The ABCDs of Desi Humor
By Beena Ahmad

“Isn’t it funny how Indians think by putting a bed sheet over something, it makes it more comfortable?” —Paul Varghese, Comedy Guru

In a flash, I was convinced that the comedians of Gurus of Comedy had grown up in the same basements that I had. It doesn’t matter what kind of desi you are, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalee, Paki, etc, etc, you must have spent long afternoons hanging out on bed sheets that carpeted the basements where all the kids, aged one-and-a-half, to unmarried-going-on-thirty, got relegated. Most of us were dorks and we got shuffled off on the weekends to these mercilessly endless functions, a religious holiday, some little kid’s birthday party or a cousin’s graduation. Little kids in disheveled party clothes chased each other, doing hurdles over heaping platefuls of basmati rice, samosas, ladoos, birthday cake, and paper plates and plastic spoons scattered everywhere. The aunties and uncles carried on upstairs. You could hear occasional bursts carry through the walls of that one uncle’s squeaky giggle or that auntie with the distinct belching guffaw. Good lord, it was such a scene. But, this was also a space where you were among other kids who got it, what it was like to be an ABCD (American Born Confused Desi), where you could laugh at bossy old Auntie Nargas singing ghazals in the shower or slap your forehead at how cheap Uncle Snehal is. How cheap? So cheap that …

I recently caught the final installment of the Gurus of Comedy 2006 tour, which included Tapan Trivedi, Raj Sharma, and headliner Paul Varghese, who I had already seen perform on last year’s tour. The show brought me back to that world of aunties and uncles. It affirmed for me that what was “weird” at school was “normal” for us. How else do you explain how Paul knew that the only peanut butter jar our refrigerator had ever seen contained mango achar? (In Paul’s words, which are funnier than mine: Let’s be honest, the only reason that Indian people eat peanut butter is to have someplace to store their mango pickle.”) These guys turned those common desi experiences, some painful, others forgotten, into humor that struck a funny bone buried deep within. I have to admit it was the sort of redemption that could make you proud to be desi.

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It was a warm Saturday night in Edison, NJ. My friends and I were seated at a bar in the lobby of a Sheraton hotel. Ah, Edison, I summoned up a morsel of nostalgia for the dreadful adolescent years I spent here. Whatever else I could say about it, Desiville was certainly the appropriate location for some long overdue comic relief. It was a good guess that the organizer of the tour, Piyush Dinker Pandya, of American Desi fame, had had something to do with the locale. Anyway, I was sitting at the bar doing a lame job of convincing myself that I could get away with writing this story without interviewing the comedians. As if I didn’t feel earnest enough with my journalism props, the tell-tale notepad and tape recorder (which I was to find out later didn’t work), my confidence was further impaired by the two-drink minimum imposed by the venue and a bartender who was determined to interpret Tequila Sunrise to mean that I should be given enough tequila to last until sunrise. No, no need to interview, I had just resolved, when I turned to my left and saw a familiar face beside me. My heart sank. It was Tapan Trivedi in the flesh. There was no mistaking the eyebrows. I was acting like a poor excuse for a journalist, but I’m not so terrible that I would flee from the story. He was soon joined by a second face that I recognized from poking around on the internet – Raj Sharma. I gathered that Paul was on stage performing.

Tapan Trivedi:

Tapan was sweaty from his set. He told me his act went over well with the 7 pm crowd, the uncles and aunties of Edison, but man, did he feel burnt out. Just the 9 pm set left and he could head back home to the Bay Area, and his wife Mandy, who is pregnant with their first child. The Gurus of Comedy had just hit up 16 cities in four weeks. The schedule sounded intense. Flights during the day that zig-zagged across the continental U.S. by day and a show, sometimes two, in the evenings.

The three of us watched an antiques show on the television set mounted above the bar, you know, the kind of show where people find forgotten brass spittoons with authentic spit-stains or intact saltshakers from the Ming dynasty under their beds, and rake in mucho moolah at the auction house. I racked my brain for a conversation that might lead to insightful and engaging questions. Raj looked totally engrossed in the program. He said something about loving to see how much crap was worth, but Tapan was willing to talk. Out of the four comedians, Tapan is the only one born in India and he’s the newest to comedy. Raj and Paul are both ABCD’s from Texas. Tapan told me he works an “eight-to-four” job, eight months of the year he’s just another freelance computer guy in San Francisco and four months of the year, he devotes to the comedy.

Tapan shared with me that he’d like his jokes to transcend comedy and push the barriers of what society considers acceptable. Curious, I asked him for an example; I’m into irreverence. He told me that there is a lot about America that is strange to him. Like get this, suicide is illegal, but abortion is allowed. Whoa. I was a bit taken back. I was tempted to pluck a juicy worm out of the can that had just been opened. I could get past the politics, but I couldn’t find that funny. That is an observation, for sure, but a joke? He assured me that even his audiences in San Francisco like this one. He told me he had a joke about incest in his repertoire, but he planned to keep it conservative with his humor tonight.

“Desis are more into fluffy stuff,” he said. More the reason to make us think then, I thought.

During the set, I appreciated one of Tapan’s early jokes most. He commended Indians for their profound, all-encompassing diplomacy.
“We always find the win-win situation,” he said.

For example, Creationism versus Evolution. Did we come from monkeys or God? No problem!

With his energetic eyebrows, he brought the joke home.
“What if a monkey was a God?”

Some of Tapan’s other jokes went into the same zone where I wasn’t offended but mystified at where to direct my laughter.
“People want to know: How did you get married to a white girl? (whoa, thin ice, thin ice!) The answer is simple: Outsourcing. I do the job for half the money.”

Well, okay, that one worked out in the end. Finally, there was one joke that fell flat on its face. I didn’t catch the opening, but the punch line was: “I don’t want my kid to be the first ever Indian gay guy.”

A male couple, well-dressed and apparently gay, sitting side by side, raised their hands. Er….oops?

Raj Sharma:

The next comic to take the stage was Raj Sharma. Raj is the epitome of that funny desi guy at those family functions of yesteryear. Like many desis he was a on a pre-med track in college and like some he fell off it. Interested in theater, he ended up in comedy.

Here’s one of his jokes:

“My dad has a tendency to state the obvious. I told him that my buddy Jason was getting divorced and he said ‘I’m telling you Raj, something must have gone wrong.’”

He also says, ‘When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.”
One step further: “My dad kind of sounds like a beer ad, “… Until then it’s Miller time!”

Another one, at the expense of Raj’s dad: “Don’t drink and drive. Well, if you do, wear a seatbelt.”

“It costs $400 to replace a windshield, you know.”

We’ve all heard our parents dole out bizarre advice that we can only guess must have gotten garbled in translation. We can relate.

“I think the humor is coming from the words,” Raj told me afterwards. “What I do in the joke, he actually said that. It was just the wording. I never let him finish that thought. Half the time there’s meant to be more but I don’t let him finish. It’s that half the time that I capitalize on.”

Raj’s approach to humor is to find those things that we’ve all thought about, but have just never thought to reflect on through the lens of comedy. Given that, it makes perfect sense to me that he would name Jerry Seinfeld, the king of mundane humor, as a kindred comic soul. And I agree this is what seems to work best for him.
One of my favorite jokes, which it turns out, is the first original joke he ever wrote, captures Raj’s sensibility, I think.

He reminded us of what we, desi kids, had going for us:
“You don’t want to play Monopoly against us because we take the hotel-motel business very seriously.”

The Edison audience was pretty receptive and supportive, but occasionally Raj told me there are hecklers, usually obnoxious or intoxicated (or both) individuals. He enjoys taking them on and hopes to move his comedy into improvisation that works off the crowd. This comes from years of experience of handling bullies at school.

“As one of the only Indian kids getting picked on, you had to be really quick with things,” Raj said. “They had to know that if you pick on me once, I’ve got forty jokes about you.”

Paul Varghese:

As I mentioned earlier, I’m not a newcomer to Paul’s comedy. To my delight, Paul performed a few of the same jokes that I saw on last year’s tour again this year so the batch of friends I brought with me could see the original sketches instead of relying on my pathetic reenactments. I’ll do my best to share a few of his jokes here, with the caveat that I won’t be able to do them justice for you either. So much of Paul’s comedy is in the performance. Somewhere along the way, he picked up miming and it’s what sets him apart from much of the other stand-up I’ve seen. You really should seek out one of his shows before he gets so famous you can’t afford him. In the alternative, I guess you could wait for him to get so famous you can see him on Comedy Central for free. He was on NBC’s Last Comic Standing a few years ago and he was in the running again this year. He recently found out he didn’t make the cut and it’s anybody’s guess why.

One of my favorite sketches starts off with Paul’s observation that American dishes are basically lists of ingredients. His example: garlic, lemon-peppered chicken. You know exactly what’s in it. That would never work for Indian food, Paul notes.

“Meanwhile, my mom’s there dropping in the ingredients like a witch,” he says, conjuring up the three witches of Macbeth by dropping pinches of this and pinches of that into an imaginary cauldron.

“If my mom listed the ingredients… This is a paprika, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, chili….”

Paul told me afterwards that he enjoys making aunties and uncles laugh the most. There are two topics that will please the older generation without fail –“couples fighting and food.” His parents are often the butt of these jokes, not in a malicious sort of way, but in the way that they could stand in for any of our parents. For example, if your parents had an arranged marriage you could relate to this one.

Paul relayed how his Dad has been mystified by the fuss over “love-marriages.” “I’ve been married 35 years,” Paul’s father purportedly said. “I don’t love her. We’re just hanging out.”

At some point during that inebriated interview after the show, I managed to ask the question most on my mind. How do you keep your comedy from propagating stereotypes about Indians? Indians and long names? Indians and saris? Indians and arranged marriages? We, desis, might get it, but what about the rest of the audience? Is it okay that they’re laughing at us?

“It’s way too early for South Asians to be pigeon-holed,” Paul said. “My only requirement with an Indian joke is if a white guy could do the joke, I wouldn’t do it,” Paul added. “I want to come from a perspective that no white guy could pull the joke off.”

“A lot of Indian jokes aren’t based in reality. I’m not a terrorist. I’m not a 7-11 employee, that’s really what I’m referring to,” Paul added later. “If you talk about being Indian, it’s like you’re being stereotypical when there’s still a lot you can do. A lot of comedians in general will just look for what it would take to get a laugh.”

I was forced to reexamine, for a second, what I meant by stereotypes. The saris and the long Indian names, I was used to jokes about these things. But, are these necessarily offensive or even stereotypes? I came to realize that they were not … necessarily. Not if this was your experience.

Raj made a similar point to me by using the example of bindhis, which can be justifiably considered offensive when mishandled by white comedians, namely because these comedians are ignorantly taking a cheap shot at the expense of Indian traditions like the dot. It’s the difference between laughing at people and laughing with people. This cultural critic was satisfied with the explanation. To be honest, I felt a bit sheepish with my initial wariness, the product of an over-skeptical, over-analytical heart.

However, the one criticism I maintain is that certain subjects lost their flavor when they were used by each of the comics. For example, after the second or third outsourcing joke or Indians-with-long-names jokes, I couldn’t help noticing how the humor in these jokes got diluted through repetition. I was less inclined to find these jokes funny as the evening progressed.

This is a minor grievance. More importantly, I realized the function that Paul’s joke about arranged marriages also served. Through comedy, he humanized what many Americans still look at as some sort of barbaric, uncivilized custom. He managed to portray his traditional parents as ordinary Americans, people just “hanging out.”

I also came to appreciate the special challenge facing Tapan, Raj and Paul in pioneering a path for desi comedians. Most white comedians only have to be concerned with one audience – the twentysomething to fortysomething all-American crowd, which shares enough of a cultural frame of reference to find the same material funny. These guys have to make their jokes work for the aunties and uncles who make up the majority of the audiences at private functions, which is what brings in the dough at this stage of their career. They have to appeal to us, desi kids, because well, we’re their peers. We get them. Disappointingly, we’re also the least supportive. Raj told me that he and Paul tried to start a South Asian night at an improv theater in Dallas, but the crowd eventually turned white.

As disappointing as this outcome is to me, the silver lining is that Raj and Paul were universal enough to appeal to this last audience, which all the major network heads probably have in mind when they decide whether to give someone a break. Achieving universal appeal is also the way out of getting pigeon-holed as a desi comedian with only Indian jokes up one’s sleeve. All three comedians look to Russell Peters, the Canadian desi comedian, who has managed to find mainstream success by striking the balance.

Out of the three comedians, I think Paul has mastered the universal space the best. Take this line for example:

“You ever drink so much, you’re on the couch looking for the seatbelt?”

Or there is the sketch he did about watching the Winter Olympics bobsledding competition on television. He mimed an onlooker trying to cheer for his country as sleds whiz by at neck-breaking speed.

“If you do have time to cheer for your country, that means your country lost.”

Again, so much of the joke is lost in my re-creation. It was the facial expressions, the acting, and the delivery. Whether this is the product of experience or talent, I couldn’t say. I’d be tempted to call it talent but Paul was pretty adamant that being funny is hard work and requires years of practice. Twenty years went into Russell Peters’s success, he reminded me. Five years went into the 45-minute set that he performed for us. He believes he’s reaching the point where he can rib on anything now to create a joke, say something even as prosaic as an alarm clock. Paul claims he’s not even sure he’s found his voice in comedy, though I think something else he said at some point later in the interview reveals that he’s not particularly searching for a persona either.

“What I write and what’s out there is a reflection of me,” he said. “I’d like to think who I am on stage and who I am off are the same person.”

Paul told me afterwards that critics commonly complain that his sets feel disjointed because he frequently pauses to figure out which direction he wants to take the audience. He usually only has his first joke and final joke planned; the rest he improvises.

“I’m comfortable with silence,” Paul said. “I think audiences are more uncomfortable with silence than I am.”

I can only speak for the two shows I’ve seen. I thought Paul kept the jokes coming in a steady fire. If the show felt a little disjointed, it was not for the silences, but for how little time he gave us in between his jokes to finish laughing our asses off.

For further reading and a glimpse into Paul’s comic musings, I would recommend his blog: www.paulvarghese.blogspot.com. You can find him on the web at www.paulvarghese.com
Raj Sharma can be found at: www.raj-comedy.com
Tapan Trivedi can be found at: indiancomedian.blogspot.com

A fourth guru was not present this evening, Dan Nainan, a tecky turned performer who it seems had some other obligation or engagement or something not quite divulged to me. He’s half East Asian. You can find some of his sketches on the internet. Google him, if you’d like. You know how.

Published June 30, 2006