Russell Peters: Red, White And Brown
DVD review
Russell Peters is certainly doing something right. With little profile in Britain, this 38-year-old Indian-Canadian comic can sell out London’s O2, just like he does in arenas back home.Looking at the audience on this DVD gives a clue to the market he’s identified. A packed Madison Square Gardens contains a much, much wider ethnic mix than you’ll ever find in an average comedy club. After decades of supposedly inclusive comedy, it seems that there’s a lot of people who feel that stand-up still doesn’t offer something for them. That is where Mr Peters comes in.
And, boy, does he milk it, trying hard to mention every minority group in the room: Arabs, Indians, Asians (in the North American sense of Chinese and Japanese folk), Guyanans, Trinidadians, Jews, Italians… he’s the Google Earth of put-down comedy.
But though he’s well-travelled, what Peters says about each nationality is at best hackneyed and at worst racist: Chinese people have slitty eyes and can’t drive, black men have big dicks and are ‘cheap as shit’, Arabs are ululating would-be bombers to a man. If it wasn’t for foreigners and their crazy, crazy accents, half of his act would evaporate. Yet in the midst of all this, he has the audacity to blame the media for ‘perpetual stereotyping’.
Not that anyone in the room is offended by him. The only thing worse than being derided by Peters is being ignored by him, and each quarter of the room whoops and hollers when he namechecks their background. It might just be the joy of outsiders being made to feel they belong here, with apparently jovial knockabout banter at traits they recognise. Cutaway shots the very well-lit auditorium show fans sometimes weeping with laughter, giving the subconscious green light for you to laugh at home, too.
‘I realised that in a lot of my jokes the punchline is in the Indian accent,’ the self-aware Peters says when he discusses the fears of taking his act to the subcontinent (which smells of shit, apparently). And indeed, his strength as a performer is in his crude-but-effective mimicking of his targets.
Sometimes, especially towards the start of this 80-minute show, he puts that stagecraft to more interesting use, especially with an analogy about the nutjob Islamists always shown on TV news that goes deeper than the one-dimensional mocking that characterises much of his act. But it’s the exception, rather than the rule.
In the few moments he takes away from the racially influenced stuff, Peters still sticks to the obvious, with routines about penis and pubic hair that’s as unedifying as it is uninteresting. Yet the audience lap it up.
Maybe, since I’m a white guy, this just isn’t meant for me. Still, I guess I’ve got most of the rest of the world’s stand-up output to choose from.
Published: 4 Feb 2009
