A bunch of stand-up comedians of Indian origin are making America laugh out loud
I know my parents would like an arranged marriage for me but I tell them I can’t take the pressure. Maybe they can arrange a one-night stand and I can work my way up from there.” These are words of blinding insight that Paul Varghese delivers, left hand clutching the microphone and face poker straight but enough to have the audience at a comedy club in AddisonTexas in splits.

Varghese is a stand-up comedian from Dallas, Texas, with roots that go down all the way to Kerala, India. He recently won Improv’s 2009 ‘Funniest Comic in Dallas’ contest, has performed in over a dozen comedy festivals across America and is among a bunch of new stand-up comedians of Indian origin who are making America laugh out loud. And we are not talking Russell Peters.
Varghese, who has been featured in NBC’s Last Comic Standing and Comedy Central’s Live at Gotham, says he knows a little Malayalam and is biased towards Malayalam movies. He gives us his joke that works all the time: “Here’s what’s brilliant about Indian people. The British ruled India for around 300 years and they forced the English language on India. And how did the Indians take their revenge? ‘So you’re going to force us to speak English? Okay, then we’re going to take all 26 letters of your alphabet and shove it in our names.”

Though the Texan often draws on his Indian background—joking about his Malayalee surname and the accent of the tech support guy in India who pronounces his name with a drawl more American than his own—Varghese says he is an American who takes a lot from his varied background.

... contd.