Missed Translations - Sopan Deb
Prologue
Shambo, the thing is that if you do not have peace at home, you can work hard or whatever, but you’ve got to have someone to come back to,” Atish said. “You remember I used to watch my favorite television show, Cheers? And there was that song called—”
“You want to go where everybody knows your name, yeah,” I interrupted.
“So this is the thing. Where you are comfortable, where you feel good: That’s the thing that you guys didn’t have. Like if I’m away, as soon as I get out of home, let’s say fifteen minutes, I get a phone call. ‘Where are you?’” Atish said, looking at Sima, his wife of more than thirty years. “Sometimes I get mad. She always worries about me. But that’s the thing: I know inside that I’m wanted. That someone is missing me. Someone wants me home. So that’s the thing: You have to have love in your life.”
One
“I’d like to say a few words about race relations.”
I grabbed the mic and locked in. It was January 2018, on the cusp of my thirtieth birthday, and I was prowling back and forth onstage at the Comic Strip Live, a comedy club on New York City’s Upper East Side. I was absolutely killing it, man. A rare feeling.
Stand-up comedy crowds can be warm. I’m prepared for them to be icy. Used to it, really. But this one was on fire. Bodies were squeezed into every seat just looking for an excuse to laugh. I felt larger than life, like Mario after eating a mushroom or LeBron dunking on a fast break.
The Comic Strip is an institution. Seinfeld. Chappelle. Sandler. Murphy. Rock. Every comic who has made it had, at some point, gone through this place. The venue is deep and cavernous, with seats crammed at long tables strewn throughout the room. Behind the stage is a familiar brick wall. Somewhere between the main stage and the front entrance, out of sight of the crowd, is a green room for performers, which is more like a green broom closet. In some parts of the venue, it’s hard to see the performer. When you’re the one telling jokes, you can’t see shit.
My set was part of the Big Brown Comedy Hour, a recurring show that Dean Obeidallah and Maysoon Zayid, New York City–based comics, started in 2009 as a way of putting a spotlight on up-and-coming comics of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent. These shows are always packed to the brim with, well, brown people who rarely get to see shows like this. When brown crowds are in, they come to laugh.
After seven years of doing comedy, getting the room to laugh because of something I constructed still gives me a high. When a punchline really lands—I mean, really—it is the kind of moment I want to freeze, store in a jar, and put on a shelf forever. Or pour into one of those Pensieves from Harry Potter.
But laughter is fleeting, and you have to keep things fresh. That night, I decided to test out some new material—a seasonally appropriate bit about the holidays:
My favorite Christmas tradition growing up was asking my mom what the meaning of Christmas was. Every year, we’d be like, “Hey Mom! What’s the meaning of Christmas?” She’d go, “Oh, it’s when Jesus died on the cross.” We’d say, “Oh. Why did Jesus die on the cross?” She’d answer, “It’s because Jesus became a carpenter instead of a DOCTOR!”
The bit played on a tired South Asian trope that Indian kids are supposed to become doctors. It didn’t quite slay, but I heard the laughter ripple across the room. What I didn’t hear was my own bullshit.
For one thing, I grew up Hindu. My family didn’t exactly have Christmas traditions, which explains why I confused Christmas and Easter. The only traditions of any kind we had were family squabbles and seething resentment that split our family into warring factions. What I knew about healthy families at Christmas was what I saw in pop culture. Think “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” or Miracle on 34th Street or Tim Allen’s The Santa Clause. Yes, even the last one.
The best stand-up comics deliver searing honesty to the audience. They’re supposed to expose and clarify truths about the world as they see it. They heighten hypocrisies and spotlight inequalities, and they do it all for the crowd’s amusement. Someone once framed it for me this way: The greats tell the audience what is funny rather than try