Comedian Shaun Majumder focuses on the chaos of fatherhood on new LOVE Tour
The former This Hour Has 22 Minutes star draws on his experiences with two kids under age three at home
Shaun Majumder.
The Massey Theatre and Laughter Zone 101 present Shaun Majumder: The LOVE Tour on May 13 at 7:30 pm at the Massey Theatre
ASK ANY PARENT what it’s like to have a second child, and they will tell you that your math is off if you assume it’s twice the work as having one. Newfoundland and Labrador-born, Los Angeles-based comedian Shaun Majumder is one of them. Speaking to Stir from the home he shares with his wife, Shelby Fenner, and two daughters—Mattis, who’s approaching three years old, and Eslyn, who’s almost five months, the little ones occasionally jumping on the call—he admits that welcoming another baby into the world is far harder than he ever anticipated.
“The other day I woke up going, ‘Omigod, I hate this, this sucks; this parenting is garbage. I may even put my new kid up for adoption on tour,” Majumder says, referring to the LOVE Tour that will bring him to the West Coast. “She’s lovely. It’s not that I don’t love her; she’s perfect. But we just can’t deal with it. It’s too much headache. It’s not double the amount of work; it’s exponential. Even right now, Mattis is banging on the door. The first kid doubles your life work; add the second kid and it exponentially turns it into 10 times the original. I don’t know how compound interest works.
[Here, Mattis says hi while I’m on speaker phone and talks about going to the zoo that day and seeing the tigers and meerkats and her dogs Jazzy and Freddy and soon it’s going to be her birthday and she’s going to be three and do you like surprise parties? Eslyn also joins in to make some noises.]
“It made me laugh the other day, how incredibly hard it is, and how I don‘t know how to get out of this contract with these children now,” Majumder says. “We’re stuck. I can’t sell them, I can’t put them up for auction. I can’t put them on eBay. I’d like to sorta keep them around because they’re super fun, but I don’t know yet. I gotta work that out.”
With the joyous chaos that’s currently enveloping his home, Majumder admits that he’s still also figuring out exactly what his material will be for the tour that will take him all across the country. What is for certain is that the LOVE Tour will focus on what being a father, husband, and family member is all about. It’s the flip side of the artist’s 2019 HATE Tour, which arose out of life in the Trump era, the rise of overt racism, and the barrage of toxic vitriol that Twitter trolls unleashed on him after his “Beige Power” sketch on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
“At first, it felt like stand-up, with the hecklers, and it was going back and forth and back and forth, and I couldn’t believe what I was reading,” Majumder says. “It really struck a nerve with white supremacists all over North America. I was just a Newfoundlander making fun of the fact that I was beige and pretty soon everybody was going to be beige.
“This thing is a direct contradiction to my HATE Tour,” he says. “It revolves around me being a dad—a new dad, an old dad—all of that.”
Majumder, like most artists, is just now returning to the stage after a long pandemic-induced absence. His family spent much of COVID in Newfoundland with some time in Michigan. “My whole world over the last two years essentially kind of stopped and I’ve been being a dad,” he says. “How it affects my material remains to be seen. It’s still a work in progress even as we sit here.” [Majumder and Mattis chat about the “leafy” whale and the donut whale and other whales.)
He jokes about putting his baby up for auction while on tour, given how much work she is—noting that, in the era of cancel culture, there’s a part of him that is half-tempted to see what kind of outrage he would spark if he managed to convince people he was for real.
“What I was blown away by on my HATE Tour was how people take everything so literally, online and on Twitter,” Majumder says. “That’s the danger of humour and comedy: it’s not black and white, and you do have to push the boundaries, and you do have to say things that are off-kilter and strange to get people to see it a certain way. That’s a risk you’re always going to take. What makes us human is we laugh, but it is a different world we’re living in: what can you say and who’s going to cancel who? I do worry about that, but I think I would have been more worried about that with my previous show.
“Stand-up is one of the hardest of all the disciplines,” he adds. “But I love being present on-stage. I love sharing ideas and thoughts and bringing perspectives. I haven’t been doing it every single night of my life these last two years, and I’m a little bit nervous to bring this tour out to the world, but one thing I do know and that has been consistent is that I feel a real strong connection with an audience, always, when I’m on stage, and I think people are hungry to get back into theatres and sit and lose their mind in a fun atmosphere that’s just a place where they can laugh. [Mattis tells her dad she’s putting on a tail for bunny hopping. Hop hop hop.] People are hungry for that right now, and I am as well.”
Majumder has several other projects in the works, including a role on the forthcoming Epix sci-fi horror series From, a TV drama that is “not funny at all”. He left This Hour Has 22 Minutes after more than 16 years in 2018; he says he had ideas for how the program could move forward that didn’t jibe with those of the showrunner at the time. Among the many other credits to his name are Race Against The Tide, Cedric The Entertainer Presents, Unhitched, The Firm, Detroit 187, ‘da Kink in my Hair, Republic of Doyle, and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
Is Majumder worried, following the Will Smith slap to Chris Rock’s face at the Oscars, that comedians may be at greater risk of being attacked for saying something someone in the audience doesn't like?
“I’ve had people charge the stage once or twice with me,” he says. [Mattis brings him a fresh strawberry.] “Chris Rock had every right to make jokes and to do what he did and say what he said. It was offensive but it was also misunderstood. Regardless, violence is never okay and hitting somebody is never okay.”
Majumder notes that although his new show is called the LOVE Tour, it’s best to leave the kids at home. “It’s still an adult show,” he says.
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