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| Russell Peters: Hollywood’s New Romantic Hero? | | By LISA TSERING | | | indiawest.com | November 19, 2009 03:34:00 PM |
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SAN FRANCISCO — It’s a freezing cold night out, but it’s toasty inside Cobb’s Comedy Club, where a sold-out crowd roars a warm welcome to Russell Peters as he strolls onstage, wearing an oversized white tee-shirt emblazoned with a graphic of three golden lions: the pillar of Ashoka.
“I wore this shirt in honor of the Indians” in the audience, Peters told India-West Nov. 12. “This is what’s on the money.”
 Peters sold out a five-night run at Cobb’s, an intimate club whose limited size led to tickets reaching black market prices of $150 and up.
“I just came off a big theater and stadium run; the smallest one I was doing was like 9,000 seats or something,” he said. “I like going up and down like that with a big room, and then a small room. Also, I hadn’t been onstage in about a month. I wanted to get back onstage, and you can have more fun in a small room. It reminds you that you’re a comic, you know?”
Toronto-born, Anglo-Indian Russell Dominic Peters has become one of the world’s most popular comedians. He’s sold out Madison Square Garden, London’s O2 Arena and the Sydney Opera House, and his DVDs, which include the hilarious “Red, White and Brown” and “Outsourced,” have sold over 250,000 copies. Forbes ranked him as one of the Top 10 highest grossing comics in 2009.
So where do white-hot comics go after all that? The big screen, of course.
“There’s a Billy Crystal film we’re working on, me and Billy,” he told India-West. “It’s a romantic comedy. He’s getting somebody to write it and it’s my first shot at the big time with a legitimate person. Billy’s going to produce and direct it, and star in it. I will also be the leading man, I guess. That’s pretty exciting.”
This year, Peters marks 20 years in standup comedy — an impressive feat. To celebrate, he’s kicking off a “Green Card Tour” at Radio City Music Hall in New York Jan. 29-30. “We have two nights sold out already. Then the Nokia Theater in L.A. Feb. 6, then off to Australia,” he said.
“Hopefully I will be getting my green card any day now. It’s in celebration of me becoming … ‘legitimate.’”
These days Peters, 39, is never far from the side of his girlfriend, Amalia, a slim 22-year-old brunette of Chilean descent. “She was working in a mall in Toronto. She sprayed perfume on me and was like, ‘You’re mine.’ I was like, ‘What? I love you!’”
At Cobb’s, Peters tackles topics he excels at — the ways different cultures spark against each other — and he constantly shifts in and out of accents: Filipino, Iraqi, Iranian and Vietnamese; and Spanish, Mexican and Salvadorian (you bet, there’s a difference).
But he gets his best response when he dips into his expansive trove of South Asian humor. Like other desi comics, Peters talks about cows in the street, weird Indian names, digestive curiosities and the mysterious head wobble, but he does it with an authority and presence that’s — to steal a phrase from his “Red, White and Brown” show — “mind-blasting!”
Not all of the Indian material made it into the show, though.
“Once I record it, and it ends up on a DVD, I don’t do it live any more,” he explained. “I may use a line from a joke, but I won’t do an entire bit. I’m pulling from my tour material right now. But that’s an hour-and-a-half or two hours [his comedy club set runs under one hour] and there are times when I don’t know what direction to take with the audience — there may be a long bit right here, and if they’re not with it, they’re not.”
Not all of the material works. Despite the preponderance of Indians in the club, Peters’ bit about the Nov. 26 terror attacks in Mumbai just sat there. Another bit, about the Mumbai train attacks of July 11, 2006, did slightly better. “The 2006 attacks were on July 11. We got hit on 7-11! It’s almost a joke!”
But Peters clicked with another bit about Indian Americans returning for a visit to the Motherland. “You act like Americans, saying, ‘How do you people live like this? No toilet paper? What is this cup?’”
And he riffed on the Indian penchant for making up onomatopoeic words like “su-su.”
“Indians make up words based on sounds we hear — what’s the word for firecracker? ‘pataka.’ Whispering — ‘kus-pus.’ I was in India and someone called a rickshaw for me: ‘fat-fatia’!”
Then he turned his attention to a young Punjabi man in the audience who was just about to go to India for an arranged marriage.
“So, Inder … have you met her yet?” he asked. Then, with a broad wink: “Are you getting a dowry?” |
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