In a recent TV interview, Canadian comedy megastar Russell Peters was asked how things were going for him. “Well, I’ve got nine cars and five houses,” he replied.
A comment that in anyone else’s hands would normally seem shallow, but coming from Peters just seemed innocent, as if no one were more surprised at his success than the comedian himself.
It’s this self-effacing quality that is one of the reasons for his success, and it can be found in plenitude between the covers of his new autobiography, Call Me Russell.
Those looking for a joke-a minute tome will be disappointed — not much is played for laughs here. But what you will find is a candid story of the life of Canada’s biggest stand-up comedy export since Jim Carrey and Howie Mandel.
What do we learn? The man loves his family,especially his father, and that nothing in Russell’s early life would have indicated that superstardom was in his future.
Barely passing high school, and in a vocational school at that, he admits he even sold drugs for a short time to get by, a nervy admission from someone who crosses borders so often. And there are some stories about adolescent bullying and racial epithets that might explain his obsession with race in his work.
Race is Russell’s big theme, and he has to be credited with revitalizing a tired topic.
At his best, his keen eye for multicultural nuance equals that of some of our very best travel writers. But there’s also a reductive tendency in his work that perpetuates stereotypes as much as he deconstructs them. He has found an audience, and a global one, but not necessarily one that demands a lot of sophistication.
His rise is inauspicious, at first, with the usual dreary one-nighters in bars for little or no pay. He works his way up to headline status and a few Canadian TV specials, but it isn’t until someone posts them on the web and they go viral that Russell becomes a global brand.
To his credit, he acknowledges the part that luck has played in his career.
But midst all the good fortune and success, a sourness creeps into the narrative.
He doesn’t have very nice things to say about the Canadian comedy industry that nurtured him — only that everyone “undersold” him, which is exactly what happens when anyone starts out.
And this grousing is odd, given his nice-guy image.
Throughout the book, he tells stories of people who didn’t appreciate him during his struggling years: a comic who didn’t let him do a guest spot on a show in Mississauga, a booker who made him listen to her penny ante critique, an agent who just didn’t see his true value, the critic who didn’t like his TV special. And on and on.
Now here’s the weird part. He names these people, even though they are unknown outside of the small circle of Canadian stand-ups.
His legendary friendliness devolves into settling old scores. But the stories would have worked just as well without naming those names. At this point, can’t he just take the high road?
Ah, but this is a book written, or at least co-written, by a comedian. You can have world fame, rank on the Forbes list, have nine cars, five houses and be the nicest guy in the world, but a comic’s a comic, and that means the pain, the insults, the grievances, no matter how tiny, will never go away.