Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa took the long road to stand-up comedy.
He was born in Sir Lanka, went to elementary school in New Jersey and lived in Berlin. He got a medical degree in Singapore and then taught himself how to code so he could get a visa to move to Europe.
All of that provided plenty of material for his current career as a London-based stand-up comedian — a career that most definitely has been taking flight with the release of a number of self-directed-and-written specials (including “French Kiss Tunnel” and “Woodapple Jam,” both from 2024).
Rajapaksa, who quit his “day job” last year to focus on comedy full time, is getting ready to release a new special. Although the release date has yet to be nailed down, fans can still hear plenty of the material when Rajapaksa brings his Paradise Gothic Tour to Northern California.
Rajapaksa performs on Oct. 12 at Punch Line in Sacramento and Oct. 13 at Cobb’s Comedy Club in San Francisco. For more information, visit punchlinesac.com and cobbscomedy.com. Learn more about at Rajapaksa at vidurabr.com.
I recently had the chance to chat with Rajapaksa about the big tour.
Q: Good to talk with you today, Vidura. Are you, are you still in London or are you at some fancy Holiday Inn Express in Bakersfield, California?
A: I’m in today in Chicago.
Q: Nice. One of my favorite cities.
A: It’s very pretty here. And also the weather is very nice. It’s becoming fall, hopefully.
Q: As I understand it, this is your very first tour of North America. How are things going?
A: Good. When I’ve toured other places, I end up usually touring just the capital cities of the countries. This is the most cities I’ve done inside one country. I live in the U.K., but even there I’ll do London, I’ll do Edinburgh, Glasgow, and then maybe a few more. But the U.K. is also a much smaller place to begin with.
It’s also just been nice to see sort of more of the breadth of the country as well because I had started in New York and then I went up into Canada for Toronto and then North Carolina and then Texas and then now I’m around here. I think this is the Midwest — Chicago, no?
Then I go further west, in a week or so.
Q: Well, spoiler alert here, Vidura — but the further you go west, the better it’s going to get. That’s especially true once you get to California. Do you get a chance to see or do anything as you’re moving through the country? Or is your schedule just too tight and jammed for that kind of sightseeing and you’re just like New York tonight, Philadelphia the next, and on and on?
A: Yeah, it’s a little bit like that where I need to be quite militant with my time. Say today, I got into the city at 11 a.m. There, I was able to check in early, so I had time. The hotel is right by the park, Lincoln Park in Chicago, so I went for a little run. That’ll be my main way of seeing the city — if I can get out for a run before the show.
Q: Since you’re right by Lincoln Park today, you could go to the zoo. And it’s free, I believe.
A: Oh yes, I went through the zoo on my run. There was a a very sleepy lion there.
Q: What would do you do if you had a full day off on tour? Are you a museum guy? Someone who has to taste the local cuisine?
A: I’m a very food-based traveler. But show days make it complicated where I don’t want to be too full and like bloated before I perform. On my off days, I usually will go find whatever the local food thing is, and enjoy as much of that as I like and then get back to the room and just sort of hibernate the rest of the day.
Q: OK, here’s a tip for you then — given that your concerns about feeling bloated and sleepy — don’t down an entire Chicago deep dish pizza before the show tonight.
A: Oh, no, definitely. Actually, Chicago has been good because there’s also the Italian beef and I ordered some of that to the hotel. I just ate that about an hour ago.
Q: I’m a huge Italian beef guy, man. If I could only have one meal in Chicago, I’m definitely going Italian beef sandwich. How have the crowds been thus far on the tour?
A: To a great extent, crowds are crowds in the sense of like, they are not necessarily better or worse place to place. It’s like other factors have much more of an effect on things than place. Like say in Houston, the show was at 3 p.m. on a Saturday, which I felt like, “OK, these, these people are in their afternoon. They’re not in like a nighttime mode quite.”
Even in the previous legs of the tour, say like the Asia-Australia leg, both the best and worst show were in the same city on the same night — the early show and late show — because the early show sold out and it was very full. Then the late show was maybe like half sold, and it was late on a Wednesday, so it’s not quite the same as late on a Saturday, and it was difficult.
My biggest tell is how chatty they are before I go on stage, for the most part.
Q: Is chatty good?
A: If there’s a feeling of energy and looseness, amongst themselves, then generally it means that I’ll have an easy time.
Q: Is there ever a too-chatty crowd? And if so, how do you handle the person who wants to be part of the show? Because I’ve had some friends like that. They’re like, ‘We want to go to a comedy show and sit close to the stage and get involved.”
A: This is like a plague. There’s a lot of this like speaking to the crowd content that is put up on the internet and this has trained the audience to think that that is what stand-up is. Then I feel very old man shouting at the clouds about this, but like that’s, you know, not what I do. And it’s not what I think the art form is at all.
Every now and then, there’s something like this that will happen. Before this became somewhat of a social media thing, the speaking to the crowd was just a utility of like, if someone interrupts, you address them long enough to handle the situation, then you move on with the show.
That’s sort of the extent of which I’ll address it. I will get to a laugh in whatever way, you know, whatever way my instincts serve me in the moment. And then just continue the show as soon as I handled that situation.
Q: Tell me about the material for this tour. Is it a lot of the same stuff that will be on your upcoming comedy special?
A: I’ve made little improvements, but it is literally like a line or a sentence. But with stand-up, it very often is like a word moved here or there that makes something exponentially better. But then every show generally just ends up being what has occurred in my life or what has been on my mind since the last one.
So most of what’s in this one is that this is my first year full-time as a comedian. And last year was my last year, sort of doing double life day job. I was laid off at some point.
That’s the main narrative arc. But it’s very rare that any stand-up show, like mine especially, rests on a just a few themes. It sort of goes all over the place.
Q: Seems to be a good buzz around the upcoming special — that perhaps it could be the vehicle to take your career to the next level.
A: I hope so. I’m sure it’ll do well enough. But I’m excited because with stand-up, there’s a thing of like once the material is done and you put it out (in a special) then you don’t do that live anymore. And I am at the point where I’m really starting to get sick of my own words here. So once (the special is) out, I can start writing the new hour (of material) and I’m very excited for that — mainly to creatively move on to the next thing,
But, yeah, I’m happy with this piece of work. And I’m kind of ready to get on the other side of this tour and then put out the special.