Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
His mantle holds a Gemini, Peabody and Emmy as one of Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Comics of All Time.
This Saturday night, Russell Peters cracks up MGM National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland.
“It’s my act that I’ll be doing, but you never know what’s going to happen,” Peters told WTOP. “I talk to the crowd a lot, so it’s one of those things where I don’t know what’s going to happen as much as you know don’t what’s going to happen. It’s a surprise for all of us. Let’s just say if you’re sensitive, I don’t want you there.”
Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1970, Peters grew up watching all of the comedy greats.
“It was George Carlin, Don Rickles, Cheech & Chong, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin,” Peters said. “You gotta figure though in the ’70s and ’80s when I was [enjoying] comedy, we were listening to comedy before we were watching it. We were listening to it on records or on the radio. Watching it wasn’t much of an option until the mid-’80s.”
In 1989, he began performing standup comedy at age 19 at open-mic nights in Toronto and spent the next 15 years honing his craft at clubs in Canada and the U.K. In 2004, he earned acclaim for his CTV special “Comedy Now!” and became the first comedian to sell-out Toronto’s Air Canada Centre in 2007. Peters went on to set attendance records at Madison Square Garden, the Sydney Opera House and London’s O2 Arena.
On TV, he delivered the Comedy Central special “Outsourced” (2006) and the Showtime specials “Red, White and Brown” (2008) and “The Green Card Tour” (2010) before becoming the first comedian to release a Netflix original comedy special with “Notorious” (2013). He followed it up with a second special for the streaming giant called “Almost Famous” (2016).
“It was a big deal,” Peters said. “They came to me like, ‘Hey, we want your next special.’ I was like, ‘Great, I’ll sell it to you.’ They were like, ‘No, no, no, we want to produce it.’ I go, ‘I produce my own specials.’ They were like, ‘No, we’ll give you the money, we want to own it.’ I go, ‘Huh? What about the DVDs?’ They go, ‘There’s no DVDs.’ This was 2012, so I’m like, ‘What do you mean there’s no DVDs?’ … They were gonna stop doing [DVD mailers].”
His pre-pandemic global tour, “The Deported World Tour,” was seen by over 400,000 fans in 40 cities across 20 countries and culminated in the Amazon Prime Video stand-up special “Russell Peters Deported” in January 2020.
“I’m one of the lucky ones who gets to go all over the place,” Peters said. “I go to places that most comics never will go to, and if you hear a comic saying they went to that country, they didn’t do it for the people, they did it for like an army base. … I performed in Croatia and it was sold out. … I did shows in Lithuania and I was like, ‘How do they know me in Lithuania?’ I do Finland every tour. You don’t think about going to Finland, but Finland’s kind of dope.'”
He expanded into TV series like “The Indian Detective” (2017), which set a Canadian viewership record for Bell Media/CTV and was released globally on Netflix. He’s also acted in movies like “Source Code” (2011), “New Year’s Eve” (2011), “Chef” (2014), “The Jungle Book” (2016), “Clifford The Big Red Dog” (2021) and “Velma” (2023).
“It’s OK; it’s a lot more work than I’m prepared to do,” Peters said. “I’ve been doing standup for 34 years, and I make my money that way, then they ask you, ‘Hey, do you want to do this movie or TV show,’ and a movie will take you a month and a half to two months out of your life, and the money you make in those two months is not even equivalent of what you make in one weekend doing standup, so you really have to want to do that movie.”
In his spare time, Peters stays busy raising his two kids and regularly practices hip-hop DJing on turntables. In fact, he and rapper Lord Finesse are co-hosting the DMC USA National DJ Finals this Sunday in New York.
He also has a blue belt in jiu-jitsu, so he could kick your butt if you get out of line at his standup show.
“I’m about to be a purple belt, let’s not get it twisted,” Peters said. “I’ve got four stripes on my blue, but if I just got my a** in the gym more, I would have had my purple belt about a year and a half ago, but that’s the way it goes.”
Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
