Review: The Outsider; A Memoir for Misfits by Vir Das
From using humour to deal with bullies to repurposing failure as material for his stand-up comedy, Vir Das’s new book provides many laughs and a few insights into his life
In his new book, The Outsider: A Memoir for Misfits, Vir Das, Emmy-award winning stand-up comedian, actor and singer, addresses issues of identity and adulthood. These are weighty matters presented like a song sung by one who knows it is going to end but who also realises that while it plays, someone will dance, cry or smile. The short prefatory note mentioning that the book’s subject is a fool immediately endears the author to readers, all of whom are possibly also seeking answers in various stages of their own lives.
So how did Das discover his ability to make people laugh? As a student at Lawrence School, where teachers encouraged his talent as a speaker, Das, who, in the age-old tradition of Indian schools, was routinely ragged, turned to humour as a defence mechanism. His amusing repartees to bullies provide a picture of the growth of a dissenter. From his grandfather, he inherited his obsession with stories and American television made him enamoured of the West. All of it led him to find freedom in singing and participating in stand-up shows.
But the road to success is rarely smooth and Das has had to contend with his share of failures. Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour, Truman Capote once said and this seems to have been the case here too. Clearly averse to self-pity, Das hilariously turns defeat into more fodder for comedy. The lovers he couldn’t have, the gigs that got cancelled, the jokes which the government found seditious and the death threats that left him sleepless are all material that’s presented with an unbeatable punchline. Even when the stories are small, for Das, the flamboyant retelling of them is important as a representation of his life. Viewed in this light, his failures then are almost better than his successes. The award-winning Vir Das here is merely an extension of the man who acted in flop movies, has a sabotaged heart and nurses a broken spirit.
An interesting section that deals with his family’s move to Lagos, Nigeria, provides an insight into what makes the author’s humour both universal and particular. The young Das’s awareness of the complex nature of racism is acute: “We were trusted by white people, tolerated by Black people”. He writes with sensitivity also about the freedom that Indian families experienced in Africa during the late 1980s when the continent was trying to find itself after years of colonial rule. His sense of being an ‘outsider’ was sharpened in Lagos where he stood out because of his skin colour and his facility with English, which was seen as alien. The experience did not make him wary of the native population. Rather, it made him look more closely at fellow Indians, who, he believes, do not accept joy or sorrow with openness. His realised then that his displacement to Nigeria had made him joyful, that he could finally express himself without worrying about what anyone else thought: Africa was nazar-proof, he writes.
Das broke into the mainstream with a brand of stand-up comedy that makes satire sound stylish yet simple. The Outsider: A Memoir for Misfits is funny, courageous and honest and succeeds by peeling the layers of the author’s experiences to allow his audience to see its own mistakes and virtues. Having anointed himself in the title as an outsider and misfit, Das then goes all out to prove that he is a citizen of everywhere, nowhere and also somewhere in-between. No mean achievement.
Kabir Deb is a writer, editor, book and film reviewer, and translator.
