Father Knows Best

He's been in the comedy game 24 years, and now Indo-Canadian comic Russell Peters' legions of fans regularly fill up arenas, rather than the backroom and basement comedy clubs in which he started out. Peters is getting set for his second 'arena tour' of Australia, but says to sharpen up his skills before playing to thousands of people, he regularly gets right back to where he started. “I go on a club tour before I do the arena run to prepare. I tighten up the material, make it work, and it takes me back to my roots, you know? Because an arena is not a place to try new things out. People have spent hard-earned money, they don't want to see you 'working it out'. It's like paying top ticket for watching a boxer spar.”

The last few years for Peters, 43, have been eventful. He was married, got divorced – “I was married for a good twelve or fourteen months,” he deadpans – and he has a two-year-old daughter, Crystianna. He says his divorce from wife Monica was comparatively easy to get through because it “never became a contentious situation, never got ugly”, but the one game-changer has been leaving his daughter behind to jet off on tour. However, that doesn't mean that Peters – famous for talking about his family on stage, particularly his dad – will be trotting out a swathe of parenting gags.

“I am one of those guys who, when I hear comics talk about their kids, I'm like, 'Shut the fuck up, nobody wants to hear about your kid.' So I made a conscious decision not to be that guy. I just want to keep my stuff as relateable as possible, whether you have kids or not. To most people, talking about having kids is like somebody Instagramming their dinner – just stop, I don't give a shit about what you ate.”

Peters says the one big thing that has changed the comedy landscape in the last quarter-century is the internet. He first grabbed the mic in 1989, at the end of the 'comedy boom'. “Nobody gave a shit about comedy at that time,” he suggests. “Older comics would just be bitter and mad about the way things used to be: 'Oh, you guys don't know how it used to be, we used to have limos and private planes and cocaine.' I didn't care about any of that. Those are never things I wanted to get into comedy for. So I came up at a time where nobody was paying any attention to comedy so you could figure it out at your own pace and there were no consequences. There was no YouTube, no social media. So you had to put in more time back in the day and work on the craft.

“Now you've got kids who've been doing comedy a year or two putting their stuff on YouTube and they get a couple of hits and they think they're famous, but they've not put any time into it. A lot of people get into the game and see guys like me who are making $20 million a year and say 'I wanna do that.' I never went to see Eddie Murphy as a kid and said 'I wanna do that.' I just said 'I'm gonna do comedy and maybe if I'm lucky ten people will show up.' There was never an end game for me. It was a thing I just
wanted to do.”

WHAT: Russell Peters    
WHEN & WHERE: Tuesday 5 March, Perth Arena WA