The United States of America is currently in the middle of a tourism slump. One of the biggest reasons behind this is the draconian policies of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who in the last few months have detained or jailed visitors from Australia, Germany, Canada et al. International visitors are being arbitrarily stopped at airports and interrogated with the kind of intensity usually reserved for terror suspects. In comedian Kaneez Surka’s new 40-minute standup special I Found My People (released on her YouTube channel), this all-too-familiar scene and its power equations are turned around 180 degrees, to hilarious effect. 

During the first 5-6 minutes of the special, Surka pulls off a really interesting conceit. Having told the audience that she moved to New York for her career, but also to “find love”, Surka frames the tense airport encounter with security as a tall, handsome white man hitting on her. You singled me out amidst my white girlfriends? How flattering. Oh, you wanna pat me down? Slow down, cowboy! You get the drift. The tragicomic implications of the phrase “person of interest” form the punch line here (if it helps, visualise Jim Caviezel’s face from Person of Interest while reading this).    

Surka says, “When I go back to India and South Africa and they’re like, ‘we heard Americans are really racist’, you don’t worry. Because I will be telling them, that’s not true, that’s factually incorrect. Americans don’t see me as a person of colour, they see me as a person of interest and there’s nothing more flattering than that!”

I Found My People is about the search for community—sounds simple enough, right? But when you stop and think about it for more than a second, you realise how conditional, gendered and downright existential this quest can prove to be, especially if you’re inching towards the wrong side of 40. Surka doesn’t spell this out, of course, but her routine revolves around how this quest plays out differently for her, as a female, 40-something South African-Indian Muslim divorcee living in New York (the id-pol equivalent of an NBA ‘triple-double’). 

Take her (very funny) jokes about white women, for example, where she says she wouldn’t want to be a “Karen” i.e., a “party-pooper, conservative white woman”. Instead, Surka says she wants to be a liberal white woman imperiously expressing her offence at everything under the sun (“You don’t drive a Prius, that offends me, you eat meat, that offends me”). This joke works across a variety of demographics and in fact, acquires an additional layer of poignance as we go further into the special, when Surka riffs about being the only nonwhite girl in class at her South African boarding school (Surka grew up in Apartheid-era South Africa). She says that as a child, she really did want to be white.

I Found My People is a very enjoyable, breezy 40-minute ride. Its strongest feature is its ability to appeal to the slacker 21-year-old as well as the careworn, serially responsible 41-year-old.

Another extended gag that I really enjoyed was Surka being introduced to the social mores and conventions associated with (drumroll) the booty call. I am not going to reveal the punch line for this joke but the setup itself is so very enjoyable. Surka plays this in a clash-of-cultures way, but instead of Indian prudishness (the predictable route for such a joke), she leans into Indian hospitality, an inspired choice.   

Surka says, “I don’t know what the protocol for a booty call is. But I do know the protocol for having a guest over. As an Indian my mother has drilled that into me. And I remember that if a guest is coming over, I have to cook something. You have to feed your guests, that’s the number one rule. So, I’m in the kitchen, frying samosas, making chai, preparing mint chutney… I am making a full meal for my booty call.”

I will say this: I would have really, really liked more material around the liberal vs orthodox Muslim standoff that leads into the two-and-a-half jokes about Surka’s divorce (she even hints that those events need a dedicated special unto themselves). Basically, Surka, brought up by not-particularly-Muslim parents who drank and ate pork, ended up marrying into a really conservative Muslim family. So much so that her imposing hulk of a father-in-law received the dubious nickname ‘Al-Qaeda’ from his own children. This is not just standup fodder, it’s a whole sitcom, in my view. Surka wraps up this brief segment far too hastily, even though it is one of the most effective usages of the “finding my people” throughline here.

That minor disappointment aside, I Found My People is a very enjoyable, breezy 40-minute ride. Its strongest feature is its ability to appeal to the slacker 21-year-old as well as the careworn, serially responsible 41-year-old. And it does so without devolving into preachiness or treacly, after-school-special territory.