Russell Peters, an infamous 43-year-old comedian from Toronto of Indian origin made $21 million last year itself through his stand up acts. Russell or ‘Russaaalllll’ has now started targeting the current state of DJ-ing (at his Notorious Tour) as a base of his jokes. Ironically he started his career as a DJ, which never really worked out & took up stand-up comedy which led him to the pinnacle of his career.
In an interesting interview with HuffPost Comedy, Peters talked about how boxing and DJ-ing influenced his comedy.
Here are some snippets that bear importance..
HPC: I loved how in your Netflix special, you start off by complimenting the DJ for actually DJing instead of waving his arms in the air.
RP: I DJ, and I know the art behind it. The world we live in now, we’ve got all these DJs who literally press play. And some don’t even press play. The sound guy across the room, he presses play. I played a show a couple months ago with a very “big” DJ, and I was DJing on that show. I was doing my thing — scratching and mixing. I see his setup, and I see 4 CD-Js. But none of them are plugged in.
HPC: Were they props?
RP: They weren’t plugged into anything! I’m like, where are the inputs? I looked in the back of the mixer, and nothing was plugged into it. Cut to an hour or two later, everyone’s screaming for him, and he walks in like he’s a god and starts clapping. And I heard music playing! I’m standing right behind him. When you’re DJing, there are things you have to do, like deal with your mixers, your faders. He was standing there dancing, fake twisting the knob. I was like, this is disgusting! It’s like somebody coming up to Eric Clapton and saying, I play guitar, too. I play Guitar Hero.
HPC: Do you think you learned a lot about stage presence by DJing?
RP: No, I learned more about crowd pleasing. When you’re DJing, there are songs I love to play, but I know people are going to walk off. It doesn’t matter what I like. You have to be able to play the popular song and slip in one of yours, in such a way that they don’t notice it. You’ve got them in such a roll that you get them back into what they think they like.
Point made, Russell.