This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

20th October 2007

Russell Peters has a beef with Chinese people. And Italians. And Arabs. And Jews. And blacks. Come to think of it, there are few ethnic or national or racial groups that are spared a tongue-lashing by this acerbic Canadian comic. The thing is, he does it with such verve and obvious irony that audience members can’t help but laugh – even if they’re the butt of the joke.

Having said which, there were one or two stony faces projected onto the big screen behind Peters when he performed at the Cape Town International Convention Centre last week (before moving on to Johannesburg and Durban); faces that belonged to members of one of the groups under attack, who were not amused by the levity of the stand-up comedian’s approach to suicide bombing, body hair or arranged marriages.

When I went to see Peters perform, by the time he appeared on stage the audience had been well revved up. DJ “Starting from Scratch” set the mood, mixing golden oldies with heavy beats on his electronic turntables. Then it was the turn of Stuart Taylor, who shared with a sympathetic audience his frustration at empty gigs in Jo’burg during September, when two world cups were on and it was Ramadan.

Taylor, a quintessential Capetonian, expressed his surprise at all the changes that had taken place while he was away (“now you even have white ushers!”) and launched into a diatribe on the preparations for 2010: the sight of octogenarians from Sea Point in Zimmer Frames toyi-toyiing to protest against the new stadium, or the unenviable task of the highly paid Carlos Pereira (“give him the money, he’ll be unemployable after 2010”). TV show 7de Laan invoked Taylor’s ire for suggesting that “white girls in their twenties don’t pomp” and that “only coloured girls have children out of wedlock”.

Then it was time for the main event. South Africans seeing Peters perform for the first time (this reviewer was one of them) might think that he has just done his homework well and so knows how to play the race card for laughs in this country. To a degree that is true, and Peters, who was here in 2003, has researched South Africa well enough to do pretty good versions of local accents. But it soon becomes clear that playing up assumptions about race, class, and culture is what Peters does best.

He grew up in an increasingly multi-cultural Canada, the son of parents who had emigrated from India. Peters’ ambivalent attitude to his Indian heritage forms the core of his routines – something which, he admits to his audience, caused him no small amount of anxiety when he went on tour to India for the first time last year. “That’s when I discovered: I’m not actually that Indian!” Fortunately, his imitation Indian pronunciation, gestures, mannerisms and speech patterns went down a treat.

Those in the front row were soon regretting their position, as Peters picked on them throughout (“a black girl sitting between two Italians – what are you, Eritrea?”). There were a few gay jokes, but Peters diverted accusations of homophobia by talking about Arabophobia: “It’s the media’s fault. They make Arabs look crazy. But you know what? Fundamentalists are the rednecks of the Arab world. Over there they call them ‘brown trash’!”

Much of Peters’ material was ad-libbed, picking up on details he elicited from the audience. Every now and then the energy level dipped as he searched for a new line of offence, but his bravura performance kept the crowd attentive throughout.