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Sugar Sammy recently took his first vacation in two years. The Montreal comic, who is embarking on a Just for Laughs-sponsored national tour (opening tonight, Feb. 5, in Winnipeg), took a rare week off to go on what he calls a “ball-hockey cruise of the Caribbean.”
The reason Sugar Sammy – born Sam Khullar – has been vacationless for so long is simple: He's too busy touring. Australia, Europe, South Africa, Asia – he has been to all of them, several times. His airline points number in the millions. The only populated continent he hasn't played is South America, and his agent, former Just for Laughs executive Jodi Lieberman, is working on that.
He was in Toronto recently for a round of interviews, but just for a few hours – then it was back to Montreal to collect his bags, and off to Dubai for the weekend. He has played there five times in the past year.
He travels so much that he has no fixed address, except his parents' place in Montreal, where he crashes between flights and tries out new material on his folks and his two younger siblings. He doesn't own a car, either. “What's the point?” he says. “I'm never there to drive it. I never want to have to take a job to pay bills for something excessive.”
The only continent the Montreal-born Sugar Sammy hasn't played is South America.
There's no girlfriend on the scene either. “Impossible,” he laughs. “With my life? I might as well just open up a complaint department.”
Rather than throw his money away on frills, Sugar Sammy is salting it away. It's a form of insurance, he says. “The more I have, the less vulnerable I am to having to take gigs where I might be compromised.” Like playing convenience-store owners and Indian food restaurateurs in film and TV shows – good money, he agrees, and easy work, but tired old stereotypes.
In his comedy, Sugar Sammy bears a certain resemblance to the phenomenon known as Russell Peters. Like him, he has found and mined a niche ethnic market. And like Peters, he crosses over. He has a huge likeability factor. But Sammy, a Montreal-born child of Indian immigrant parents, is also fluent in French, which gives him yet another weapon in the stand-up arsenal. “I hated going to French school at the time, but I'm so grateful now. It's a great passport.”
But can an edgy, push-the-envelope stand-up comic like Sugar Sammy keep his comic integrity in a place like Dubai, navigating through its heavily censored, alcohol-free zone?
He can, he insists, by being very careful.
“You'd be surprised about Dubai,” the thirtysomething comedian says. “They do give you parameters, but you can pretty much deal with any subject, even sex, as long as you do it tastefully. It always comes down to the tone. I do talk about sex and Arab and Islamic culture, but they always know I'm kidding around. And they keep bringing me back.”
His Dubai audience tends to be about one third Arab, one third Indian and one third assorted expatriates from around the globe. But Muslims, he says, are the first ones to buy his new CD, Down with the Brown, and request a Facebook connection.
Sammy knows that other comics have encountered problems in the Middle East. “For me, it's all about winning the audience over before you venture into more difficult waters. I've never censored myself. I don't like working that way. It takes the honesty away, and that's worst crime a comic can commit – being dishonest. I'd hate to operate with that kind of filter.”
He compares the process to dating a girl. “On your first few dates, you don't right away start exposing all the crazy parts of yourself. You have to work up to that. And once she's comfortable with you, you can open up and tell her anything.”
Sammy found comedy as a child of 8 when he cajoled his mother into renting an Eddie Murphy DVD, Delirious. “It was an East Indian movie store and it was the only English-language film they had. I think I watched it six times that first day, and that was it, the defining moment. I knew what I wanted to do after that. The way I laughed uncontrollably, rolling on the floor – from then on, I tried to get kids at school to laugh the way Eddie Murphy made me laugh.”
Of course, knowing and doing were two different things and, even after he started performing in Montreal at 19, Sammy struggled for almost a decade to gain recognition. He did have his stage name early, however – attached to him by young women because of his amazing facility as a party organizer at college.
His debut was a 30-minute unpaid gig at a student fundraiser. “I have the tape, but I won't watch it,” he laughs. “I can't. I'd just cringe.”
That led to open-mike nights at Montreal's Comedy Works club. Soon, he was a regular. But he hedged his bets, taking a degree in cultural studies from McGill University and, with an eye to his future career in comedy, taking courses in marketing.
From his parents, who ran a string of six convenience stores, he inherited a strong work ethic – and worked in the stores every summer during his teens.
It wasn't until 2004, when Just for Laughs booked him for its annual summer festival, that his career began to shift into overdrive. “It used to bother me that I'd audition every year and they'd reject me,” he says, “but you know what? They were right and I was wrong. I'm so glad they rejected me, because I wasn't that good. I wasn't ready. I needed to grow.”
In fact, Sammy remains ruthlessly self-critical, insisting that he still has a few levels he needs to reach. “And the moment I feel that I'm not getting better, I'll have to sit down and revaluate where I'm at. The more I work, the better I get. Better at timing, delivery, tonality and improv. You can't go up there with cockiness. Because that just leads to complacency, in which case you might as well work on an assembly line. You have to pay attention onstage.”
After the Canadian tour, Sammy heads to Lebanon, then Australia again, then Jordan. Work, work, work.
“It's the only way to get better. I'm a big fan of Wayne Gretzky's, and he used to say, ‘People tell me every day, I'm the best, but it never stopped me from trying to get better every day.' That's the way to work, because the second I stop trying to improve, someone else will take my place.”
In addition to his Winnipeg show tonight, Sugar Sammy plays Edmonton Feb. 6, Calgary Feb. 7, Vancouver Feb. 13, Surrey Feb. 14, Toronto Feb. 20, Ottawa Feb. 21 and Montreal March 12 (further information at www.sugarsammy.com/).
