SWEET TALK FROM
SUGAR SAMMY
By Robin Roberts

Proving the old adage “Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” Sugar Sammy recalls his first paying stand-up show this way: “A buddy of mine — I’m not going to say his name — is notorious for organizing some of the worst gigs in some of the shadiest bars. About five years ago, he asked me to do this gig at a ‘dance’ club. And not a high-end dance club, either. It was a dodgy, underground club off an alley where all the dancers were on drugs. So this guy gets this idea for a dance-comedy show where the first part of the night the girls are dancing, then there’s a set of comedy, and then they go back to the dancers. Problem was, the customers were not expecting this. So while the girls were on their break, the customers were yelling at us to get off the stage. Right in the middle of our act! Then the dancers would join in, telling us to get off because they were losing money with us up there. Then we’d start yelling back. It was this bizarre battle across the room between the dancers and the comics. It was so bad, but looking back, it was so funny.”

Looking back is not something Sammy does often these days. While he’s not exactly laughing all the way to the bank, he’s at least chuckling on the doorstep. Never again will he play a seedy bar; the brown kid from suburban Montreal has his sights set higher. Much higher. Opening for Dave Chappelle in the fall of 2006 was a good sign he was on his way. Seeing his face plastered on billboards ahead of a show in South Africa was “weird” confirmation. He’s so popular there, in fact, that he’s been assigned a driver and bodyguard. As he sits in a tatty diner in New Westminster on a blustery March afternoon, where he’s come for his pre-show meal, the only one dazzled by him is his waitress, who offers him a free dessert and a shy smile. He declines politely, explaining he’s late for his show, but promises her he’ll return for the freebie afterwards.
Half a block away, fans are lining up at Lafflines Comedy Club, which has extended his three-night, sold-out booking to include a fourth show. This crowd, as with the three other shows, is jammed with mostly Indians, who laugh uproariously at his tailor-made jokes about Surrey (“The large population is part of the plan for Indian domination”), as well as the usual riffs on race (“All cultures have their role models: the Latinos have Antonio Banderas, blacks have Denzel Washington, the Chinese have Jackie Chan. We have Apu from The Simpsons. And he’s voiced by a white guy! We can’t even get work behind the scenes!”).

Toby Hargrave, Sammy’s opener this night, says, “There’s an unwritten rule in comedy: ‘You can make fun of the club you’re part of.’ I think you have to address what’s going on in the room, but funny is funny and it’s not just Indian funny or white funny. Sugar draws a crowd, obviously. He has a great following, not just because he’s a funny comedian but because he has great community support, which is absolutely fantastic. We don’t see that all the time. Sammy gets compared to Russell Peters quite a bit and, unfortunately, the biggest reason for that is because they’re both brown. What has made Sammy stand out and not be just a knockoff of Russell has been his performance, how he is with people, how he handles himself on stage and with media, and the material he writes. It’s a package, and that’s what makes a success. Bottom line, if he wasn’t funny, nobody would be here.”

But they are here, and in droves. And they’d likely still be here if he played five nights a week. But Sugar Sammy has no intention of overstaying his welcome. “He says he wants to be able to come back [only] once a year, because he doesn’t want to bore the people,” says club manager Barry Buckland after the show. “But I wouldn’t turn him away if he wanted to come back more often. You want to leave people wanting more, and that’s what he does. We brought him back twice because he sold out in January, so it was easy to sell out a second show, then a third. I had probably 500 e-mails I couldn’t get back to; we turned a lot of people away on Friday and Saturday. He’s obviously very popular. And he’s very personable, which is nice.”
Born Samir Khullar in Montreal somewhere north or south of 30 years ago (he’s deliberately coy about his age in order to keep his professional options open), Sugar Sammy was so dubbed while at McGill University by a sorority who thought his pick-up lines were lame but sweet. His father, Desh, who calls him Sam, says “Sugar” is fine with him. “At university the girls called him Sugar because he’s a very nice man, very sweet. There’s nothing wrong with that,” says Desh from his home in suburban Montreal. “He was a good boy, a normal child. He was a little naughty sometimes, that’s all, breaking things in the house, dancing. I never [reprimanded] any of my three children. They did whatever they liked. I didn’t care, really. If they break a television I’ll buy a new one. I don’t care. I just laugh at those things.”

Sammy, in fact, credits his unflappable father, a retired convenience-store owner, with his own sense of humour. “My dad always went out of his way to make us laugh,” says Sammy, grinding pepper onto a mound of already spicy sausage pasta. (He says he gets the best Indian food at home, where he and his siblings still live with his parents, who both cook, so he doesn’t seek out Indian restaurants on the road.) “He was a child with us, joking and clowning around. He’d come out of the shower and start dancing around while wearing a towel, and me and my brother, about eight and six at the time, would start laughing. Those little things made for an environment that was very funny, light and healthy, which you don’t always get in a lot of East Indian homes. It’s a bit tragic to see kids doing things that they have no love for. I wake up loving my job and I can’t wait to perform.”

When he digs into his meal (a pre-show ritual he’ll follow later with a couple of drinks to loosen up), he splashes sauce on his shirt and lets out a disgusted sigh. “I spill stuff on myself all the time,” he says, dabbing at the stain, luckily lost in the black of his shirt. “I’m the worst.”

Good thing he has bundles of new clothes to change into. His tall, slender frame caught the attention of Montreal-based clothier Parasuco, which specializes in high-quality, intricately detailed denim, and of rapper-turned-designer Sean P. Diddy Combs, creator of the popular label Sean John.

“They just came to the shows and said, ‘You fit our image, we’d like you to wear our stuff.’ So I don’t even go shopping any more. There are bags and bags of clothes at my place, stuff that I haven’t even opened yet. They fit with what I like, which is simple, nice guys’ clothing.” On this day, it’s head-to-toe black: black shirt, black jeans, black leather jacket. Later, he’ll trade his sauce-stained shirt for a white one and hope he doesn’t spill his pre-show drink on it.

Sammy, who hasn’t a trace of an Indian or French accent (he speaks — and tells jokes in English, French, Punjabi and Hindi), borrows his Indian accent for his bits from his easygoing dad. “Look, I came from India,” says the elder Khullar. “English is not our mother tongue. I am from Punjab, my wife is from Punjab, my parents are from Punjab. It’s what we speak at home. If I have a funny accent, it doesn’t matter, as long as you understand me. I don’t mind if Sam imitates me. I’m his father, why should I mind?”

He also doesn’t mind the often racy content of his son’s shows (think Kama Sutra, for starters), most of which he attends when Sammy plays Montreal. “It’s a part of the game,” says Desh. “When you are in Rome you do as the Romans do. Whatever the audience likes you give them. I’m an old-timer but my thinking is in 2008. I’m not living in 1947. I know whatever Sam does, they love it. When you take things too serious you become an old stubborn man, which I don’t want to become. I’m more than 60 years old but I look around 40 or 45 because I laugh all the time. My wife looks like a teenager because we laugh so much.”

All that laughter made Sammy not only at ease as the centre of attention, but an avid seeker of it. On school field trips, he’d be the kid at the front of the bus grabbing the microphone and aping his teachers for the amusement of his classmates. Later, in university, he’d be the first to volunteer to host talent shows or organize fundraisers. He took the stage in front of a large audience for the first time while a student at Marianpolis College, a prestigious, private school in Westmount, just outside Montreal. “I was so nervous,” he says, shaking his head at the memory. “I practised in front of my friends every day in the hallway between classes and during lunch. I’d just rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. I still try material out in front of my brother and sister, or when I have dinner with my friends. Then I go to these little rooms with open mics where I really tweak it, get it tight.”

He continued plotting his future at McGill, where he majored in Cultural Studies. While that may sound like he analyzed artifacts from remote tribes in deepest Africa, it was in fact a program of film, television and media studies. He graduated with the necessary academic tools to tackle the biz; what he lacked was the backstage savvy. In addition to the occasional seedy dance bar, he was playing some pretty low-level clubs. Not content to wait in the wings, he learned about marketing and event planning by contracting himself out as a club promoter, organizing wrap parties for films shooting in Montreal. As the go-to guy, he schmoozed with the likes of Robert De Niro, Pierce Brosnan, Edward Norton and LL Cool J. He even danced with Rebecca Romijn. What he craved more than hob-nobbing with the stars, however, was to be one himself.

“I kept being shut out of the game, out of the business,” he says. “A lot of it is politics. Everybody has to pay their dues and then somebody says, ‘Hey, this guy’s actually really good,’ and then everybody else listens.” The first one to say that was Paul Ronca, owner of Montreal’s Comedy Zone. While other clubs relegated Sammy to open-mic nights, Ronca recruited him to emcee and host the shows. Soon he got his own slot and began performing five nights a week.

“Every club had their stable of comics they used, so it was always the same guys,” says Sammy. “And you couldn’t break into that. Nobody really paid attention to the new guy. So Paul basically coached me and made me better, gave me advice, made sure I wasn’t making the same mistakes week after week. I got so good so fast that within nine months I was headlining. Then Just For Laughs came and saw me at the club and wanted to put me in the Festival. All this happened within a year because of Paul. And once I was on Just For Laughs, things started flying. I was on everybody’s radar and everybody was booking me.”
Despite the rocky road up, Sammy knew he was funny because 10-year-old girls told him so. Bored while waiting his turn at bat during an elementary-school baseball game, he started cracking wise to the little girls in the stands. “The girls were like, ‘You’re funny, come over here after you hit home plate,’” he recalls. “So I ran to home as fast as I could, then went over and made them laugh some more. They wanted to hang out with me rather than all the other baseball players. And I thought, this is good, this is fun.”

Elementary-school boys weren’t quite as smitten. He and his younger brother paid the price for their prowess at ball hockey by being jeered at and checked by lesser athletes who reached low for their punishment. “We’d get pushed around and slashed and called Paki,” says Sammy without anger or resentment, perhaps aware that success is the best revenge. “It was just because we were Indian and better than everybody. When you’re any ethnicity and there’s a majority of another ethnicity and you excel at something, a lot of times they will call you certain names because they’re mad at how successful you are.”

That particularly juvenile behaviour didn’t end after school. When Sammy finally started booking some decent rooms, fellow comics, jealous of his good reviews, resorted to simplistic excuses for his success. “White comics would say, ‘Oh, you’re just doing well because the Indian thing is hot now.’ But, you know, I’ve played Just For Laughs for the last five years, I’ve signed with one of the top managers in the industry, big producers and promoters have booked me all over, I finished number one comic in my city the last three years. It has more to do with the work ethic and the fact that I take this seriously. A lot of times these comics aren’t really mad at me, they’re more mad at themselves. When they see some guy passing them by it’s like, ‘Oh, well, we’ve got to do something to give the excuse that it’s not because I’m [crap]; this guy’s doing well because it’s the Indian thing.’ Why don’t they follow the example, and just work hard at it, too?”

While Sammy may have been raised in a home with few boundaries, he was nevertheless instilled with the credo that the labour is its own reward. “I think my father is the person I listen to the most,” he says of the best piece of advice he ever received. “He just said, ‘Never mind what people say about you. Do what you want to do.’ Other people always told me to be cautious and careful. But he’d say, ‘Go up there and do it with guts.’”

It was his guts — and that work ethic — that caught Jodie Lieberman’s attention. When she was director of programming for the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, Lieberman would distribute free tickets for the shows. She reserved a stack for Sammy to pass out to patrons at the clubs he promoted. When she discovered he took to the stage himself, she checked out his set and was impressed. “He had a great presence, great charisma on stage,” she says. “And he was a young, developing comic and I just saw the potential in him.” So when she went to work at talent agency Thruline Entertainment in Beverly Hills, she immediately signed that young developing comic. “He’s really a great client, he works really hard,” says Lieberman, who also manages Jeremy Hotz and Sean Majumder. “Having that promoter background makes him a great businessman. And he’s a great marketer; he knows how to market himself. We work really well together and, hopefully, there’s a lot more to do.”
She says the ultimate goal is “world domination” but for now the plan is to target every English-speaking market, including return dates throughout North America, the UK, the Caribbean, Dubai and South Africa, with a specific eye to theatre venues. He was off to Australia for the first time in April, and Lieberman is waiting on confirmation of his first tour to India.
It’s a whirlwind existence, but one Sammy thrives on, even if he is on the road 10 months out of 12. “If I’m at the same place next year that I am this year I wouldn’t be happy,” says Sammy, whose dream venue is Montreal’s 22,000-seat Bell Centre. “And if I was at the same place this year that I was last year I wouldn’t be happy. So I feel like it’s progressing every year, like I’m building my following, performing in different places, getting better gigs, demanding more money. It’s an upward movement. If it wasn’t, I’d probably lose my mind.”
Adding to the whirlwind, Sammy is shopping a proposed TV project that is based on his life as a rising comic. Far from uncharted territory — Russell Peters has been pushing his own, similarly themed show for years without success. Sammy is undeterred, even though he shares some of the same frustrations as Peters. “A lot of times, and I don’t mind saying this, people who are at the helm of the industry don’t have the pulse of the people. They have all these ideas of what’s good, and what will work, but these are formulas from the ’80s; old solutions to new questions. If they trusted the artists a little more, let them be in charge of their projects, allowed them to hire who they want, they would probably be able to capitalize. I believe in myself 150 per cent and I think Russell’s the same way. If someone said to him, ‘Do it on your own terms,’ it would be successful. But I think a lot of people are trying to change his ideas, make it into something hacky. I think the right move for him is what he’s doing, he’s refusing them. I think someone will eventually sign him and then everybody who passed on his project will beat themselves up.”

Meanwhile, Sammy is calmly, yet doggedly, determined to live the life he’s charted for himself, even if that means sacrificing chill time and a love life. The rare few hours he does have to himself are usually spent watching Bollywood movies (he’s an unabashed fan of Amitabh Bachchan, whom he describes an “everyman who’s not unbelievably perfect. His flaws make him such a cool and fascinating person.”) or his Star Wars boxed set.

In fact, if it came down to a choice between going out to party or re-watching his Star Wars DVDs, the self-professed closet geek would choose a night on the couch with Darth Vader. “I’m a sci-fi freak and Star Wars is my number one thing,” he admits. “I could watch it over and over.” As for being sweet on someone special, Sugar Sammy laments, “The last four years, when it really went full time for me comedy-wise, have been hard. There are girls I’ve thought I could really be with, but it’s just not in the cards. I’ve met a few girls here [in Vancouver] who I’d like to take out, but it would be just such a waste. I’d go out with her, I’d really like her and then I’d leave. I date girls in the industry now, because they understand. They know I’m not going to be here for long.”

And now he’s not long for the diner. The tall, dark and handsome comic rises from the booth, waves his thanks to the shy waitress and strides out onto the street. Minutes later, he bounds onto the stage at Lafflines and launches into his act in front of yet another packed house. And no one yells at him to get off the stage.

Seriously, though . . .
While Sugar Sammy was in the Vancouver area playing to sold-out crowds, he took a night off to participate in the 10th annual World of Smiles Telethon, which in just six hours raised $500,000 for the B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation. Having never been involved in such a fundraiser, Sammy’s eyes were opened, particularly when he took a tour of the hospital.

“The organizers want you to have an understanding of why you’re doing this, where the money’s going,” he says of the tour. “So I went, and I was a mess. I’m very sensitive, so when I saw those kids in ICU, these little babies hooked up to machines, that really got me. And the kids in oncology, all putting on a brave face. I hated myself for ever complaining about anything in my life. I remember saying to myself, ‘These kids don’t deserve it. If I get injured tomorrow, I can say that somewhere in my life I did something to earn it, I’m sure.’
With these kids, your heart sinks. I was depressed for the whole day.”

Producer Atish Ram, who took Sammy on the tour, was concerned about the comic’s state of mind, so when they were driving away, he asked what he could do to lift his spirits. “I said, ‘Just take me for ice cream. That’ll help me. A little bit of ice cream always puts me in a good mood.’ It helped a little bit, but I needed to sleep it off, try not to think about it. After that, it was a no-brainer to say yes to the telethon, and yes to every year.”