‘Deli Boys’ is a quirky and smartly written crime comedy

In “Deli Boys,” a surprisingly sweet, deceptively subtle comedy of violence and panic premiering Thursday on Hulu, Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh play Pakistani American brothers Mir and Raj Dar. Their father, Baba (Iqbal Theba), owns a chain of convenience stores throughout the Delaware Valley — Philadelphia is the center of the action — and plans to move into golf courses.

After Baba dies — hit in the head by a golf ball, ironically — the brothers learn from their beloved Lucky Auntie (Poorna Jagannathan), who has just shot someone in the face, that his real business, in which she is an associate, was processing and dealing cocaine. As drugs go, cocaine is a more acceptable vehicle for comedy than, say, heroin, meth or fentanyl, though it is very bad for you and the social fabric in general. Marijuana, which went mainstream decades ago, is hardly worth mentioning anymore; stoners are merely later-generation drunks in the book of comical inebriation. (And it is, for all intents and purposes, legal.) “Deli Boys” creator Abdullah Saeed has a history in weed media, including hosting the cannabis cooking show “Bong Appétit” and writing for the HBO pot-delivery comedy “High Maintenance.”

Mir and Raj are schematic opposites, physically and temperamentally. Mir, who works for his father’s legitimate business, completely unaware of the illegitimate one, is the smaller, more compact, more driven brother. He models himself on his father, whom he lives to impress, and points out at every opportunity that he has a business degree from “prestigious” Drexel University — Philadelphia local color. Lanky Raj, whom we meet passed out among his “orgy cabal,” is the grasshopper to Mir’s ant, a happy-go-lucky slacker who asks his brother, “How can you wake up every morning and go into work when you know you don’t have to? It’s up to us to enjoy this life for everyone who looks like us but doesn’t have it.” A split screen contrasts their carefully executed wake-up routines, coffee versus cannabis.

Baba’s death creates a power vacuum among his associates that Lucky vies with Ahmad (Brian George) to fill. (“Leave the business to me and stick to making biryani,” he says; there is an anti-patriarchal streak to the humor.) As it happens, Mir and Raj will be sucked into that vortex, which includes avoiding the FBI — in the persons of eager new agent Mercer (Alexandra Ruddy), who is developing a case, and regional director Simpson (Tim Baltz), a genial credit stealer — and paying off Peruvian drug suppliers who want their money, or their lives.

Poorna Jagannathan plays Lucky, one of Baba’s associates fighting for control of the business after his death.

(James Washington / Disney)

Their road to solvency over 10 sitcom-length episodes brings our heroes into contact with a variety of human stumbling blocks, including Tan France, from “Queer Eye,” as a hood over from London; Chris Elliott, as a local policeman who learned about following protocol “the hard way”; and Kevin Corrigan as New Jersey mob boss Chickie Lozano, whom Raj keeps calling Lasagna, whose sociopath daughter, Gigi (Sofia Black-d’Elia), attacks him as a “f— boomer who thinks women can’t be involved in business.” There are jokes seated in the generation as well as the gender gap: “Racist old-world thinking, man,” Raj tells Ahmad, when Ahmad refuses to work with Indians because “they’ll rob us blind like they did during Partition.”

Apart from that, Mir has a fiancée, Bushra (Zainne Saleh), who has a mother, Seema (Sakina Jaffrey), who doesn’t like him. Raj, whom people can’t help but like, has a girlfriend, Prairie (Alfie Fuller), who is also his shaman, but stumbles as well into a sort of nonrelationship of convenience with Nandika (Amita Rao), who rates him “a Philly 10.”

The series mines an old strain of film comedy in which a team of innocent idiots are thrown into a world of crime or intrigue. Hope and Crosby, Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello, the Bowery Boys, Cheech & Chong all went there, if not quite so covered in blood. Because Mir and Raj are in danger of their lives, we accept whatever extraordinary, extra-legal steps they might take to come out all right, even if we might prefer that everyone just get along and nobody got hurt, or was even made afraid. Well, I would, but I’m sensitive that way.

Creating comedy in which the principal characters are involved in crime does require some balance — worse criminals to contrast with the nicer ones, or a deserving or faceless target, or, as here, no other option. But mostly, we like people who make us laugh; whatever else they get up to, we want good for them, a happy, relatively moral ending, free from tension, out of danger. That isn’t necessarily where the series goes — another season is implied — but as to laughs, “Deli Boys” delivers. It’s smartly written, festooned with quirky business, farcical situations, droll asides. Above all, it’s built on great performances, even in the smallest roles, that ground the wackiness and so make things only funnier.