One of the highlights of this weekend’s Masala! Mehndi! Masti! festival will be the MyBindi Comedy Night at Queen Elizabeth Theatre Sunday featuring a slate of South Asian comics. Toronto’s Jazz Mann will be representing the home team on a bill topped by New Yorker Vidur Kapur.
Live With Culture interviews are nearly always done face-to-face but scheduling challenges meant that my conversation with Mann had to be done over the phone. The actor/comedian is clearly at ease in the promotional ring because we were bantering like old chums inside of five minutes.
“A true comic has to have some marketing skill or promotional ability,” he says. “A lot of comics think it’s enough to be funny without making the effort to really understand the business. You can be the funniest comedian in the world but if you don’t know how to market yourself you’ll be the funniest comedian in the world in your parents’ basement.”
Born in Toronto but raised in B.C., Jazz moved back to TO in 1998 after completing a business degree. “That was the deal,” he says. “My parents said, ‘You can do what you want to do but you’re going to get an education.’ So now I know what I’m doing, apparently; now I’m giving other comedians a ride in my Audi (laughs).”
Mann has no problem being stacked on a bill with other South Asian comics. “Is there a chance some of us are going to be talking about the same stuff? Yeah, quite possibly. But that shouldn’t be a problem. Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Eddie Murphy . . . tell me they don’t talk about being black and the stereotypes of being African American. Latinos do the same thing; George Lopez talks about being Latin on his show every single night. There’s nothing different here, it’s just that we’re the newest kids on the block. Being Indian is always going to be part of our act because that’s who we are and you have to write about what you know.”
Get him going and Mann is happy to riff on and even rage a little about trying to get ahead in a white world with brown skin. “There are so many East Indians in America but we have almost no representation in Hollywood,” he observes. “Why can’t we have a show about kids going to high school and two of the kids happen to be East Indian?”
“I just did a guest spot on Rookie Blue and I only accepted the part because it didn’t require an Indian accent. How come every beer commercial has three white guys and a black guy? Do you have any idea how much alcohol South Asians consume? We ARE their market. And when was the last time you saw three white guys and a black guy in the same house cracking open beers? That black guy is thinking, what am I doing here?”
Wind him up and chances are better than fair that Mann will crack you up, too. He certainly got me laughing.
WHERE/WHEN: MyBindi Comedy Night, Sunday, July 25 at Queen Elizabeth Theatre (190 Prince’s Boulevard, 416.263.3293), $15 – $27.
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I don’t know whether he’s funny or not but Jazz sure is a looker!