Peters’ skeeters
My friends and I were recuperating from a night of manic Bandra club-hopping with garlic bread and omelettes when we spied Russell Peters with a clutch of female admirers. He’d complained in the past that his management wasn’t giving him time to develop new material. The new show he taped in California included too many routines you’ve already seen.
So he’s camped out in Bombay right now writing for his first India tour — Bombay and Delhi early next year. You need new material and you need material that resonates with the audience. ‘I’ve been on the road so long that every city looks the same to me, man,’ he said. ‘It’s a hotel. There are Indians everywhere, it’s clean, this could be Singapore.’ Peters is in the five star bubble, no mosquitoes. Anuvab ran into Peters earlier at Indigo and was quoted in the Mumbai Mirror, which is much less criminal than how I expected Pal to hit the tabloids 
A friend tells me the stand-up scene in Bombay is nascent, which is maybe why you import Shazia Mirza. Comedy is alive and well, but not Western-style standup.
We didn’t thank Peters for being a bad-ass comedian. It was three in the morning, it was maudlin, he had girls waiting.
on Friday, December 1st, 2006, 4:14 pm in Bombay, Humor › 
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Who were these girls? Comedy junkies for a comedian who hasnt even performed here? Now that’s fame.
The only thing remotely close to stand up comedy show was the great India Comedy Show. Johnny Lever used to do some stand up, I am not sure if he is still into it. As for Peters being popular in India, like everything else it is easy to get pirated copies of his routines.
I’m surprised; most of my india contacts hadn’t even heard of him until I mentioned it just now. And I agree; he has groupies already? That’s incredible.
Lots of South Bombay kids went to school in the US. Besides, the man is funny. So groupies should be easy to find.
Despite his apparently hairy back!
I suspect that youtube has made a star of this man in India as elsewhere in the diaspora!
At his show in New York a fortnight back he mentioned that he was about to head to India to hang out, but that he wouldn’t be performing for a while.
During that show, he only repeated one small bit of previously aired material.
Interesting to me was how many people responded when he did the “Any [fill in nationality of your choice] here tonight?”…. wide variety of Asian countries represented, Iranians, Syrians, at least one Bahraini, and even Armenians.
He closed the show musing on how vapid Bollywood actresses sound when interviewed about their roles, and how he’d love to see them in porn flicks, and finally how he’d use Indian music to the score these movies.