By Nick A. Zaino III Globe correspondent, Updated July 31, 2024
Ahmed Bharoocha is far from his wilderness days as a stand-up comic. He celebrated 20 years in comedy this past June, and returns to Boston this week for headlining shows at The Square Root and Ralph’s Rock Diner in Worcester, plus a couple of drop-ins at the Dugout Cafe‘s Mendoza Line. Bharoocha spends most of his time in Los Angeles, performing and teaching stand-up, and spent three seasons in the cast of Adult Swim’s slapstick but strangely beautiful sitcom “Dream Corp LLC.”
One of the things he likes to tell his students is that he’s not teaching them how to be funny, which is a dubious proposition. He’s helping them find the ways they’re already funny. Boston is the place where he found that out for himself, and it took some searching.
“In the beginning, I was trying one-liners, or I would have dirty jokes or clean jokes,” Bharoocha says. “Eventually you start to notice what’s your personality and what just sounds right coming from your voice.”
Bharoocha had been doing comedy in Rhode Island for three years when he first discovered the Boston scene around 2007. He went from performing maybe once a week to getting onstage five nights in a row at The Comedy Studio or The Vault, burning off everything that didn’t feel true to himself until he had a strong comic core.
“It’s my fondest memories of comedy,” Bharoocha says. “It just felt like I was surrounded by people who all wanted to be funnier, just work on a better joke and give each other tags.”
“I think in Los Angeles, I’ve missed that,” he added. “I don’t think that there’s as much of a community that’s all trying to push each other.”
In the roughly four years Bharoocha spent in the Boston comedy scene before he left in 2012, his premises got more personal. His father is Muslim and his mother is Catholic, and he began to explore religion. One of his more enduring riffs, on gay marriage, started around then.
At the time, gay marriage was still illegal, and Bharoocha found it strange that one group of people could vote on another group of people’s happiness. He compared it to someone trying to order cake at a restaurant and having someone at the next table over cancel the order because they don’t like cake. He imagines that person explaining, “You can go home and eat cake in private, but we’d prefer if you didn’t call it ‘cake.’ Maybe a civil muffin?”
