Saad Sarwana tries to juggle careers in physics and comedy.
Saad Sarwana is a Pakistani-American Physicist and Geek. His research is in superconducting electronics. He has over 40 peer reviewed publications and two US patents. Saad is also an amateur comedian for 20+ years, and is on a personal quest to perform in every state in the US, he is about halfway there. Saad has combined his love of Geekdom and his south asian heritage to create the “Science Fiction and Fantasy Spelling Bee”, a show he hosts at various local cons. On most days you can find him in the lab or home playing with his kids (he doesn’t get out much!). He lives in Westchester County, NY (home of the X-men!).
This story first aired in February 23, 2018 on an episode titled Double Lives.
Story Transcript
Growing up, I wasn’t the class clown, but I always wanted to be. If there was an opportunity to make a smart-aleck comment and get the biggest laugh possible, I took it as my personal responsibility to do so. What prevented me from really grabbing the class clown title was my love of math and physics so, in a way, my studies kept on getting in the way of my clowning around.
I was growing up in the mid-nineties, when the most popular book among the nerdy people who I used to hang around with was Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Everyone claimed to read it and understand it, and I was one of those people. So when it came time to graduate high school and move to college, I left Pakistan and I moved to Canada to McGill University in Montreal, where I joined the undergraduate physics department.
It was during freshman orientation that my new friends took me out to see the college improv troupe and my eyes were exposed to the world of amateur comedy. I was hooked. I loved this. There was a comedy club close by which had open mic nights. I used to go there just to watch. It took me a whole year to have the guts to actually attend one of the improv workshops, but once I did, I never missed a single one.
By the time I’d graduated with my undergraduate degree in physics, I was me, a fresh-off-the-plane immigrant was now part of the college improv troupe. I'd even tried stand-up a couple of times but it was time to move on and I didn’t want it to end. So I did what every other undergraduate does in this situation. I went to grad school.
Because even in all this time my parents had always taught me that you must have a career and I still loved science and physics so I joined the Physics Department at Stony Brook on Long Island, which is right next to Brookhaven National Labs, and I continued my research in superconducting electronics and physics. I kept on doing stand-up on the side. I tried to find an improv troupe in Stony Brook. I couldn’t find one so what I did was I tried to start one. I failed miserably.
But I found a local comedy club and I started going there. One of the graduates from that local comedy club’s improv group was Kevin James, who had just left Long Island - he's from Stony Brook as well - and moved to L.A. so I was performing with all these comedians who used to hang around with Kevin James. They started giving me tips on what to do in stand-up so I started doing more stand-up.
My act at that time could best be described as a Pakistani Yakov Smirnoff. What I did was political correctness had started coming into comedy and I took all the hacky 7-Eleven racist jokes and I could get away with doing them so I started doing them. It was horrible. I’m embarrassed to say that I even did any of those jokes. But I didn’t know any better and I gradually started getting better at doing comedy.
Then 9/11 happened and in those times I was one of only maybe three Muslim comedians doing stand-up in New York. I realized that I had to say something important. I had something important to say. So I started talking about my life and what my life was. It was basically a life of a single Pakistani Muslim male who had come to America on a student visa to study physics. Basically I talked about racial profiling.
And I started getting a lot of laughs. I got profiled by 20/20 on a story about Muslim comedians. I passed a lot of comedy clubs. I started even getting gigs at colleges and I got approached by a casting agent who said, “Hey, I can put you on TV and you can get paid.”
I’m like, “Paid? I’m on a student visa. If I start doing comedy for money, I'll be taking jobs away from American comedians. I could get deported for doing that.” But I said, “You know what? I think maybe I'll get away with things under the table so…”
And I couldn’t really say no because this is what all my comedian friends hoped and wished for, to get their own sitcoms. For me I was like, “Nah, this is gonna disrupt my lab experiments.” I had no problems doing stand-up at night because I could work in the lab during the day and the shows were usually nights and weekends where I was free, but these auditions were during the day.
But against my better judgment I started to go out for these auditions, and let’s see what I auditioned for. I auditioned for a 7-Eleven employee, a cab driver, a gas station attendant. You might be noticing a little bit of a pattern here. The one audition I really remember was I was doing a research project in quantum computing superconducting implementation with IBM Research in Yorktown Heights one day and the next day I was in the city auditioning for a commercial for IBM. It was for a software engineer so it wasn’t like I was breaking any boundaries there either.
When I used to go into these auditions and normally when I was a physicist or as a comedian I used to be unique when I go into these rooms. When I used to go into these audition rooms there was a roomful of people who looked exactly like me and even I was like, “All these people look the same.” Finally I told my agent that, “Please, don’t send me out for anything unless it’s different and unique.”
She finally contacts me and she says that she has this opportunity for a new feature film that they're making and they want me to play the part of an Indian stoner. I’m like, “Okay, submit my thing.”
So she sends me the script finally. I get the script and the first scene is described to me, and this is the scene I have to act out in the audition, is it starts out with… how should I put this delicately? A moonshot of my character. He's turned away from the camera and he's shaving his genital area and hair is falling down. I’m like, “I am not doing this.” Besides, I’m a Muslim and Muslims are supposed to already shave that area so they might have to use some CGI or something to create that so it’s probably not going to work.
I never went for that audition. For those of you who haven't recognized that movie, that movie was Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Kal Penn who got that role went on to do great things, including work at the White House. Somehow his whole career wasn’t sabotaged by that pot-shot.
So I went back to my research. I concentrated more on my research. I published more papers, kept on doing comedy on the side, pretty much dropped auditioning because I wasn’t really an actor, and I told my agent that, “Unless you get a role for like an awkward Pakistani physicist, I’m not really interested.”
So she contacts me a few months later and she says there's a new sitcom which is being shot out in L.A. and if I would like to fly out to L.A. to try to audition for this spot. It’s a sitcom about physicists. I’m like, “No one’s gonna watch a sitcom about physicists. Americans will not watch this. What’s my character?”
So she reads me what she has and she's like, “Well, it’s this awkward Indian guy. He can’t really talk to women so in this pilot most of the time you'll just be sitting there and smiling.”
I’m like, “You want me to fly to L.A. on my own expense to audition for a one-dimensional character who can’t even say anything and all I do is smile? You know what? I'll pass.”
That show, as most of you would have recognized, was The Big Bang Theory. Kunal Nayar who got the part of Raj Koothrappali now makes a million dollars an episode.
But I moved on. I continued doing my physics. I got married. I had children. Instead of doing comedy at night I changed diapers at night, pretty much the same thing. And I concentrated on my research.
Finally, I get a call after a long time from The Discovery Channel. I, at this point, had given up on comedy and they said, “Hey, we’re looking for funny physicists who can take YouTube videos or internet videos and make funny smart-aleck comments about them and explain the science behind them.”
I’m like, “This I can do. I've been doing this since high school.” So I sent in my audition tape and I got it. The show is called Outrageous Acts of Science. We've been going around about six years in the Science Channel. It’s one of their highest-rated shows. It’s watched by over four million people globally.
What I've learned from all this, because my friends, all my comedian friends tried to follow their dreams and become comedians and none of them made it. Some of them even got cast in pilots which never got made and they just struggled and failed and they experienced a lot of pain just like I did before I got this show. And what I've learnt from all this experience is that if you're a professional and you have a passion for doing something, don’t follow your dreams. Just keep on what you're doing on nights and weekends and if you're lucky your dream will come find you. Thank you.