Russell Peters suspects the entertainment industry is not his friend. However, you know who is? Darn near everyone else.
The Brampton-raised standup superstar does not lack for local admirers, naturally — on Saturday he will play the Scotiabank Arena for the ninth time — but a glance at his Instagram page hints at the globe-spanning breadth of his personal connections: his peers; other comic performers from relative newcomers to legends (eg. the late Bob Newhart and Dick Van Dyke, about to turn 99); famed musicians (Jon Bon Jovi, Talib Kweli); King Charles; Jordan Peterson; and athletes from 21-year-old soccer hero Jude Bellingham to a certain 58-year-old boxer who just absorbed an underwhelming loss to influencer Jake Paul.
Mike Tyson wasn’t taking any calls in the days leading up to last month’s bout, Peters, 54, recalled over the phone, and he hasn’t talked to Tyson since the fight; life is busy. The comedian (and amateur pugilist himself) has a tour to do and a new special to promote: “Act Your Age,” his 10th, was filmed in Abu Dhabi and released last week via the unusual platform of Patreon.
Hard-core Toronto fans who somehow missed his 2022 tour of that material — and the CTV/Crave series he hosted from earlier this year, “Irresponsible Ensemble,” where some of it also appears — can get ready for Saturday by watching the special, which finds him in comfortable if risqué territory: ethnic jokes, sex jokes, teasing the younger generations and ruing how hard it was in his teens to find smut, never mind scheming to furtively view it:
“If you wanted to see porn in the ’80s, you had to be a real pervert … We looked at the same tape for four years … loading a VCR in a quiet house (in the middle of the night) is easily one of the loudest things you can do. You might as well just turn a blender on.”
Maybe the cable channels and streaming services were looking for something less racy; they’ve certainly cut back spending generally in the last two years. Peters expresses dissatisfaction at his failure to find partners for a project about his late friend (and founder of New York’s Paid in Full Posse gang) Rapp: “Nobody wants to spend, Everybody’s so cheap nowadays. All the industry is gone … I’d love to get that done for Rapp.”
The Crave series, too, is something he has as-yet blunted ambitions for. It serves as a worthy showcase for fresh (Geoffrey Asmus, Zarna Garg) and established (Tom Papa) talents, but Peters had — and has — hopes for something grander with a broader reach: “I’m going to add on to it and make it more of a desirable project for people to want to jump onto … where it was going to go originally flopped on us.”
At the moment, in a career that’s included a bit of everything, including small movie roles, voice work (“Velma”) and producing the award-winning “Hip-Hop Evolution,” he looks ahead to his non-standup plans and sees “nothing, I don’t think. I mean just touring, that’s really the only thing that makes me money.
“The industry was never a Russell Peters ally and they’re still not, so. And I’ve gone this far without them.”
If that reads as bitter, it didn’t sound that way. His personal life is full to bursting: he’s got a 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage, a five-year-old son from another relationship and now two stepchildren, 29 and 31, via his second wife, Ali. Their 2022 wedding sounds like a dream invitation: an oceanside ceremony of less than 10 minutes conducted by Cedric the Entertainer (“I love you. You love me. Yes, yes. OK, let’s get this party started”), leading directly to a celebrity-studded reception and first-dance song performed by R&B star Deborah Cox. The bandleader? The ’70s-’80s pop titan Nile Rodgers, another Peters pal.
(The romance emerged from the trying times of the pandemic, with Peters, like so many others, cut off from most avenues to perform; “I was burying myself in jiu-jitsu (and) able to kill any human being walking around me.”)
Though he once told the Star that “I check out when some (comedians) talk about their kids unless it’s like something really spectacular,” family life creeps further into Peters’ material in “Act Your Age.” What still isn’t much there is politics.
Peters offered the Star a profane preview of the joke he’s doing now about the Donald Trump-Kamala Harris choice and suggested that booking insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe for a spot at a Trump rally was a mistake, but of Hinchcliffe’s much-criticized Puerto Rico joke he offered a defence: “in a comedy-club setting that joke would have been very funny (where people) would be able to hear the irony in the joke, too. Puerto Rico is a beautiful place, I’ve been there.”
There aren’t too many places Peters hasn’t gone to do comedy and he thinks that the far-flung young comedians who have said he’s their inspiration — the people he has called his “comedy babies” — can open some remaining doors.
Oddly, a fighter on the Tyson fight undercard, Whindersson Nunes, is a famous comedian in his native Brazil, and “he messaged me before and told me that I’m the reason he got into comedy. And there’s a comic in Mexico, Franco Escamilla, same thing. And they’re like, ‘We want to be the ones to bring you to our country.’ And I’m like, ‘Please do.’”
In the meantime, he can do right by all those friends. Toronto standup veteran Kenny Robinson’s monthly show helped launch Peters; now he will open for Peters at the arena. “Kenny never got his shot,” noted the star, whose gratitude as he returns to town extends well beyond his social circle.
“I am completely humbled by the support of my city and my country, no less that this kid who dealt with a lot of things (that) made him think his country did not like him, to have the people still come out after all this time over and over, it means a lot.”
