Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Russell Peters: Deported’ On Amazon Prime, Where Mumbai Is Still Bombay And Other Outdated Notions Are The Rule

Russell Peters, a Canadian-born comedian living in the United States, became one of the first stand-ups to go global thanks to YouTube and hasn’t looked back, selling out arenas and raking in money. Peters makes the jump from Netflix to Amazon Prime for his newest hour, which he filmed in Mumbai, India, and for reasons we may never find out in the hour, he titled it Deported.

RUSSELL PETERS: DEPORTED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Who is deporting Peters? And to where? Not back to Toronto, where the 49-year-old was born. Certainly not to Mumbai, India, where Peters filmed this hour in a dome called NSCI Stadium with a seating capacity of 8,000.
And where he opens up by confiding to his audience: “I know it’s going to sound strange, but it’s good to be home,” adding: “I feel like I don’t have to do things that I have to do back home to keep up with white people. I can just be a comfortable brown man here.”
Peters made his fortune, landing on the Forbes list of richest stand-ups multiple times in the 2010s, through this salesmanship of his brand as relatable brown man for the masses. Even if neither the facts nor the stats nor even the jokes really add up. The stadium is a theater-sized arena. And he still refers to Mumbai as Bombay, even.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Much of his relatability, in fact, comes from his long-running tactic of stereotyping and insulting his fans in the audience based on the specifics of their South Asian heritage, or in Mumbai, just on their names and appearances alone. Peters mocks one guy in the front row almost immediately for having a name that sounds like “Pre-Ugly,” then points out another guy dressed all in white, who Peters describes as a man-sized sperm. So yeah, Peters wants to be Don Rickles, maybe. His fans love it. So he keeps doing it.
Memorable Jokes: Peters does turn the heat back onto himself, too, before too long, with a prolonged bit about how he had gained weight since his last trip to India, how he’s mad at some of his haters for insulting him the way he would’ve liked to, and his misadventures with his doctor in diagnosing his problems. He circles back around later with his doctor to find out he’d also been living with a broken nose for years, sustained from his longtime love of boxing.

Our Take: Back when he made an original docuseries for Netflix in 2013, Russell Peters Vs. The World, Peters talked in one of the episodes about how he believed happier comedians made for bad comedy. “What the hell are we so happy about? We’re not here to spread joy. We’re spreading joy through our misery,” he said. “The more things you have going wrong in your personal life, the more relatable you are to everyone else, because everyone else has these problems.”
So diving into his own medical issues, whether it’s thyroid issues or acid reflux, turning 50, or growing up with immigrant parents, can have a lot of resonance.
It’s disappointing, then, that so much of his material is juvenile at best, homophobic at worst.
Turning an online insult of him as “thicker than a Snicker” into a hyperbolically glowing description of his dick is one thing. Warping his father’s pronunciation of “esophagus” so he can repeatedly reply “I have no phagus in me” is just unnecessarily dumb.
I’m not saying Russell Peters is homophobic. But “Russell Peters” the onstage comedian is most definitely, stridently, woefully afraid of being perceived as gay and more than willing to feed into anyone else’s fears of homosexuality. You want to make light of your doctor scheduling an endoscopy appointment by taking it too literally and believing that the scope is going into your end, sure, why not make a joke of that as an initial reaction. Peters, however, refuses to let this dumb-guy schtick go in his re-enactment of the bit, as he tells us how big of a scene he made at the front desk when he shows up for the endoscopy, and how paranoid he reacts every step of the way. At a certain point, Peters has stopped being the butt of his own joke, so to speak.
He’s well past that point when, following the procedure, he doesn’t develop an anticipated sore throat. His go-to joke for this? “I must have the throat of a gay man!…Here I am with all this wasted talent! I coulda been guzzling dick all day!” He acts out said guzzling, then smirks in a further aside: “the envy of a community.”

It’s a shame, not just because he doesn’t explore his gay paranoia for more than cheap laughs at others expense, but also because it points out how little he has to say about much of anything.
He spends about eight minutes delivering generic relationship advice that amounts to telling men to fake their orgasms, too, to get out of having kids.
Unlike Hari Kondabolu, who offers clever and insightful observations into multi-racial diversity on a local and global scale, Peters simply feels bad for white people for “dwindling” in numbers and jokingly leans into white nationalism for the heck of it. “If white people go missing, who are we going to blame?”
And when he attempts to take a look at himself and his own cultural ignorance regarding his Indian heritage, Peters cannot help but reduce it all to running racial joke based solely on deliberately mis-hearing his driver’s name.
Our Call: SKIP IT. In TV and movies, criticism these days talks a lot about fan service. Peters is all about that, too. But in stand-up comedy, we have another term for fan service. It’s hack. And no stand-up really wants to be a hack. If you go back to that 2013 Netflix docuseries, you’ll see that even Peters doesn’t want to be known as a hack. And yet. Here we still are.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Russell Peters: Deported on Amazon Prime Video