Ask any of the new wave of brown comics about his or her influences and odds are better than not you’ll hear names like Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Bill Cosby and Eddie “back in the ’80s when he was funny” Murphy.

Comedy only came in black and white back then and for Montreal’s Sugar Sammy, it was Murphy’s signature concert film — and its R-rated takes on family, women and white folk — that taught him how to get laughs out of being a first-generation Indo-Canadian in Quebec.
“When I was 10, I accidentally saw Delirious,” he says, lounging on the terrace of the Montreal Hyatt on a cloudy afternoon at the tail end of the city’s Just for Laughs festival. “And that was my only comedy experience. That was it, until I was 18 and old enough to get into clubs.”

Almost 15 years later, Sammy is the comic voice of his ethnically complicated hometown — a smooth character who performs on both sides of its many fences in English, French, Punjabi and Hindi — and one of the brighter lights among this country’s new generation of Desi stand-ups. Put him together with Russell Peters and Shaun Majumder and you’ll get a funny version of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.

In the meantime, though, Just for Laughs has him on the bill for its second Toronto spinoff, part of its ethnic series that includes hosting the Asian Invasion show on Thursday (July 24) at the Winter Garden Theatre, a bill of multi-hyphenates that includes Filipino-American rising star and BET regular Jo Koy, Japanese-American KT Tatara and Texan-based Malayali Paul Varghese.

The ethnic series also has local musical duo The Doo-Wops with paisanos Joey Kola, Mike Marino, Dom Irrera and Calgary’s Cris Nannarone appearing together on Friday.

It seems like a lot of comedy is packaged according to colour these days, whether it’s the white trash of Blue Collar Comedy or the “brown is the new black” stylings of Ahmed Ahmed and his cohorts on the recent Axis of Evil Tour — a trend Sammy puts down to new comics coming of age in step with their audiences.

“Everyone’s in their twenties and thirties and bringing their own flavour,” he says, clicking with fans who are sometimes getting their first taste of live comedy. He points out Frank Spadone — like Sammy, a comic who gets a lot of material from his immigrant family — who is two tables over and also in mid-interview.

“People who are my age or Frank’s age are the first of our ethnicities who have disposable income and knowledge of the English language,” he says. “Frank’s parents would never have gone to see stand-up in English, and neither would mine. We’re feeding a market that’s come of age.

“But a lot of these guys also relate to the mainstream,” he adds. Whether working at home, in South Africa or Dubai, “you look at my audience and it’s not just Indians or people of ethnicity, it’s everyone.” Ethnic comedy, he says, “has become a trend because it’s the face of the world.”

Like his idol Murphy, the former club promoter with the mack-daddy moniker is known for doing ballsy material about sex and race — even though he doesn’t think his act is edgy so much as honest. “I’m not Andrew Dice Clay,” he protests with a laugh, “I don’t go out to be blue. Life is clean and life is dirty. I talk about both parts. I’d be a hypocrite not to.”

He spoke up recently in defence of the Mike Myers film The Love Guru, answering complaints that it is racist against Indians, but takes a dim view nonetheless of racial material that’s sloppy or ill-informed. He doesn’t like it when a comic “hasn’t done their homework” and, for instance, can’t do a proper Haitian accent.

He shares an ear for accents with Jo Koy, who has built much of his act around his Filipino mother and has a great Chinese-meets-Mexican bit about orange chicken. Koy says he learned how to riff on his family from watching Cosby and gushes about the marriage and parenting bits in the comedian’s 1983 stand-up film Himself, which laid the groundwork for much of the material seen later on The Cosby Show.

“I couldn’t stop watching it,” says Koy, a high-energy comic with the look of Yul Bryner and the voice of a young Chris Rock. “I was so used to comics doing observational stuff.”

Koy played Toronto’s first Just for Laughs, making a big splash on the stage in Yonge-Dundas Square, and has been brought back (and indoors) for a top-of-the-bill spot on the Asian Invasion show, though he has mixed feelings about the packaging.

“The whole ethnic thing can be good or bad,” he says, on the phone from LA. On one hand, it’s a chance to “showcase our side of things, and bring people into our world.” But he doesn’t like the idea of being pigeonholed as a comic who only works with Pinoy crowds.

“I’ll be going to do a show in Pittsburgh or Kansas and someone will say to me, ‘Oh, they have Filipino people out there?’

“No, they don’t,” he grumbles. “But I’m a comic. It’s my job to make people laugh.”