‘Deported’, another tired old Russell Peters comedy special with defunct racial stereotypes and homophobia
“I know what my intention is… if what I say is being misconstrued, that’s more your issue than mine,” said Russell Peters in an interview. The Canadian-born stand-up comic of Indian descent was addressing some long-standing criticisms on his style of observational comedy in the interview with Forbes on Christmas 2019.
Peters’ sets have in the past always played up racial stereotypes. His use of exaggerated accents has an almost Michael Scott from ‘The Office’ feel to them -- essentially, juvenile and distasteful.
The thing with Peters is that things have never been misconstrued. His sets have always been racist. And his new set ‘Deported’ on Amazon Prime Video is also homophobic. What a treat, right?
The show taped at the NSCI Stadium in Mumbai, India, is ironically laughably insipid. On a stage decorated for some reason with tuk-tuks, Peters did what he does best: Patanking. For those who don’t know, this word coined by actor Sakina Jaffrey refers to what Hollywood passes off (and often forces brown actors to do) as an Indian accent, one that The Atlantic notes, involves “retreating tongue, stressed syllables shaken out of order, mixed V’s and W’s, and hammered-out A’s”.
Peters, back in the day, had made a career of this accent. “Somebody gonna get a hurt real bad” -- a line he attributed to his father in many sets -- was a kind of meme for what Indians sounded like. As we enter the second decade of the second millennium, however, this trope has become more tired than millennials facing burnout.
And in ‘Deported’, it is almost painful to witness this still in action. He does the head nod, he does the accent (someone, at some point, should tell Peters that he sounds like Jason Mantzoukas when he speaks in his regular accent), and he continues to play the “Indian men have small penises” joke over and over again for some reason.
In his seminal essay ‘The Wanking Foreigner From The Big Bang Theory’, author Nikesh Shukla had observed, “I have a theory that Western popular culture is on a mission to desexualize Asian men. And it’s working. They rarely get to have successful, meaningful brilliant sex. Instead, they are frustrated, and sweaty, and wanking at home.”
He had added in the essay about a theory called “Three Bears”. He explained, “If black men are too sexual and their d***s way too big, and Asian men (and we are encompassing an entire continent here) are undersexed, sexually repressed, either culturally or familially, because of an overbearing mother, and their d***s are way too small, that makes the white d**k, juuuuuuust right.”
Peters is guilty of both -- the undersexualization of brown (and more particularly Indian) men and the hypersexualization of black men -- in his set. He does the d**k jokes (both brown and black) a few too many times for anyone’s liking. But that is honestly, the tip of the iceberg in this exhausting comedy special.
While laughter is far and few -- and those too can be written off as nostalgia-induced -- the real cringe-worthy bits are when Peters begins to get homophobic. In a bit about a visit to the doctor’s where he was prescribed an endoscopy, Peters took great pains to point out on several occasions that he was not gay and that he did not want things to be shoved into his butt -- the joke was supposed to be him mixing up endoscopies and colonoscopies. And the implication that straight men do not like things shoved up their butts.
He continued further with how during the procedure, his throat never got sore and he felt that he had a “gay man’s throat”, an obvious (and earth-shatteringly juvenile) play on fellatio. The rest of the set was full of more such displays of “Indian humor” that would make his contemporary brown comedians (like Hasan Minhaj, Hari Kondabolu, Aziz Ansari, Kumail Nanjiani, Aparna Nancherla, Mindy Kaling and more) sink in shame. Because, honestly, at this point, Peters gives brown funny folk a bad name.
Culture critic Jonathan Macintosh pointed out in a video essay some time ago that “Most comedy writers know that retrograde style bigotry is no longer acceptable on primetime television, but they still want to use sexist, racist and homophobic jokes as an easy way to get cheap laughs.”
And when you don’t have much else going for you (unless you count frantically making annoying noises with one’s mouth on stage), you have to rely on racist and homophobic jokes to fill in a 67-minute-long set, don’t you?
Russell Peters’ comedy special ‘Deported’ is available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.