Paul Chowdhry: What's Happening White People?

DVD review by Steve Bennett

Paul Chowdhry does not want to be your friend. He takes to the stage with an unsmiling, abrasive, alienating attitude to counter the racism he sees everywhere.

‘Goodness Gracious Me? I've got none of that shit comedy,’ he tells the Hammersmith Apollo. But whether he’s in a position to slag off more successful comedians is a moot point (he also calls Keith Lemon a wanker); for this debut DVD, on the back of his regular appearances on Channel 4’s Stand Up For The Week, is decidedly patchy.

Race is pretty much the only tool in his arsenal, which would be fine if he had a varied approach to it. Instead he takes the role of an over-sensitive politically correct policeman... a PC PC (with the initials PC) seeing prejudice everywhere. Why are ghosts always white people? Isn’t that ‘Mighty White’ bread racist?

Not that he seems particularly keen on building a rainbow audience of all ethnicities. He assumes a white woman is ‘shitting herself’ for sitting among Asians - even though it turns out she is married to a Sikh. ‘My sister's with a white guy,’ he reassures her. ‘We beat the shit out of her.’

His portrayal of Asian people largely involves an angry middle-aged man, sometimes his dad, shouting ‘bastard’ frequently and bluntly – in almost exactly the same way Stephen K Amos depicts his father. Elsewhere, there are easy jokes about burkhas and hairy Asian women.

Chowdhry also does the tired, stereotypical shtick of aping young people and their street slang ‘aksing’ questions and having ‘bare’ slang. Talking of cliches, there are even Michael Jackson gags and boring misogyny. When he asserts: ‘If I want a women's opinion, I'll go to the kitchen and ask her,’ any irony, if irony was intended, doesn’t seem to have got through, given the enthusiastic male response.

Yet it’s not all so tired; when he talks about his penny-pinching dad, he offers the best sort of observational comedy, which resonates widely, yet still comes from his own memory, not a smorgasbord of comedy staples. He’s nicely dismissive of those who live their lives entirely through their ‘friends’ on social media, too.

Chowdhry tries yet another approach, too, when he targets the various subsections of Britain’s Asian population, which are usually lazily lumped together as one mass. Canada’s Russell Peters has become incredibly wealthy with this sort of approach, making every minority seem part of the show, even if the material is slight.

Although Chowdhry doesn’t have Peters’s warmth, his take on Indian weddings and funerals and the tensions within the ‘Asian community’ is funny and credible – and comes as he finally starts to relax his prickly delivery.

That bluntness might be is his way of taking the piss, but it’s not the easiest of viewing, especially in the routines where the material isn’t up to much, making this one of the less essential DVDs this Christmas.

Published: 22 Nov 2012

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