This year’s Indian Summer Festival will open with a Sri Lankan comedian who enjoys riffing on race and various nationalities. Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa brings his deadpan wit to the Vancouver Playhouse on July 9 as part of his Paradise Gothic tour.
Vidura plans to explore “immigration, ‘radical’ Buddhism, and the absurdities of attempting to build a life within late-state capitalism”, according to the Indian Summer Festival website.
He’s not afraid to venture into controversial territory. In one of his videos on YouTube, Vidura says that he’s jealous of how confident French people are. He goes on to describe France as the “Kanye West of countries” because its citizens believe the hype about their nation.
“The French people think that they’re the best whites,” Vidura quips. “I could not disagree more. They’re not in my top five.”
In the same video, he maintains that his favourite white people are actually the Irish. That’s because everything that the British did to Sri Lanka was first tested out on them.
In another video titled “One Thing Worse Than Being a Bigot”, Vidura acknowledges feeling empathy for young, white, liberal males under 40. He sympathetically comments that they were “born just in time to miss the glory days of your people”.
“You were doing so well for 500 years,” Vidura wisecracks, “and right before you pop out, everyone hates you. And you can’t even be mad about it. You even take it on the chin.”
Reconciliation through confrontation
He doesn’t restrict his jabs to white people—Vidura also takes aim at Indians for how they view Pakistanis. And he doesn’t have much good to say about Buddhist retreats in an essay on his website, even though he grew up in a Buddhist household.
“Retreats will seemingly afford you the relief of escaping your present reality, but do little to remedy the reason for which you are so eager to escape in the first place,” Vidura writes. “The only reasonable path to any reconciliation, be it internal or external, is confrontation. It is through confrontations, and the compromises which result from [this] that a person is slowly made.”
His final line about confrontations just might offer a clue into why Vidura’s comedy is so bitingly sarcastic.
Indian Summer Festival is co-presenting Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa with the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival on July 9 at the Vancouver Playhouse. The 16th annual Indian Summer Festival runs from July 9 to 19. For tickets and more information, visit the festival website.
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