scarcely staffed genre of brown laughs. It has also earned him worldwide acclaim, including a regular talk show on the BBC in the U.K.
Mirror: Let’s
talk about that Karma show. There was a lot of confused nationalism
in the room that night— Russell Peters:
You mean stupid nationalism. Those guys were giving me this typical
browner-than-thou shit. Accusing me of not representing Indian culture.
But Indian culture is so fucking huge, man! You’ve got your light-skinned
Indians in the north, your dark-skinned ones in the south, Bengalis
in the east, all kinds of people in the middle! And everyone’s
different. They all speak different languages. M: What
do you think their problem was? RP: These
kids come up to me sometimes and say, (puts on thick accent) “Rah-zell…
Fahh-keen’ Rah-zell…” And they can’t believe I’m
an Indian because of my name, right. And I’m just like, “I’m
an Anglo-Indian, you idiot! There are plenty of us, learn your fucking
history, man.” When I was growing up in Brampton in the ’70s,
the white kids didn’t give a shit what my name was. It
Black and brown
all over M: I’ve
always thought of Brampton as brown-town— RP: Brampton
was a different place then. There weren’t any East Indians then,
just blacks and whites. So if you weren’t white, you were black.
And the white kids would beat you up. So growing up, most of my friends
were black. M: But you
didn’t become one of those brown homies. RP: No.
I mean, most of my friends are black now, but I don’t speak black.
I’ll use the slang now and then. M: What
about as a comedian—does the black community dig your act? RP: Yeah,
they love what I do. I grew up with black folks so I’ve got the
impressions and nuances down perfect, and it really surprises them how
well I do it. It’s like, they see this guy who’s not black,
but does a perfect impression, and I can get away with it because I’m
not white either! M: When
I saw you at Karma, you did a bit about being refused acting roles because
you “weren’t Indian enough.” It seemed especially apt
at the time since those goons in the audience were accusing you of the
same thing. RP: I had this audition at the CBC a while back that really pissed me off. The story was you’ve got this Indian guy, who was, you know, educated in his country, and he comes here and he works at a Tim Horton’s. And he dishes out little bits of advice here and there. Anyway, they wanted me to read the part with an accent. And I said, you know, “Why should this guy have an accent?” So I read it my way, and they said “That’s good, but can you try it with the accent?” And I knew right there I didn’t want it, so I went like, way over the top with the accent and pissed off the casting director, and then I gave it to them—I said, “This is what you motherfuckers love, isn’t it? You want me to dance through hoops, you want me to play a character who was royalty in his own country but is worth nothing here.” : With the
New York Kings of Comedy at |
“Are you
talking about the stupidity in the audience that night?” asks Russell
Peters blankly, referring to a question about his last gig in Montreal,
hosting the Karma show held at the Olympia theatre in August. Throughout
the East Indian talent gala, he was relentlessly interrupted and harassed
by a group of shit disturbers who seemed to feel he was too white for
the job.