"I'd gotten used to being yelled at outside the home for my skin colour, so as a kid I just kind of assumed my mom was yelling at me for the same reason – for not being white."Īlthough Peters claims to be a "mama's boy" who shares more traits with his mom than anyone else in the family, his relationship with his father and elder brother were clearly the most significant in his formative years, and still are. Peters's experience of racism extended to a fascinating childhood misconception about his own mother who, although Anglo-Indian, had fairer skin than Russell and was often assumed to be white. Adding insult to injury was his undiagnosed ADD/ADHD, for which he was sent to "retard school." Eventually he took up boxing, successfully crushed a few bullies, and "from that time on … had a much easier time of things in school." Like many South Asians who grew up in Canada during the seventies and eighties, Peters was continually bullied and called a "Paki," which he refers to as his "N" word. … People think it needs to be qualified by something else."Īs befits someone who claims to be obsessed with the proper use of language, Peters has built his career on this hyphenation – which isn't to say it was easy. "There's always that hyphen," he writes, "I guess that's what happens when you're the first at something. There's also the matter of being the first Canadian-born, Brampton-raised, South-Asian stand-up comedian in the world. "Many people see me as a celebrity," he writes, "but I definitely don't think of myself as one." There are many reasons for this, one of which must be the more than 20 years it took him to get there.
He now performs to sold-out stadiums around the world and has more movie and television deals than most comedians can be bothered to envy.Ĭall Me Russell, we learn that nobody is more surprised by his success than Peters himself.
Unless you're whiter than Don Cherry's hair, or have been living in a tree with squirrels for the past five years, you ought to know that Russell Peters is a comedian from Brampton, Ont., who struggled to make a living for 16 years until 2005, when an unauthorized YouTube clip from his stand-up show turned him into an international comedy sensation.
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