From teaching maths to British teens to being an acclaimed stand-up comedian, Romesh Ranganathan says following his comedy aspirations has not always been easy.
Before his first trip to New Zealand to perform as part of the International Comedy Festival, he spoke to Kathryn Ryan on the phone from a toilet at a UK theme park.
Romesh Ranganathan Photo: Supplied
Ranganathan says he was ‘negatively inspired’ to become teacher.
“I was inspired to be a maths teacher because I had such a terrible maths teacher.”
He says stand-up comedy is a lot easier than being a teacher.
“Stand-up I can talk about whatever I want, whereas a maths teacher, you know, I had to talk about maths and I had to entertain students and keep them engaged while talking about fractions, whereas in my stand-up I’ve talked about fractions, well not that much.”
He recalls his first foray into comedy during a talent quest at a UK holiday park at the age of 8 or 9.
Ranganathan says he stole all of his material out of a joke book and delivered the material entirely in a Sri Lankan accent as he believed it gave him an edge.
He won the talent competition but his career didn’t take off until some years later, when he entered ‘So you think you’re funny’ in 2010, an annual stand-up competition for new acts.
In the competition’s semi-finals a judge told him he was good enough to go professional, but Ranganathan says he had to reach rock bottom before his career took off.
“I’d left a secure teaching job, I started doing stand up and I couldn’t even pay the bills for a long time, and then it was only after I sort of started to get a bit of recognition things started to take off but for a while it looked like I really had made a mistake.”
The move was a risk for his whole family.
“Some people, what they do is they take a risky move like that when they’re young and they don’t have any dependents. What I decided to do was wait until I had a young family and then start doing stand-up, just to make sure there was a real level of jeopardy.
“What’s the point of just risking yourself when you can risk the livelihood of some children and your wife at the same time?”
When he started doing stand-up he was trying everything to be funny, but the stuff that had really happened to him turned out to be best, he says.
“For me, when I watch stand-up, people that take sort of the everyday and interpret it in a way that’s really funny is what I like the most, and that is what I try and do in my stand up.”
He tries to express what people in the audience are thinking but aren’t saying.
“You’re sort of saying, ‘this is what you think about it and I’m reflecting it back at you’ and hope that that’s the case. Obviously sometimes you push it too far and people in the audience go mate, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but most of the time that is what you’re trying to do.
“I think I’ve probably achieved it twice but I’ve used those two occasions to try and build a career on.”
Ranganathan’s comedy career has opened up various broadcasting opportunities, including participating in a BBC documentary series, Asian Provocateur.
The show centred on Ranganathan discovering more about his Sri Lankan heritage.
“I’m English, I’m British and I don’t really know anything about it and me having kids my mum started to get concerned that I wasn’t going to pass it on.”
The idea for the show was that he would get a crash course in Sri Lankan culture, with all of his activities planned by his mum.
He says it was an eye opening in several ways.
“I really do like creature comforts and I’m hugely ungrateful when out of my comfort zone.
“My capacity to moan surprised even me.”
Ranganathan’s parents come from a tiny village in Sri Lanka, which he said was a side of them he hadn’t known.
“The idea that they came from a tiny village and then they ended up being these citizens across the other side of the world, I felt like after that trip that I sort of knew them better than I did beforehand.
He doesn’t speak the local language, which he says created a barrier for him connecting to the place.
“It’s sort of an awkward situation where I don’t speak the language and I can’t connect with people properly, but look like I should be able to, so it’s a horrible dichotomy where everybody assumes that I’m going to be able to speak it and I can’t.
“So you’re like a tourist who’s in disguise a native. It’s the worst of both worlds.”
However he says he does believe he’ll go back one day.
“I did feel like a made a connection with my culture in a way that I’ll happily, in a few years – not now because that crash course in Sri Lankan meant I’ll happily not visit there for a while – but eventually I’ll get to the point where I’ll take my kids there and pretend that I’m an expert on it.
“I’ll probably read just enough so that I know more than they do so that I can sort of pontificate in the way that many people do when they’ve been travelling.”
His mum Shanti also featured in the show and proved to be popular with viewers.
“Initially it sort of seemed like a novel idea… your mum getting some shine, but then it sort of gets to a point where she’s starting to enjoy it too much, people are starting to go to you, where’s your mum, are you bringing your mum out with you on tour… and then you start to resent her.”
He says he talks about his family a lot in his comedy, including talking about bring up his kids in quite a frank way.
They’re too young at the moment for him to explain that to them, but he says he’ll bring it up with them as they get older.
“What I will say to them is, you know, look around at all this stuff, do you want this stuff or do you want daddy to stop talking about you on stage? You know, make a decision.”
His show Irrational is a one hour show that begins with one story and then digresses.
“The show centres around the story that made me look at myself and my sort of character and then the whole show is a digression off that story basically.
Romesh Ranganathan will perform in Auckland on 28 April.
