A Comedy of Errors

I like to think I have a pretty good sense of humour. My friends would probably say the same thing, but that might be because I laugh at everyone’s jokes, even the bad ones. But I appreciate a well-intentioned joke, I really do.

I often find myself in the midst of a Netflix binge too, staying up late to watch the comedic stylings of Trevor Noah, Aziz Ansari and Maria Bamford. They’re witty, they’re professionals, and they know how to get laughs that aren’t necessarily at the expense of others, except maybe themselves. I like comedy that is both intelligent and universal. I like comedy that doesn’t resort to belittling other people. I like comedy that makes me smile, because isn’t that the whole point of it?

Well, I went to a comedy club in Melbourne, Australia expecting just that. To smile. I moved here two months ago. I’m black. I’m British. I’m Ghanaian. At the moment my braids are blonde. In a sea of mostly white faces – including the comedians and the majority of new friends I came to the comedy club with – I was hard to miss. But I’m used to sticking out; it’s nothing new. And besides, I was about to laugh until my sides split, no one was going to be paying any attention to me; I was just there to have fun.

The first three comedians were a mixed bag; one good, one average, and one great. Besides a joke mocking the low income families of a particular Melbourne suburb, all three sets were mostly without incident. I am told that Aussie humour makes fun of everyone, the more or less fortunate alike, and that it’s “all in good fun”. I’m always up for being a good sport, so I take that at face value.

And after these three jesters, I was pretty comfortable, I’d had a drink and I was having a good time. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

And the headliner was someone I didn’t know. Tall, white, lanky and in his fifties with an old rocker vibe. Quintessentially Australian with an “I don’t give a f***” attitude.

To begin with, he caused me to guffaw out loud with jokes about getting old, about sex, about modern technology ruining dating. They’re topics that have become go-to-fodder for comedic material, but his delivery made them seem brand new and exciting.

And then, he gave us a “trigger warning”, and it was all downhill from there.

It was not just his continued complaints about the world being too ‘PC’. Or his impression of an ‘overly sensitive millennial’ whose right to complain about feeling offended, personally offended him, this joke of a man. These little things simply raised the first of many flags for me. The ones every minority has felt slowly rising within them just before someone offends a whole group of people and then wants to explain why their actions should be accepted.

His fifteen minute speech about how ludicrous gender identity has become and how feminism has made women bitter and shouty – to which he received hoots and cheers from the oh-so-tired men in the back of the room – was flag four of twenty. Yet still, he was a talented comedian and his delivery worked, and so I found myself chuckling along awkwardly in spite of my beliefs, sat in that uncomfortable space between amusement and embarrassment.

But I stayed with it, sat in the middle of a table of eight, faces turned towards the stage in a darkened room. I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck, but I stayed. I sensed all my flags at full mast, but I stayed. And I watched this joke of a man pointedly, as he headed into territory I knew he would head into, now that he had done ‘the women’ and ‘the gays’. I knew ‘the blacks’ were coming next, but like I said, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Not yet.

And then as casually as a breeze his next story began, under the guise of the “Too PC” part of his set, and he dropped the N-word so swiftly I wasn’t sure for a second that I had even heard it.

The second time he said it louder, as if just for me, so that I could be certain, and I felt my stomach drop. The third time, my face heated up. Then my palms got sweaty. And so on and so on. At least twenty times he said it, sprinkled throughout a joke that involved the rap group NWA (which stands for N****s With Attitude); but for some reason this waste of a man felt the need to say what the acronyms were for every time he referenced them, perhaps because it tasted so stupidly good on his tongue, I don’t know. All the while the whole room was collectively holding their stomachs to contain their belly laughter, and I sat surrounded by a sea of jostling white people, wilfully ignorant and unaware of what their laughter was really saying about them.

My head felt like it was on fire with rage. I felt the uncomfortableness of my new friends around me, still laughing along but less freely now. My presence was as awkward as it was inconvenient. But the idiot continued.

And this was his final act, the end of his show, the pièce de résistance. It was something that would no doubt make him unforgettable. Certainly for me at least. His story was a dated one, a regular ignorant piece that was worthy of an exchange between white and black teenagers who were still learning about the world and themselves. It was not a story a man who had lived for half a century should still be telling. He revealed to us both his lack of intelligence and his own hypocrisy in the telling of this story. The one about the white guy who sings along to a rap song whilst surrounded by black friends, who uses the N-Word, is told not to, and has the audacity to question why he can’t.

I am tired of this story and was tired when I heard it again. Perhaps this remnant-of-a-real-man made it worse by explaining the reasons why he knew he shouldn’t and couldn’t use the word. 400 years of oppression. The black community have taken it back for empowerment. It’s really not ok for a white man to say it. But then he added the caveat.

“They’ve made it sound so cool.”

They. We. The black people.

And he, of the white people, wanted it, so he took it. Isn’t that what white men do and have always done? I do not know why I was so surprised, but I was. That he could explain why white use of the word had been so oppressive, and then he could go ahead and use it, and continue somehow, to oppress.

He ended his show using the N-word too. It was the final sentence of his set, one last “F U” to whoever he was imagining would police his words if they heard him say it; me, the black community, perhaps the so called black “friends” he kept referring to as if a credible excuse for his actions, who could say.

Afterwards I felt like a deflated balloon; the smile I had been wearing all night had long since vanished. I made my exit from the place quickly, before the lights had come back on for too long, before people could really see my face, the only black person there, the butt of the last ten minutes of jokes. I didn’t want to deal with their uncomfortable looks; this wasn’t about them. But that was nothing new; whiteness has a way of taking over everything.

I didn’t stick around. I went home and chose to write this instead of crying. Instead of wishing every white face in that room dead, even those of my own acquaintances. Instead of blaming every white person I met subsequently, for the actions of that one.

And yet, the laughter of the entire room, signing off on his bullshit, I can never forget, or even forgive. It still haunts me, the ease with which it happened, the lack of note or reference to it from my acquaintances until I brought it up, a week later. The loneliness of being the only one of me in that room. The only one not laughing. The only one without a sense of humour.

I write this in the hope that one day, I’ll remember how to laugh again.