An evening of comedy by Amir K. with host Reza Peyk at Centennial Theatre, Sunday, May 26 at 8 p.m. Tickets $45/$35/$25. For more information visit centennialtheatre.com.
IT was the Monday after the office Christmas party, and Reza Peyk was being asked into his boss's office.
Memories of the weekend's festivities flooded back to him.
What had been uproarious when seen through the prism of low-light and beer goggles was now a historical fact to be viewed with humourless scrutiny, and Peyk had an inkling he was about to get canned.
He'd mocked everyone he worked with at the marketing firm, including his boss, in an impromptu roast.
"He pulled me into the office and he actually literally forced me to do stand-up," Peyk recalls.
Unaware of open-mic nights and amateur hours, Peyk rented out Centennial Theatre and performed.
Ten years later Peyk is back, and this time they're paying him.
"I haven't grown, I'm still at Centennial Theatre after 10 years," Peyk says.
While Peyk was summoned to the stage, his fellow stand-up comedian Amir K was forbidden.
Amir K, also known as Amir Kamyab, has played gigs across North America and even turned in a small role in the Academy Award-winning film Argo. But 10 years ago, he was still doing his best to keep his comedy a secret, mainly from his father.
"In the Middle Eastern community, comedy or stand-up comedy isn't a viable option," Amir says, explaining his father's skepticism. "He thought it was me being a clown, literally dressing up as a clown and performing for people."
Following the Iranian Revolution, Amir's father gave up everything to which he was accustomed to bring his family to North America.
At four years old, Amir began learning the power of jokes as a way to get attention and as a substitute for size.
"I was always the smallest kid in the neighbourhood," he says. "I couldn't fight anybody . . . so I would just have to fight them with my words."
Just before heading to UCLA to study history and political science, Amir had his first exposure to the soused patrons of stand-up comedy.
"It was like this really sh#!!y bar in Newport Beach, actually. I was 18. It was the first time I worked up the courage to go up and perform stand-up comedy," he says. "I must've rehearsed this five minutes that I wrote in front of the mirror probably a thousand times. . . . I go there and there's like two drunk guys at the bar that had no idea there was even going to be a show and I go up there and do this horrible act that I had over-rehearsed in my bathroom. Literally, there could've been nobody there and I would've still done exactly the same thing as I did with a shampoo bottle in front of my mirror. . . . I got maybe one laugh, I think they were laughing at me, not with me."
For some performers, that evening would have served as a warning that sent them scurrying back to their studies.
"I was hooked," Amir says. While he got one laugh in Newport Beach, he couldn't even get a smile from his father. "Shortly thereafter I got into UCLA and he was like, listen, you can't do this clown sh#!!,'" Amir recalls.
For Peyk, the choice between being a clown or a non-clown was no choice at all. "I got a tattoo a couple of days ago, it's a Charlie Chaplin quote and it says: 'I remain just one thing and one thing only and that is a clown,'" Peyk says. "His father is right, we're just a couple of clowns. . . . His nightmare came true."
Amir enrolled in UCLA for his father, but while ostensibly preparing for law school, Amir veered towards theatre courses with his electives, becoming more and more entranced with comedy.
During what was supposed to be a brief break between university and law school, Amir set up a business.
"The real estate market was really, really hot in California, so I decided to start this real estate appraisal business to save a little money to go to law school. When the real estate market tanked after about three or four years of doing that and my dad had left for Iran, I decided I did everything I needed to do for my dad and my parents," he says. "I just decided to jump into comedy and follow my dream. . . . It's like coming out of the closet as a comic, it's so funny. I can see how some of my gay friends felt."
His father now lives in Iran, and while Amir jokes that "His disappointment comes from another country," he allows that his father has become supportive of his career.
Arriving in Edmonton, Alta. from Iran without even a smattering of English at 13, Peyk initially struggled to translate his sense of humour into the Canadian tongue. "I would make little jokes here and there and my classmates would laugh and that would help me fit in and not be made fun of so much," he says. "I think it was kind of a defense mechanism, too."
The Iranian sense of humour is dense and distinct but largely ignored by the outside world, according to Peyk. "With all the stuff that's going on in the media and all that we're hearing about Iran and that region, unfortunately it's hard to put a sense of humour to our people," he says.
"To me, I think Iranians are actually the funniest people in the world."
Translating the layers of Iranian humour into the stricter setup/punchline guidelines of Canadian comedy has been one of Reyk's passions. "It's literally two different types of humour from two ends of the world but they kind of mesh together somehow. It's beautiful."
While their comedy is meant to be for everyone, both Peyk and Amir share the experience of living their lives as Iranians, sometimes when surrounded by the hostile and the fearful.
One of Amir's most-watched performances includes a description of boarding a flight in Alabama and deciding to masquerade as a terrorist for the sake of messing with racists.
While he allows the story is embellished, Amir says it's not entirely fictional, either.
Reyk has similar tales. "I've been to Atlanta and South Carolina, when you get deeper south they don't even know where Iran is half the time. 'That's in Iraq or something,'" he says, quickly modulating into a southern accent.
Reyk regularly performs in front of crowds of different races and ethnicities today, but early in his career he found himself turning into something bordering on a caricature. "I was doing a lot of this Middle Eastern stereotype stuff," he says. "I was getting sick of myself being under this umbrella of ethnic comic."
Peyk appeared to self-destruct, becoming verbally abusive to his audiences. "Just to try to get away from what I was used to I started going the other way and being offensive on stage just to experience what it's like to get really awkward," he says. "I started really pushing the envelope too far and it got me banned from some of these clubs in the city."
While there were some excruciating performances, Peyk explains that it was a process of becoming fearless on stage. "I'll train all the muscles, I don't care what we're talking about. I feel like if we've cried about it, we can laugh about it," he says.
Despite his verbose nature, Peyk initially struggles to quantify the appeal of being on stage.
"It's something about that honesty and it's something about that vulnerability that you have up there," he says eventually. "It's when I feel like I'm at my most honest."
Amir's style on stage is slightly different from Peyk's, leaning more toward character work, but he also speaks about the stage in reverential terms. "My true passion is stand-up and it will always be that," he says.
While he is a skilled writer, much of Amir's comedy is spontaneous. "I do a lot of my writing on stage which is kind of fun and I think unique to my act," he says. "I've been working to be so comfortable on stage that when I'm talking to the people it's . . . just like I would do in a circle of friends."
