There is a single minute in Buy the Dip, Nimesh Patel’s new Netflix comedy special, in which the comedian nimbly and hilariously goes from describing his wife in labour with their first child to complaining about a Rolex sporting doctor wearing “insurance payments on his wrist” to Luigi Mangione. The hilarious bit is impressive for how much Patel packs into a single minute and how much it all speaks to the comedian’s own experience, expertise and worldview. Patel, who hails from New Jersey, was once a pre-med finance graduate from New York University.
He entertained going into healthcare before joining the ranks of finance bros. He abandoned all of that when he found a path in comedy alongside the likes of Hasan Minhaj and Rami Malek, a generation of brown guys who came of age in the shadow of 9/11 and have had to grow up being associated with Al-Qaida by the most racist swaths of American society. Patel is maybe the only one of them who could land that punchline about Mangione, which exists in the exact same intersection as him: of healthcare, finance and charges of terrorism that don’t stick.
In Buy the Dip, and across a lot of his comedy found online, Patel maintains the most laidback, effortless and unbothered vibe. He’s the kind of stand-up who makes it genuinely seem as though he’s floating along and the jokes just so happen to make their way to him. Patel understands that passive air to be both a feature and a bug.
Throughout our conversation he looks back at moments in his life and career, at times with regret, where he “didn’t deal well with adversity” (he gave up on pre-med after getting a C in one class) or he let fate decide his life choices for him. On the latter front, for instance, Patel lost his job in finance in 2016, at the same time that Chris Rock discovered him at the Comedy Cellar in New York, where he had been performing and honing his craft for years. Rock tapped the newly unemployed Patel to write for his hosting duties at the 2016 Oscars, which led to, among other things, Patel becoming the first Indian American to join the writer’s room at SNL, where he lasted a single season that nabbed him an Emmy nomination.
I have my own way of delivering my jokes in my worldview. To then recalibrate that and figure out how someone else would say it is actually a pretty difficult thing. Some of those joke writers are the best joke writers on the planet, but I’m a very good stand-up.” Through our conversation, Patel’s brain regularly goes to finance, whether he’s crunching the numbers on ticket sales growth at his shows (“I might have been the first comedian that proved that you could sell tickets via TikTok”) or casually dropping a reference to Apple and Nvidia’s stock growth while calculating what he sacrificed (a $125,000 payday) when backing out of the Saudi Arabia-sponsored Riyadh comedy festival last year.
Even the title to his special, Buy the Dip, is a finance phrase for buying stock while it’s low, which Patel wields playfully. On the one hand, it’s a reference to Donald Trump’s corruption, a big talking point in the special. Over the past year, the president’s tariffs wreaked havoc on the stock market.
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