Russell Peters - Deconstructing Stereotypes Through Comedy

The Canadian comedian Russell Peters is famous for his ironic performances in which he confronts his racially diverse audience with stereotypical associations of different nationalities. His jokes at first seem to be very racist and offensive towards the different nationalities that he deals with in his performances. But since he often addresses his audience directly and asks which nationalities are present at the time of performance, he shows that his comedy is open to everyone and that he does not joke about others behind their backs. It seems that the secret of his worldwide overwhelming success is that he does not only joke at the expense of other nations’ stereotypes but also about his own Indo-Canadian cultural background. By making fun of Indian people living in diaspora in Canada and thus of his own people, he ridicules other stereotypes at the same time, because it seems as if every nation in the world is depicted in other people’s minds by stereotypes. This technique of Peters supports the deconstruction of stereotypes even though at first they seem to be reinforced by him. By making them such obvious stereotypes, he makes his audience understand that they should not think in such categories and that not all citizens of a nation or every immigrant to another nation are the same.

During my research of online videos of Russell Peters’s performances, one especially caught my attention: in “Immigrant parents” Peters deals with these parents and their way of treating their children in Canada. In this performance he tells his audience about the stereotypical ways in which Canadian immigrants supposedly treat their children. For example, Ukrainian immigrants are supposed to hit their children with a cabbage roll, whereas Chinese immigrants supposedly hit their children in the style of Kung Fu. According to Peters, the stereotype of White people in Canada is however, that they do not hit their children at all. But since everyone else in Canada seems to hit their children, he advises White Canadians to do so, too, so that the White Canadian children do not feel left out and become “social outcasts” themselves. Everyone in the audience should be able to understand the meaning behind this technique. On the one hand, sadly but truly, everybody must know that it cannot be true that no White Canadian ever hits their children. So this must be a stereotype created by people outside the Canadian society. On the other hand, Peters even goes as far as to turn the table insofar as he lets the White Canadian children become the “social outcasts” of the Canadian society. He gives an example of immigrant children other than White who meet a White child on the playground for the first time. Their reaction is that they were curious to actually see a White child because they have been told so much them. This seems to be an intended inversion of what probably usually happens when White children see a dark-skinned person for the first time in their life.

Another performance by Russell Peters deals with the assumption that “the whole world is mixing”. In this performance Peters tries to convince his audience that not far from the present time, all human beings in the world will be of the same skin colour, namely “beige”, because all races will be mixed to an extent that differences in skin colour will have disappeared. This reminds me of a computer created picture of “the new face of America”, that appeared in the Time magazine in 1993. The woman’s face was created by the mixing of physical features of Anglo-Saxon, Middle Eastern, African, Asian, Southern European, and Latino people (Spickard, 12f).

In his performance, Peters suggests that it is not worth waiting for a mixing by chance but that people should start mixing now. That would lead to possible results of mixed children from different nationalities or cultures, such as “Hollapinos” (Hollander and Phillippino), “Icecubes” (Icelander and Cuban), “Hinjews” (Hindu and Jewish), or “Freek” (French and Greek). This mixing of races and people of different cultural backgrounds can be seen as a possible outcome of worldwide migration processes.

Russell Peters whole world's mixing

Fieldtrip to the Stó:lō First Nation Community

As part of my Stó:lō History class at the University of the Fraser Valley we went on a field trip to the Stó:lō Nation community in Chilliwack, B.C., which consists of different First Nations tribes who live in the Fraser Valley. The Stó:lō Nation therefore also call themselves “the People of the River”. In the 1960s the Department of Indian Affairs grouped twenty four different tribes living in the Fraser Valley between Fort Langley and Yale into the East Fraser District Council and in 1994 the Stó:lō Nation was finally formed on the agreement of all tribes included. The Stó:lō Nation is a facility in Chilliwack that serves different purposes, such as a daycare centre, an educational centre, an elders’ lodge, and a gallery. They describe themselves as an organization that focuses on the “social and economic development within the Stó:lō community through facilities and programs in the areas of education, human resource development, early childhood and youth services, health, elderly care, and social development”.

During our fieldtrip to the Stó:lō Nation our class was taken on a guided tour of the site by our teacher, who is a member of the Stó:lō Nation herself. First, we were invited into the longhouse of the nation, which did not have any windows and only small chimneys in the roof to release the smoke of the two fires that were burning inside. Longhouses used to be the homes of the families of a tribe and could literally become longer when they were extended for more families to move in. The longhouse on the grounds of the Stó:lō Nation in Chilliwack is still in use for traditional ceremonies that take place throughout the year. Our class was lucky to be invited to a singing and dancing performance in this longhouse during the fieldtrip. A member of the Stó:lō Nation drummed and sang while traditionally dressed teenage girls were dancing barefoot on the loamy ground. One of the girls was my teacher’s daughter, which exemplifies that the transmission of traditions still plays an important role among the members of the Stó:lō Nation. Furthermore, we watched a dancing performance of young boys and girls, in which they represented the traditional gender roles within the Stó:lō Nation. While the boys were in charge of representing the men’s duty of fishing, the girls demonstrated the Stó:lō women’s duty of collecting berries. Again, the drummer was proud to announce that one of the young boys was his son.

Similarly to this, a woman told us a traditional Stó:lō story, which had been passed on from generation to generation. Since she still knows many traditional stories, she can pass them on to today’s younger generation so that the traditions and the history of the tribe do not get lost. I suppose that in the educational centre of the Stó:lō Nation, children are taught about their history and also about the traditional dances, songs, and stories. This seems to be a successful way to revive the Stó:lō culture, which had been suppressed for several hundred years by the European colonizers. After being pushed to the margin of society by the colonizers and being taken away from their families and sent to residential schools as children in order to be assimilated, there finally seems to be a way for First Nations to revitalize their culture and to pass it on to their children. During the time of colonization, the First Nations of Canada were forced to live on reserves and therefore had to live in exile within their own country.