Comedian Sugar Sammy doesn’t sugar-coat it
He’s poked fun at Canada, South Africa, India and France ... now it’s America’s turn as he prepares a new ‘cultural roast’
Comedian Sugar Sammy is trying to describe how he can move to a new country and figure out enough of the local quirks to poke fun at them.
“The French will say, ‘How do you know us so well?’ ” he says in an interview in Washington, D.C.
“I’m like, ‘Because I’ve watched you, I have listened to you. I’ve been, I’ve been …” and he pauses.
The Montreal-born comedian performs in four languages and currently he cannot summon the English word for what he wants to express.
“That’s the only drawback of being bilingual: Sometimes you’ve got to look for the word if it comes to you in French first.”
He thinks aloud — victim? suffer? — then resorts to his iPhone before it finally comes to him: “Subjected!”
“I have observed, I’ve listened and I have been subjected to you for the last two years,” he continues.
“So that creates something that’s not going to go unnoticed.”
That sense of observation and lingual dexterity has allowed Sugar Sammy — whose real name is Samir Khullar — to perform in far-flung places, including South Africa, India and France, where he lives part-time and serves as a judge on their version of America’s Got Talent.
And after packing massive venues in Canada and getting plenty of buzz in France, he plans to tour every year in what he calls “the Mecca and the birthplace of standup” — the United States.
“My comedy comes from a place of fascination and love,” he says. “At the same time, it’s a roast. It’s a cultural roast.”
You would think going to foreign countries and making fun of the people there would be somewhat terrifying, but Khullar has long been a provocateur.
Starting in 2012, he toured Quebec with “You’re Gonna Rire,” the province’s first large-scale bilingual comedy show, which used both English and French.
In 2016, a reported 115,000 people attended the last performance, a free Just for Laughs outdoor show. The show’s popularity was a big deal for a place with deep divisions over cultural and linguistic identity.
His ire is especially sharp when aimed at those in Quebec who want sovereignty.
In 1995, a hotly contested referendum to proclaim sovereignty from the rest of Canada was narrowly defeated.
Premier Jacques Parizeau blamed its failure on the wealthy and “the ethnic vote.”
Khullar was 19 at the time and had just started to perform comedy.
“A lot of things were said and a lot of things were put out there and, going through that, there was no way it wouldn’t colour my comedy,” he says. “It shapes my point of view.”
The comedian, with a stage name he picked up from his university days, grew up in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a predominantly English-speaking part of Montreal.
He also performs in Hindi and Punjabi, which he spoke at home with Indian immigrant parents. And he learned French in school. (In Quebec, children of immigrants are required to attend French-only schools.)
Khullar saw an opportunity to do something other comics weren’t doing: perform a thoroughly bilingual set. He and many others in Montreal live in both worlds and have a sense of “dual” citizenship, he says, despite the separate English and French entertainment industries.
“If I look around me, in my neighbourhood and in the city, there are a lot of people like me, but we didn’t see that representation on television or in pop culture,” he says.
His approach touched off provincewide debates, such as after his 2014 ad campaign with English-only billboards promoting shows.
They read, “For Christmas, I’d like a complaint from the Office de la langue française,” referring to the entity that enforces Quebec’s strict rules for upholding French as the dominant language, including French requirements for signs.
The text was later blacked out and replaced with French text that read, “For Christmas, I got a complaint from the Office de la langue française.”
Some political commentators have accused Khullar of desecrating the French language.
His critiques also provoked a death threat before a 2014 show from someone who called the comic a “federal clown.”
For the most part, Khullar says, his audiences can take the jokes aimed at their way of life because he’s always been viewed as an outsider, even in Canada: He was an outsider entering the French Quebec circuit and, in the rest of the country, “It’s like, ‘Oh it’s that guy from Quebec.’ ”