Comedian Nimesh Patel knew the second he was diagnosed with testicular cancer that he would be talking about it on stage very soon. And about a week later—after successful surgery to remove his right testicle—there he was at the Comedy Cellar in New York City making jokes about his one remaining ball.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Saturday Night Live’s first Indian-American writer breaks down how he turned cancer into comedy in his new special Lucky Lefty and shares his reaction to the way his mentor Chris Rock tackled his own traumatic incident with Will Smith on stage. He also reveals why he turned down an invitation to appear on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show after inadvertently becoming a hero on the right when he was kicked off stage by Columbia University students mid-show in 2018—and how that experience made him rethink the debate over “cancel culture” in comedy.
“The full title is Lucky Lefty, Or I Lost My Right Nut and All I Got Was This Stupid Special,” Patel explains of his expertly crafted special, released on YouTube last month. “And if it’s not clear, I lost my right nut to testicular cancer and not, like, some bike adventure.”
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The comedian says he knew “immediately” after he got the diagnosis that he would be talking about it on stage. “The night I went to the hospital, I knew it was going to be something,” he explains. “Having done comedy now for almost 14 years, you kind of get an understanding of when something’s happening to you that you should be taking notes about. I knew right away that something was happening that was going to be fun to talk about. I did not know it was going to turn into a 45-minute thing.”
“The great Hannibal Buress once told me, you got to talk about it right when it happens,” he adds. “You gotta get on stage right away, even if you don’t have shit written. Just get on stage right away.” Patel went up at the Comedy Cellar in New York just a few days after the surgery and “ripped the Band-Aid off” by telling the audience what happened. It helped that by the time he started joking about it, he was already cancer-free.
Before he got cancer, Patel’s biggest claim to fame was getting kicked off stage in the middle of a stand-up set at an event for Columbia University’s Asian American Alliance in 2018.
“About 20 minutes in I said something that some of them found a bit offensive, which at the time I never found offensive and still don’t find offensive,” he tells me, five years later. “And I think, if you were to ask those organizers if they find it offensive now, I think they may have changed their tune. But they came on stage, kicked me off, cut my mic after asking me to make some closing remarks.”
The joke that got him in trouble was premised on the idea that no one would choose to be gay if they were already Black. “Nobody’s doubling down on hardship,” he said from the stage. “No Black dude ever wakes up, looks in the mirror and says, ‘You know what? This Black shit? Too easy. I’m gonna put on a Madonna halter top, some Jordans, and make some Indian dudes really uncomfortable.’ That’s never happened before.”
The joke got some awkward chuckles from the audience, but moments later, the event’s organizers walked on stage and accused him of being “disrespectful.”
“I can see why you would take it as kind of offensive. But it’s not at all,” Patel says now. “The most offensive part is the tag when I say that the only person who chooses to be gay every day is Mike Pence. That is homophobic in a way, right? That’s me kind of outing someone who may or may not be gay, and I’m making fun of him. That I know is offensive. That was not what they took umbrage with.” It also got a much bigger laugh from the young, progressive audience.
After the story went “mega-viral” in the following days, Patel got an email from Tucker Carlson asking him to appear on his Fox News show. “And I’m like, ‘Dude, I don’t want to talk to you!’ I was featured on Breitbart. People wanted to make me a martyr, like it was the left eating their own.”
Carlson wanted him to talk about “cancel culture,” but Patel ended up going on Joe Rogan’s podcast instead. “If I was gonna talk about it, it was going to be on the biggest platform possible,” he says in an implicit dig at their relative audience sizes.
In February of this year, a clip from that podcast interview popped up in a “documentary” that Carlson made for Fox Nation called The Death of Comedy. “I know why they took the clip from Rogan, because had they emailed me or contacted me, I definitely would have said no.”
“Hey clown, your whole documentary is wrong. I see you only used my Rogan clip because I said no to your producers. This take is stupid,” Patel tweeted at Carlson after the trailer dropped.
More than anything, Patel says that he just didn’t want to become some sort of conservative spokesperson because of what happened to him. “That was a thousand percent in my head,” he says. “I’m pretty centrist politically. I did not want to be a living martyr for anybody, whether it was Breitbart or Tucker or any other kind of right-leaning group or institution that wanted it to make a mountain out of a molehill.”
“I had the same sentiment then that I do now about people trying to hype this idea that comedy is dying, and that you can’t say anything that you want, or whatever the hell it is,” he continues. “I don’t know how these people sustain the argument when there are right-wing millionaire podcasts. There are people who are fully bona fide rightwingers going on national tours and selling out. What is dead? What are you talking about?”
“Last I checked, Chappelle is still selling arenas out,” Patel says. “So if that’s getting canceled, then cancel me.”
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