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.
This provocative kind of comedy probably works well for Russell Peters because he is a second generation immigrant and was born in Canada and he therefore enjoys a certain distance to first generation immigrants and members of diaspora like his parents, who still have a strong accent and are therefore probably not as accepted in the society as he is.
Spickard, Paul. Almost All Aliens. Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity. New York: Routledge, 2007.
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