Majumder on hate, forgiveness
Call it a comedic disclaimer.
Shaun Majumder may still be best known for his days on “This Hour Has 22 Minutes”, the longrunning CBC comedy sketch series that saw the comedian offering creations such as sweaty, heavily accented reporter Raj Binder during his 2003-2018 stint. But he doesn’t want audiences for his comedy show, Hate, to come with the wrong idea. This will not be a greatest-hits show. In fact, Majumder says it is pretty far removed from anything that would appear on the Mother Corps.
“I say it right out of the gate,” says the comedian, in an interview with Postmedia from his home in Los Angeles. “I say ‘Hey everybody, if you came looking for CBC Shaun Majumder you’re up “Schitt’s Creek”. If you came looking for Rick Mercer, you need to get on the road again. If you came hoping to find “Coronation Street”, the GPS is broke.’ I said it right away: ‘Guys, this is not a CBC show …’”
That Majumder is keen to stress this separation is perhaps not surprising given his strange, sudden and high-profile (at least by Canadian TV standards) exit from “22 Minutes” this summer after spending 15 years on the show (more on that, later.) Still, Majumder’s Hate Tour was directly inspired by something that happened during his time with the CBC. In 2016, the “22 Minutes” cast were busy following the American elections and the peculiar rise of Donald Trump. It offered them a look into some of the darker corners of the American psyche, including what seemed to be a frightening re-emergence of white supremacism. Majumder’s father is from India, but he was raised by a white mother in Newfoundland. So the idea of racial purity was strange and fascinating to him.
“I was like ‘Is anybody really pure?’ he says. “Just take a 23andme test and see how that works out for you. What does it mean to be white? I grew up in Newfoundland; so the whitest people in the world, far more supremely white than a lot of these Nazis. So I found it really interesting.”
Majumder says his “knee-jerk reaction” was something along the lines of: “Everybody calm down, we’re all going to be beige in a thousand years anyway.’
So he wrote a sketch called Beige Power in response to the people “who were screaming white power.”
“You know, just a little joke on ‘22 Minutes’,” he says with a laugh. “But the lyrics really hit a nerve with these white supremacists.”
Comedians, of course, usually aren’t too bothered when they incite the wrath of imbeciles and Majumder admits that he had a hard time taking the slew of hate mail and Twitter trolling from the alt-right movement all that seriously. It was just incredulous to him that anyone would take the sketch as a call for “white genocide,” a long-held conspiracy theory promoted by racists.
“It was like: ‘This isn’t real,’” he says. “But, sure enough, it was. Even David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, was tweeting about this comedian in Canada on this ‘CBC Communist Broadcasting Corporation’ that was promoting white genocide. I’m like: ‘I’m more white than a lot of these people! I was raised in Newfoundland! I didn’t know I was brown until my 18th birthday when my mom popped it to me: ‘Oh yeah, you’re brown.’”
So the Hate Tour finds Majumder finding humour in some decidedly dark corners.
“It’s the story of what seems to be on the rise in Canada and the U.S., and that’s just hate,” he says. “Hate has been a hot topic lately. Lots of hate on the go. It’s trendy to hate. If you don’t hate on social media, you are going to lose followers. So get on board the hate train everybody!’ ”
He covers other controversial terrain, including the #MeToo movement.