When comedian Nimesh Patel was diagnosed with testicular cancer, he knew he’d be talking about it on stage very soon. And about a week later – after he had successful surgery to remove his right testis – he was making jokes about his only remaining ball at the Comedy Cellar in New York City.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Saturday night live‘s first Indian-American writer talks about how she turned cancer into comedy in her new special. Lucky Lefty and her mentor Chris Rock’s reaction to the way she handled her traumatic event with Will Smith on stage. He also explains why Tucker Carlson turned down an invitation to appear on Fox News after unwittingly becoming a right-wing hero when he was kicked off the stage by Columbia University students in the middle of the show in 2018, and how this experience prompted him to reconsider the debate. on “cancel culture” in comedy.
“Full title Lucky Lefty, Or I Lost My Right Lung And All I Have Is This Stupid SpecialPatel explains his masterfully crafted special, which was posted on YouTube last month. “And if it’s not clear, I lost my right calf to testicular cancer, not a cycling adventure.”
The comedian says he knew “immediately” after recognizing that he was going to talk about it on stage. “The night I went to the hospital, I knew something was going to happen,” she explains. “If you’ve been doing comedy for almost 14 years, you realize that when something happens to you, there’s something to take note of. I knew right away that it was something that would be fun to talk about. I didn’t know it would turn into something like 45 minutes.
“The wonderful Hannibal Buress once told me that you should talk about it the moment it happened,” he adds. “Even if you don’t have shit written, you should get on stage right away. Get on stage now.” Just days after the surgery, Patel went to the Comedy Cellar in New York and “teared the Band-Aid”, telling the audience what had happened. When he started joking about it, it helped that he was already cancer survivor.
Before he contracted cancer, Patel’s biggest claim to fame was when he was kicked off the stage in the middle of a stand-up set at an event for Columbia University’s Asian American Alliance in 2018.
Five years later, he told me, “In about 20 minutes, I said something that some found a little offensive, at the time I never found it offensive, and I still don’t find it offensive.” “And I think if you ask the organizers if they find that offensive now, I think they may have changed their stance. But they went on stage, fired me, cut my microphone off after I gave my closing speech.”
The joke that got him in trouble was based on the idea that no one would choose to be gay if they were Black anyway. “No one has any difficulties,” he said from the stage. “No Black man wakes up and looks in the mirror and says, ‘You know what? Is this Black shit? Very easy. I’m going to wear a Madonna strappy top, some Jordans and really annoy some Indian men.’ This has never happened before.”
The joke caused the audience to chuckle awkwardly, but a few minutes later the event’s organizers took the stage and accused him of being “disrespectful”.
“I can understand why you’re taking it as some kind of attack. But not at all,” Patel says now. “The most offensive part is the label where I say Mike Pence is the only person who chooses to be gay every day. “I kind of take out someone who might not be and make fun of him. What I know is offensive. That’s not what they were ashamed of.” It also got a much bigger laugh from the young, progressive audience.
After the story went “mega-viral” in the days that followed, Patel received an email from Tucker Carlson asking him to appear on Fox News. And I’m like, ‘Dude, I don’t want to talk to you!’ I was on Breitbart. People wanted to martyr me, as if the left was eating itself.”
Carlson asked him to talk about “cancel the culture,” but Patel got on Joe Rogan’s podcast instead. “If I were to talk about it, it would be on the largest possible platform,” he says, vaguely investigating relative audience sizes.
In February of this year, a clip from that podcast interview appeared in a “documentary” that Carlson made for Fox Nation. The Death of Comedy. “I know why they got the clip from Rogan because if they had emailed me or contacted me I would have said absolutely no.”
“Hey clown, your whole documentary is wrong. I see that you only used my Rogan clip because I said no to your producers. This is so stupid,” Patel tweeted to Carlson after the trailer dropped.
More than anything else, Patel says she doesn’t want to be some kind of conservative spokesperson because of what happened to her. “It was a thousand percent in my head,” he says. “I am quite centrist politically. I didn’t want to be a living martyr for anyone who wanted to make a mountain out of a molehill, whether it was Breitbart, Tucker, or any other right-wing group or institution.
“I had the same feeling back then about people trying to exaggerate the idea that comedy is dying and you can’t say whatever you want or whatever it is,” he continues. “I don’t know how these people keep the discussion when they have right-wing millionaire podcasts. There are totally real right-wing people who go on national tours and sell. what is dead? What are you talking about?”
“Last time I checked, Chappelle was still selling the arenas,” Patel says. “If this is canceling, cancel me.”
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