I saw myself for the first time as a child of immigrants, rather than one who mistakenly ended up with the wrong genetic sample. My take on brownness had shifted from sarcastic and ironic to an earnest embrace.
I told a true story about being part of the team that launched Al Jazeera America and how we were constantly told to change the name of the network, because a lot of people in the United States thought we were a terrorist group.
“No! Why should we change who we are? Why should we bend to the ignorance of other people? We are always the ones being asked to change!” I declared onstage. There wasn’t a punchline for that one.
One day, I told the crowd, I was outside of St. Malachy’s Church, in New York’s theater district, shooting exteriors as part of a feature we were doing on the chapel. An older white guy came up to us and asked what we were doing. I told him about the story we were working on and that it was for Al Jazeera America.
“Oh, Al Jazeera. Nice to see you guys doing something peaceful for once.”
The audience got a good laugh out of that.
I added, “Not with that attitude!” while scrunching into the microphone.
When I walked off the stage, I felt funny. Actually funny. As in the way a comedian is supposed to feel when they finish a set.
Following the first Big Brown show of the year, which was early in the winter, I got some unexpected external validation on my way out the door. An older brown woman, who looked to be in her fifties, came up to me in the lobby after the show.
“I’ve seen you before,” she said sternly. “You’ve gotten much better.” Then she strolled away without another word. A true brown moment, where even a compliment feels like a criticism.
This time it was Wesley who was standing by the front door, ready to offer me my validation. When I finally snaked my way around the throngs of people headed for the exit, I saw that Ron, Susmita and Somnath’s son, was standing next to her. He was just finishing college after managing a successful state representative campaign. This was the latest of several instances in which Ron had come down from Connecticut to visit. Sometimes he needed a place to stay if he was interviewing for a job or had an event to attend. I’ve even had the opportunity to offer him advice. “From an older Deb to a younger Deb,” I once said to him before catching myself. “I’ve never had the chance to say that before!”
Ron was the first family member to come see me perform in person other than my brother, Sattik. I was relieved that the Comic Strip show went so well because the first set of mine he saw could not have been worse. We dragged him to Brooklyn on a freezing night for a show called Bushwick Bears well before the Comic Strip show. Every single joke bombed. Even a newsy joke I had written for that night was met with such silence that I had to follow up with, “So nobody heard about this?” In the immediate aftermath of walking off the stage, I vowed never to do comedy ever again, which sometimes happens. Ever the politico, Ron gamely said he enjoyed himself.
While I was heartened by the new Deb family member in attendance, I felt the absence of an older member of the lineage who wasn’t. I wished Shyamal was there. He was, of course, still in India. I knew he wouldn’t have understood any of the jokes and would probably have clapped in all the wrong places, but he would have been so excited nonetheless. No, he would have been proud.
My father wasn’t totally absent from the evening, though. I had accidentally given him a taste of my comedic stylings the afternoon before the show. See, I typically write out my set before each show because I like to have notes to go over before I hit the stage. Then I’ll email them to myself.
Except this time, when I walked inside the club, I noticed the email wasn’t in my inbox. Digging around in my sent messages, I found that Shyamal—not Sopan—had received my set notes. Until this point, my father had a minimal idea of what my comedy is all about. Of course, this set featured plenty of material about my parents, including the story about Shyamal finding out about