LUCIDMEDIA

Canadian Comic Shaun Majumder

Written by Catherine Kustanczy Wednesday, 16 July 2008 09:52

“During Christmas vacations and stuff, they’d be crying with laughter, and wanting to throw me off the balcony at the same time,” he says of his family. “I was so annoying. My mom would say things like, ‘wait for a wave to come along, you’re driving me nuts!’ but she’d be laughing hysterically. I’d break them down with mental torture to get what I wanted.” That humour has been put to good use. In a career that has seen him grace the stage with stand-up, appear regularly on television and act in films, Majumder has shown incredible range and versatility as a performer. Born in Burlington, Newfoundland, to a Canadian mother and Indian father, he used humour as a way of dealing with his parents’ separation as a child, though he hadn’t quite intended to pursue performing as a career. Speaking from Edmonton where he was preparing for an evening of stand-up, he says the huge amount of parental support he received as a gave him the confidence to follow his heart’s desire. “A lot of people come from the world of, ‘I want to grow up, I want to get a job, I want to get married, and by a certain age have kids’ - all these dreams and a structure that’s laid out in front of them. I never had that. My parents were really chill.” He credits the lack of parental pressure for his decision to pursue his passion, noting that he was “left to choose for myself and be pulled in certain directions.” “It made me more independently strong, better on my feet,” he says, “I found the calling or my passion, my bliss, pretty independently. The more other people told me what I should be doing, the more it didn’t feel right.”

Majumder attended university for a year, attracted by the prospect of playing competitive volleyball for Dalhousie, and continuing a passion for the sport he’d developed in high school. He also participated in theatre and improv groups on the side, although he admits he’s been performing since Grade 7, when he started to appear in school plays and get more involved in his local arts community.

Majumder will be using his stand-up talents to entertain Torontonians at the second annual Just for Laughs Festival, taking place July 22nd to 27th. With performers like Jason Alexander and Jimmy Fallon, and sketch comedians the Doo-Wops and The Williamson Playboys, Majumder feels he’s in his element, even if he names acting as his first passion. “They’re different creatures,” he says thoughtfully, “I started as an actor. That’s my first passion, always will be. It’s never as simple and clean. We attach ourselves to an identity, always. When you choose a career like the arts” –he emphasizes the words with sarcastic exaggeration –“there are so many slivers and doors and compartments you can work on and invest in, it’s hard to define yourself as just one thing.”

Majumder’s used his own versatility as a performer to great effect, and while he’s animated, he is also deeply thoughtful and articulate in his answers, chewing over words and ideas, extrapolating on notions of work, fame, and family. Ask him about whether he gets stage fright, and he’ll carefully, if humorously, dissect the differences between an innate, unconscious fear and an outward outer fright he’s completely aware of. He even pinpoints the causes matter-of-factly and owns up to needing “alone” time to properly prepare. If there’s one thing Majumder isn’t, it’s pretentious. He’s very open, whether doing stand-up, acting, or chatting on the telephone.

“It isn’t the stage I fear as much as my brain,” he explains, trying to wrap his mouth around how his mind works, “it depends on how I’m feeling. Yesterday I feared my brain.” What? Instead of veering into silly mock-horror movie territory, Majumder expands on what he means. Surely his brain isn’t so scary? “Well,” he says a bit sheepishly, “I’d been in Newfoundland doing a festival all weekend. Being an entertainer, I was showing people around, so when I was in St. John’s, I wasn’t sleeping, we were drinking, and then I got on a plane yesterday, flew out (to Edmonton), and when I landed, I had to do an interview right away. I didn’t get any time to rest or chill, and then I had to go onstage.” Between boozy exhaustion, the demands of publicity, and entertaining a crowd, Majumder says he knew he was at his limit. “I knew my brain was exhausted.” He says if he isn’t mentally “in tip top shape”, he has a tendency to “slow down, not trust myself, not be as sharp”, which means that people “won’t get the best show they can.”

He says auditions are far worse than live audiences. “They’re the worst! It depends on the situation, and it shouldn’t be any different, but it is. There are lines to memorize, and you’re getting judged based on your performance, but in truth, when you reach the best part of your game, you don’t know they’re there. I walk out feeling confident and great. The training involves learning to get focused on auditioning, it’s very difficult and challenging mentally.”

Majumdar’s Indian background gave him an edge in indulging in his popular Raj Binder character. The perspiration-challenged Indian sportscaster, a popular figure on CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, is hilarious for his bald-faced questions (he once asked hockey player Mike Fischer whether a Stanley Cup or a protective cup was more important to him), but in an age where political correctness trumps outright hilarity, playing up racial stereotypes can be a precarious tightrope to walk. Majumder both scoffs at the PC notion, while simultaneously acknowledging that it’s his own heritage that allows him to get away with playing a character like Raj. “Raj is interesting,” he says with affection, “Nobody in India looks like that. Imagine having a guy who sweats like that -it doesn’t matter where they’re from – and who, every now and then says, ‘is it warm in here?’ That’s funny on its own. My heritage, I can draw on … it’s so sweet, the Indian character. I am drawing from my own experience, though I’m also using license of my experience with my point of view to get away with a lot of stuff.”

As to performing onscreen, Majumder has amassed an impressive list of credits, including the wildly popular Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. “You can’t define me as just one thing, “he says, with a lightness that belies a firm foundation of self-confidence. “The more I move forwards, the more I realize the work and discipline. I’ve spend a lot of time these past two years really focusing on my acting and auditions, and trying to make sure my manager and agent know I can do anything, there’s not one thing I can’t do in terms of drama or improv. The first bunch of years I spent doing a bit of everything - doing theatre, doing improv with Second City, doing sketch, all kinds of things -and now, I’m at an age where I’m so excited. I always said I haven’t begun yet. I’m always starting over.”

When it comes to standup, Majumder says there are “so many things in my head I want to say, that I haven’t said because I’d feel like ‘I gotta please the crowd’. You get a TV show,” he says, referring to 22 Minutes, “and there’s a lot of older people (watching), so you can’t do anything dark, you do the milk and cookie stuff, but now, my voice is broader, my point of view is coming up, and I want to say shit that might make people feel uncomfortable. I already talk about race stuff, and it’s not like I’m being ground-breaking,” he says, noting that comedians like Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks and the recently deceased George Carlin were figures who pushed the limits and redefined the limits of acceptability within and around mainstream pop culture. “I’d never listened to Carlin, or these comedy albums I’m supposed to as a man in the discipline.” He laughs, putting on a self-mocking tone. “I mean, ‘read the bible, mofo!’ Lately I’ve been watching and reading and listening. Lenny Bruce is starting to freak me out… I get it. I’m starting to hear his level of game play now in these little things, and all I can think is, ‘oh my God, that’s the level I need to play at.’” In terms of the art of comedy itself, Majumder has a few theories. “It’s always a combination. Part of you wants to entertain, you gotta make ‘em laugh, and hope along way you make them think. I really want to go to the core of it, explore that pure part of what is standup.”

Much as he maintains acting is his first passion, Majumder’s love of live performance is obvious. He excitedly expands on his thought processes in the midst of performing, noting the ways audiences will or won’t follow particular threads, why, and the comedian’s job to be the sheep herder, leading the flock down the path of smiling truth-telling. “As long as you recognize it, you see where it’s coming from,” he says, referring to the nature of ideas and on-the-spot inspiration, “then your brain turns right, like, ‘let’s see what’s over here… I just know if it turns this way… oh yeah, look at it from that perspective’, even then, you might look and go, ‘well that’s been done, go more degrees right’. You might think you’re saying it for the first time. It’s a real challenge. You don’t know what every comic is talking about, unless you listen to every single person. Many people have the same point of view,” but he notes he doesn’t want to be one of the masses yammering on about the latest Britney Spears fiasco or cracking George Bush jokes. He says that lately he’s found some of the best material in his own life. “You literally tell stories about your life. Nobody can copy that. It opens up things. I’ve put a lot about my personal life onstage. It’s a new world, and I love it. I’m an open book.”

“I find if you filter yourself, you’re going to be limited, you’re not going to be talking about the darkest, weirdest places in life, and that’s the shit that makes people go, ‘oh my God, this is ugly, I have so much respect for this guy, there’s so much truth coming out of this person, for them to bear it all onstage’…” He pauses. “That’s what’s unique about standup: I can go onstage with my life. My mom passed away in 2003, and I have no idea how to talk about that. It’s not humourous, but it’s a huge part of my life, and it gives me perspective. I’m still not sure how I’ll express it.” Majumder pauses, lost in thought and perhaps memory, then goes on to explain that doing comedy about his mother’s passing, “bold-faced, ‘this is how it happened, this is how I reacted’” might allow an audience to experience the lesson her death taught him –that being, he says that “life is way too short, live for the now.”

Living in the now means, of course, experiencing, nay, embracing, some of life’s more surreal moments. As if to confirm that life is sometime stranger –and funnier –than fiction, he shares the story of an elderly fan who recently approached him in Newfoundland, procurring a simple compliment. “’Shaun’, she said, ‘you do the best Paki’. I thought, ‘Oh my God!’. Here is somebody who doesn’t know that’s one of the worst racial slurs. And she was so loving about it, but what could I say… ‘thank you?!’

 

He recalls something his mother told him when he was younger. “She said, ‘do what you want, find your own voice, do your own thing’, and that was the best lesson, an invaluable lesson. A lot of kids, they’re hammered with ‘you must do this and that to be successful, otherwise you’ll be a loser’ but if you remove those boundaries, and go, ‘you’re allowed to breathe’, they’ll naturally find it. That’s what happened to me. I’m doing what I was meant to do, and that’s a beautiful thing.” Shaun Majumder performs as part of the Just For Laughs Toronto Festival on July 23rd. For more information, go to www.hahaha.com.