Nimesh Patel comes to The Pageant for a night of stand up comedy on Sunday November 19th and ahead of his performance I caught up with him about his influences, college life and his upcoming show. 

A funny person both on and off the stage, Nimesh and I had an interesting conversation. He was genuine, kind and gave thoughtful answers to my questions. 

Patel is a stand-up comic on the rise. Patel was the first Indian American writer for SNL and has written for, among other things, the Oscars. He has four specials up on Youtube right now and will appear on Netflix’s Verified Stand Up which comes out on November 28th. His current tour, The Fast and Loose Tour is making stops at the Chicago Theater, the Theater at Maddison Square Garden as well as The Pageant. I asked Nimesh how he feels about his recent rise: 

“I got to take a moment to really take it all in. That’s why I got to remind myself it’s been such a whirlwind. Just two years ago, I was hoping to sell out 300 seats in some of these places, and now Chicago Theater is just about sold out. I got to remind myself to take a minute to take it all in and appreciate where I’m at,” Patel said.

When talking with Nimesh, I wanted to discuss his relationship with his college crowd. For those familiar, in 2018 at a show at Columbia University, about half way through his set, Patel got asked by organizers to end the show early in response to things he said on stage. Later, he posted that set on Youtube, defending his art and process. Since then, he has gained significant popularity yet still believes the college crowd to be valuable “ I was a college kid once, too. I know that mentality of what college kids are experiencing,” Patel said.

Last week, Patel did a college gig and told the audience the joke that got him kicked off stage at Columbia and it got a laugh. Patel made “it clear that [he] would doing all [his] offensive jokes in that particular college show to be like, I know you guys are not what everyone perceives you to be”. Patel states that “college kids like comedy, and I want to be the comedy that college kids like.”

I asked Patel, a premed student turned finance major turned stand up comedian, about his experience and thoughts about comedy in college. “Unfortunately, I didn’t get the comedy bug until after I graduated. I wish I had it earlier when I was in school and there was infrastructure around me to help me pursue other interests. I could be a pre-med guy, I could have taken creative writing or sketch writing or something.What I would say to college kids, who feel like they have a creative bug, but are pursuing something more traditional, for example STEM, listen to that little creative bug. At the end of the day, what you do informs everything else you do. It’s telling you that maybe you can learn something in your creative field that you’d be able to apply. They’re mutually beneficial. But at the very least, you’ll be scratching an itch. You can take whatever you like that you want,” Patel said.

We discussed how Patel got his start at his home club, the Comedy Cellar in New York City, arguably the best comedy club in the world for its cutting-edge comedy and its rotating lineup of comedy superstars that pop in on random nights. “It was in the summer of 2016. I had just gotten done writing for Chris Rock for the Oscars. So there was at least some people that knew that I had done that and I ran to a friend on the street. She said, ‘Hey, you want to audition at the Cellar?’ I was like, Of course. It was a Friday night, as all the auditions are in the main room. It was in election year. So I was doing prime election stuff, talking about Trump and Bernie and Hillary and a little bit about myself. ou got five minutes on that stage and I had my first joke hit. t was one of those blackout moments. I forgot all the stuff that I said, but I remember it just going really well. A week later I was doing Cellar spots like I was a regular,” Patel said.
For his Sunday show, Nimesh stated that you can expect that he will “definitely be making fun of St. Louis a little bit. I’ll also be talking about my own vices. I’ll be talking about Israel and Palestine. I’ll be talking about Mike Pence and a litany of stuff in between. But what you can expect is hard jokes and lots of laughs. I don’t have an order or anything like that. That’s why it’s called Fast and Loose”. 

You can catch Nimesh on Sunday at The Pageant at 8:00 or on Netflix Verified Stand Up which comes out November 28th. It’s sure to be a fun night of comedy.