If you’re house hunting in Toronto, Russell Peters has a place for you. It may not be for everyone. Though there is probably room for everyone.

“One, two, three, four, five … six, technically,” is the bedroom count according to Peters, the hometown comedy king. “Ten thousand square feet. Elevator. Indoor pool and outdoor pool. Wine cellar, a beautiful wine cellar. I don’t drink wine, but … a sauna. Two laundry rooms. Heated driveway. Double car garage and enough space on the driveway for about eight or nine cars … (Should) I say it’s on Edenbridge?”

He’s back in his hometown, in a hotel room talking up his new Amazon Prime standup special, “Deported.” While he’s at it, he’ll extoll the jaw-dropping assets of his Etobicoke house, which he has tried to sell in the past and has put back on the market. Between touring and obligations to his nine-month-old son in Southern California, he stayed there for only 10 days last year. But you don’t hear much about that son in “Deported” and Peters, 49, says you won’t in future.

“You see comics, they have kids and then all they do is talk about their kids … I check out when some guys talk about their kids unless it’s like something really spectacular.”

Still, he can’t entirely disentangle his career from his personal affairs. They’ve been intertwined since he first got started, talking about his Indo-Canadian upbringing in Brampton (and certainly since the first time he got lucky as a road comedian; it was in Moose Jaw, he tells the Star, “in a minivan”). But as a former boxer, Peters sees the domestic-life material in “Deported” in a pugilist’s terms: it’s the jab that sets up his heavier blows, the cultural observations and personal anecdotes — and dick jokes — that have formed the foundation of his standup.

(His verdict in “Deported” on his experience with the drug propofol: “I get it, Michael. I get it,” he says, gesturing heavenward.)

Recorded in Mumbai, the special puts the Toronto-born comic in front of his adoring but slightly reticent fans on the subcontinent (“I would have preferred a louder response in the audience, but that’s an Indian thing to be a little bit more reserved”), where there suddenly is a native standup scene. Asked if that’s a result of his influence, he concedes that it probably is — “when I die my legacy will be well, how many how comedy babies did I make? I made a lot of comedy babies.” (He later adds Lilly Singh, whom he met on the set of the 2011 movie “Breakaway.”)

A mammoth draw in much of the world and a big star here in his hometown, where he headlined at the Scotiabank Arena in 2018, in the U.S. he is happy at this stage to be working in comedy clubs, building his new set and eschewing larger venues until it’s ready. Pushing his art forward, he says, is a tricky, three-way dance: “there’s who you are, there's who you want to be and who they want you to be … you’re trying to figure out how to connect all three.”

He says he’s working on material about “cancel culture,” from the perspective of a man raised on the blunt, coarse TV of the 1970s (“innuendo, kind of harassment, racism, and it wasn’t presented to you as such”) faced with the very different demands of a modern audience.

In the meantime, he has other irons in the fire in TV (where he has already won a Peabody Award for producing “Hip-Hop Evolution”) and film. Chief among them: having helped tell the story of rap, Peters wants to tell TV viewers the story of his friend Rap, a founder of New York’s Paid in Full Posse gang.

“Nobody would know who he was unless you were a complete street person from Brooklyn in the ’70s and ’80s … This guy got sentenced to 230 years in prison and he got out after 33 years. He did 14 years in solitary confinement … his story is insane.

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“I feel like that would make for incredible TV. I just need somebody who can write dramatically … he’s caught a lot of bodies in his lifetime, but he’s an amazing guy.” (Even Peters’ fellow hip-hop aficionados who own Eric B. and Rakim’s groundbreaking 1987 album “Paid in Full” might not know that Rap is on the back cover.)

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Peters’ standup dates take him around the world and film roles like playing a magician in the upcoming live-action “Clifford the Big Red Dog” also keep him on the move. On those rare days now when he can get back to the GTA, the best days are not driven just by business, he says:

“Can’t get good Jamaican food in L.A., so I’ll get oxtail, rice and peas from Pat’s Homestyle on Queen Street here. And I’ll get these patties from (Scarborough) … fantastic. And then I’ll go to Swiss Chalet and I’ll make sure I get a chicken and rib combo, and then I will go to Harvey’s and I will get me a cheeseburger and some poutine, and as soon as I’ve knocked all that off the board I feel better about life.”

“Deported” is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Garnet Fraser is a deputy entertainment editor and a contributor to the Star’s Entertainment section. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @garnetfraser

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