When you're a comic who specializes in issues of race, it can be a bit of an obstacle when the audience doesn't want to hear about it.
That would be your garden-variety white audience, says Russell Peters.
He's the Indo-Canadian homeboy who emcees tomorrow's Laugh It Up Comedy Summit 2000 at Massey Hall, with D.L. Hughley (The Hughleys), character actor/comic John Witherspoon (The Wayans Brothers) and Def Comedy Jam veteran Griff.
Busy? Peters also opens for Jamaican comedy star Oliver Samuels tonight and tomorrow, in an all-Caribbean bill at Rosedale High School.
"Here's one thing white people do that pisses me off. They'll describe a guy to me, and they won't tell me what colour he is," says Peters, an 11-year Yuk Yuk's veteran who's found new cachet playing for non-white audiences at events such as Yuk Yuk's all-black Nubian Disciples of Pryor nights.
"It's like, a guy came to the club, a black friend lookin' for me. And one of the comics said, 'There's a guy who came in lookin' for ya.' And I said, 'What did he look like?'
"And he said, 'Well, he's tall, had a hat on ...' and I'm like, 'Is he black?' 'Um, I think he might have been.' And I'm like, 'You think he might have been? What are ya, blind?' "
Peters jokes that he represents "the plight of the brown man in Toronto," and he certainly embodies some of the grey areas of race politics in a multicultural mecca like ours. A South Asian who grew up in Brampton, he adopted the hip-hop culture of black friends.
"It was Brampton in the '70s, early '80s, before the influx of Indians there, so if you weren't white, you were black. White kids used to pick on me and beat me up, therefore I had no love for them. All my friends were black."
In the years since, Toronto's ethnic cultures have cross-pollinated to the point that you have black comics who get booed off the stage at Yuk Yuk's Nubian shows because they're not black enough. At the same time, "you've got this whole new generation of little hip-hoppers who can be Indian, black, white, Filipino, Chinese, whatever. And they all talk with this same twang that's a sort of combination of West Indian, American and Canadian accents."
"Like, I'll call my friend, an Indian guy, and I'll get his little brother and I'm like, 'Yo, is your brother home?' 'No, guy, he's gone to the store still.'
"And I'm like, 'What? I never called before.' 'Nah, but differently guy, he'll be back soon. Ya dun' know.'
"I'm like 'What the f--- are you saying? How you going to get a job, talking like that? Yo guy, you reach Pizza Pizza still?' "
Yuk Yuk's feature
He comes by his hip-hop youth verisimilitude honestly. Peters is a popular feature in Yuk Yuk's high school shows.
"The teachers are, like, so white. They'll tell you, 'No swearing when you're talking to kids.' But I can swear and they don't know I'm swearing 'cause I'm not using the swear words they're used to hearing. Like, I'd do a joke about how my dad thought punanny was a tropical fruit ..."
Tomorrow's Massey Hall show will be a reunion for Peters, who toured England with D.L. Hughley four years ago. He's at a point in his career where he looks to Hughley's cross-over to acting for inspiration. Peters is an eager actor, but says he's had a frustrating time of it with casting agents who haven't caught up to modern-day Toronto.
"My biggest problem is they'll send me to some audition where they're looking for Indians and I hear I'm not Indian enough. They either want me to have an accent, or they can't comprehend an Indian guy who looks westernized. They hear Indian and they think, "F---in' loser who owns a store."
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