Raagz
Raagz will see riches. It’s only a matter of time. Reason being: A few minutes around him and he’ll have you cracking up. The first time I saw him do standup he did a joke I could never forget. It went “My birthday is November 14th, so I dont get to celebrate Valentine’s day, because I’m reminded of my parents having sex.” Need I say more?
What makes something funny?
I think everything is funny. In people, insecurities are funny. Everyday happenings like just the small stuff are funny. Observational shit is really funny to people, but everything is funny. You could take prison and find laughter, even though it’s not going to be as funny as much as the outside world, but there’s funny shit going on in there. They find time to laugh at shit, so you could find humor in anything. Whether it’s someone accidentally calling you when they’re drunk, or having sex, or you typing “L-O-L” and not even laughing. That’s funny. Sitting around smoking pot watching COPS all day, is funny, which some people do.
How’d you get into stand-up?
I always wanted to do it, I just never had the balls to do it. Growing up, you don’t even tell people that because you’re afraid of their reaction. They might shit on you and tell you “you’re not that funny.” I always tried to make people laugh, growing up no matter what age it was and I used to be a chubby kid and that was my weapon and also how I made friends. I could always humor to make a situation better. Whether I was locked up, like I said before or whether I’m on vacation.
I always knew I wanted to be a comic and one day I was like “Fuck it, I’m at the lowest point.” I was engaged to this girl for five years. I was in the regular corporate world as an applications developer working with Cobalt CSCS, mainframe computer languages and I said “Not for this shit,” and let go of everything at this point. I said “I might become a bum like this but I’m just going to go out there and get on stage and do it with all my might.”
One day I got the balls to do it. Obviously everyone sucks their first time. Most people suck their first four years doing it, but from that first night I knew that’s what I wanted to do. From the minute I got on stage, even though I sucked, I mean I got a couple of laughs I remember, but it was the most amazing feeling in the world being able to control people’s emotions and make them laugh. I didn’t make them laugh too much that first show, but I knew from there.
Where was your first show?
Gotham Comedy Club in New York City. That was the first comedy club gig I did but I had done an Indian event nine months prior to that. I knew the promoter and I had my friend ask him if I could perform and he said I could. I did a hotel Indian gig but you can’t judge a mainstream comedy routine by their standards. It was a huge audience, about 500 people and I said to myself “What the hell did I get myself into?” and then I told myself, “I drank enough to handle this.” I got up there trashed out of my mind and I had a pre-arranged skit and I didn’t mess it up too bad, so it went well. It wasn’t “real comedy” as people would say. I knew what the older Indian people would laugh at so I spit that out there.
What’s the difference between knowing your audience and being a good comedian?
Knowing your audience is being a comedian. If I go out there and I see twenty Asians and I’m not talking about Indians, I have to adapt to that. Most humans are the same. Laughter is universally the same for everybody. Jokes are funny to people. The only difference to me is if I go and do a private event like an Indian event, these people have not been exposed to comedy too much because they’re new to this country. They want to hear the inside jokes about their culture. I can make a fifty-year-old Indian lady laugh at an inside joke but she won’t laugh hearing me talk about vibrators that spin. At a mainstream show I can say “Can you believe they made a fucking vibrator that spins? How can I compete with that? What do I have to do throw myself in a ceiling fan?” You can’t say that to an Indian audience, but I can say how her husband is addicted to tea or that I gurantee she eats Taco Bell every week—she finds that funny. And it’s new to them because the culture is new to the country so the comedy is something they never have the chance to enjoy in this country at least. Sure there’s comedy back home, sure there’s entertainment, but not the American concept of it. Like I said, “Indians love Taco Bell,” they don’t know that in India, but audiences here want to hear those types of jokes, because they love to talk about their culture, and it’s understandable. They don’t have any other medium to do it.
Young Indian people I can do the same jokes I’d do for young Asian people, young White people or young Black people. When I do a show for Black people I can be a little more raw, but you also have a little more pressure because that audience is not going to sit there and take some bullshit.
I did a private event the other day. I did an hour for this guy and his family. He kept saying, “I’m going to pay you extra.” After the gig he was like can you go upstairs and entertain my kids for ten minutes?
After I performed for him for an hour I’m upstairs with these kids on my shoulders, swinging this kids around cause I needed that check real bad, my rent was due the next week. Sometimes this is the way it works with those private gigs. I have to give those people what they want. Corporate gigs are the best. They pay really well.
Some people see you as an Indian Dice Clay. How would you describe your style?
A lot of people have said that to me. I love Dice from before, but not anymore obviously, he fell off now. I’m still learning so much. I’ve only been doing it for about five years now. I’d say I really started learning a lot within the last year. I love doing the political stuff, the Kramer shit is funny to me. There was only one black guy that was actually happy that night and that was OJ because it got the pressure off him that week.
I love doing impressions. I used to impersonate the croc hunter until he passed. I can’t do that anymore because the poor guy passed. I love observational humor. I love that we’re all insecure and we can tell by technology. We all have ourselves on our buddy lists. How weird is that? We’ve all looked at our own profiles. Junk mail shows you how low people are. I’ve seen junk mail where the subject said, “I’m Pregnant.” I love all styles of comedy.
What’s the toughest audience?
One time I walked into a gig just off the words “we’ll pay you decently.” It was a city gig and it ended up being a Chippendales club. I walk into the Chippendales club with no idea what to expect. I get on the stage the promoters are like “You’ll do your fifteen minutes up front, and then we’re gonna bring on the strippers. You’ll be alright just get these women into it.” Meanwhile I’m trying to do jokes and these women are like “Take your clothes off!” I’m telling them “I don’t got no six pack. I don’t got no sock on my cock.” The whole time I felt like shit.
Another hard gig I did was senior citizens. One guy was in a wheel chair, with the oxygen mask on. It was hard to make them laugh because they’re old. What amI going to do, Slavery jokes? They’re old White people, like 80 years old. I’m doing jokes about morning wood and these people are not getting it. I’m telling myself, “They don’t get morning wood anymore, you can’t do that joke.”
Tell me about the corporate gigs.
It’s hard cause I’m a dirty comic and a lot of the jokes and pranks I put online have curses in them. Corporate gigs have to be clean. I do have a tape where I don’t curse. I can do a clean act anytime I want. I don’t portray that online, so people’s first impressions of me is that I can’t do a clean act. That’s frustrating because I can do a corporate gig and make these people laugh. I can do my Bill Clinton impressions for them and they’ll have a good time. When you go to my website it’s hard for them to see that, so I don’t book as many corporate gigs as I’d like to. I do get the Indian computer consultant guys in the Indian community. Hopefully more corporate gigs will come. Mostly I do club gigs. If I open up for a bigger comic I’ll do theatre gigs, and that’s just based on meeting people.
I opened up for this guy Russell Peters, all around the country. We did 2000 seat theatres, all of them sold out. We did the Apollo, the Apollo in Chicago, Miami, North Carolina, and Atlanta among other places. It was amazing. It’s so easy to make people in a theatre laugh, compared to a club. Say you have ten people show up to the club on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, it’s going to be harder to make them laugh. Out of 2000 people even if 100 are laughing, it just carries through so much. When you’re in a club you’re in these people’s faces. You interact with these people. In a theatre it’s so humongus, it’s amazing just to see that. I was signing autographs and I’m nobody, so that felt really good. Russell Peters is a huge star. He lives in Beverly Hills and makes a crazy amount of money for an hour of work. He let me open up and I was getting paid for him for twenty minutes. Just to get a glimpse of the life of a real successful comic was really amazing. Just to travel all these places and see what groupies can be like was amazing. Once you go on a tour like this and you see how crazy and fun it can be and you come home to your shitty, normal life it can be drag, but you keep it in your heart and your mind. I saw how it was and I know I can get back there one day and I hope to continue to open up for some big shots and continue to build a fan base so I can book my own shows. It’s a dream. You got to dream in this world. If you don’t dream you won’t get anywhere.
http://www.myspace.com/raagz
http://www.raagz.com