Much is made of the seeming paradox of comedian Russell Peters. He manages to sell out arenas, including London’s O2, but most people have never heard of him. The industry barely pays attention to him, and yet Forbes estimates that he pulled in $21m last year. A week ago, he was headlining the modestly sized Crackers Comedy Club in Indianapolis; last night, he played Madison Square Garden.
And yet live, Peters makes perfect sense. The affable Canadian has amassed a global fan base through the tried-and-true style of relatable, unchallenging material, consisting mostly of stream-of-consciousness storytelling mixed liberally with crowd work. He enjoys talking to the first few rows, a tactic that surely works better at a 300-seat club than a 20,000-seat arena. He loves asking the audience about race – “What style of Asian are you?” is his first question to a man up front – as well as family, making the many parent/child combos in the room giggle with his prying questions about masturbation.
But despite the quantity of audience interaction – it’s at least one-third of his set – it rarely evolves into something memorable. He occasionally gets lucky; an Indian man in a Texan Longhorns sweater gets a laugh from the crowd even before Peters throws in his joke about “a holy cow”. But most of his banter is predictable and soft, with none of the revelatory fun that great crowd work brings.
And his material, which focuses heavily on his childhood, his ineptitude with technology, and his grievances with the modern world, feels underdeveloped. His off-the-cuff style can’t hide how rarely he hits a solid punch line; on the handful of occasions that he does deliver a proper joke, it only highlights how much filler we’ve heard since the last one.
It would be too easy to harp on his less-than-original premises – Indian parents want their sons to be doctors, kids today are getting soft – but great jokes on these topics do exist. His versions simply fail to say anything new. A bit about being recognized over the phone by tech support in India is bursting with promise, but he lets it become yet another goofy gag about internet porn.
Nonetheless, most in the room clearly enjoy themselves, Peters included. He seems to revel in the spectacle of his shows, which he self-awarely dubbed the “Almost Famous” tour. He has a DJ on stage at all times, and last night’s performance featured three opening acts, including a surprise drop-in from his fellow Last Comic Standing judge Roseanne Barr, whose uneven set didn’t lessen the crowd’s excitement at seeing the comedy legend on stage.
The real paradox of Peters may be that all the pieces are in place for him to be an exceptional comedian. He’s obviously a natural performer; he flips through sound effects with ease, and his impression of the Russian language as a language spoken backwards (a la Twin Peaks) is astonishingly good. And his situation – as a rich, not-really-famous, Indian Canadian living in Los Angeles who is also a recently divorced dad – feels so full of potential that it’s disheartening how little he does with it. But for now, he’ll continue to toil in arena-playing obscurity.
