by Gina Yashere
After destroying a showcase that had taken place in a comedy room I was running at the time, and had hosted, that TV opportunity was given to another comic, who had a similar style to Dawn French, a very popular white comedian at the time who was married to Lenny Henry, so her style and material differed greatly from all the other Black comics. I was so cocky-confident that I would get the gig that I’d approached the producer of the show to ask what date I would be needed, and when she paused, gulped, and then informed me that they had passed on me, for about two seconds I’d smiled, thinking she was joking, before the horrible realization set in. I was absolutely devastated.
Looking back, I can see why they went for that comic instead of me. She was unlike any of the other Black comics working at the time. She had material that didn’t reference her Blackness at all but instead erred towards a straight observational style. She used none of the tools we used. No Jamaican or African accents or overt physicality. No recognizable references that induced an almost Pavlovian response with Black people. In fact, if you had closed your eyes, you would have been hard-pressed to discern her race, and yet she was still funny to us, and that made her unique on the Black comedy scene. This knowledge made the rejection no less painful. I had been given an important lesson.
I say “given,” not “learned,” as over the course of my career I’ve suffered the same disbelief and disappointment again and again. The Groundhog Day of disappointments, if you will. I wanted my reach and success to be unlimited, and I was super competitive, so I actively pursued all avenues of stand-up. I straddled both Black and white comedy scenes by performing different sets for each type of audience. My more generic, observational stuff, I did for the white people, and my unapologetically Nigerian stuff, for the Black audiences. This all changed when a white Welsh agent—whom I was trying to persuade to take me as his client, having seen me at the white clubs—followed me one evening to a Black show. After my performance, he shouted, “Why are you saving all your best stuff for the Blacks and giving us whiteys the diluted shit stuff?” Best piece of advice I’d ever been given in my career. I had internalized the whole “White audiences won’t connect with Black experiences” narrative.
From that day on I was authentically me in front of all audiences—well, semi-authentic, as it would be another fifteen years before I would acknowledge my sexuality onstage. My material about my Nigerian heritage worked just as well, if not better, in front of white crowds, as the characters were funny, and it also gave them a new insight into the immigrant experience. I was represented by that Welsh agent for the next ten years.
I was starting to earn a living from comedy. Not a great living, but enough to get by, while enjoying what I did, though I still bought the Evening Standard every Thursday to keep an eye on available engineering jobs, just in case the bottom fell out of this comedy career thing.
Greenwich in southeast London is very gentrified now, with its trendy restaurants, cinemas, and museums, but in the ’90s, it was a rough, working-class, racist part of town that Black people were often advised not to venture near after dark. Unfortunately, Greenwich was also home to a comedy club, Up the Creek, that was a rite of passage for any comedian who wanted to make it as a professional. I wanted to play there. The club owner, Malcolm Hardee, was a maverick. A character. A legend. And a crazy drunkard. There are so many stories about him. There’s this urban folktale of the time when he was at a comedy and music festival—and he painted his dick and balls in fluorescent paint that was visible only under ultraviolet lighting. His wife later walked into the tent, and UV lights lit up a fluorescent ring around her mouth. Malcolm was always playing pranks like that.
He, along with two others, were known for the “Greatest Show on Legs” act—they would get onstage completely naked but holding balloons that they would move around in ways so that their genitalia were always hidden.
The audience at Up the Creek was famous for being rough. Comedians were advised to not attempt to audition for a paid spot at that club till they had at least two years under their belt, and to still prepare for the worst. If that audience didn’t like a comedian, they wouldn’t boo, like a regular rough audience; they’d give the comedian a long, hard stare, then begin calling, “Malcolm! Malcolm!” They’d just shout his name until Malcolm returned to the stage, usually from the pub next door, and abused the hapless comedian as he or she left. “Well, he was fucking shit!” or something equally humiliating. Then the crowd would shout, “Malcolm, show us your balls!” Malcolm had the most hideous testicles I have ever seen. They were unusually long, wrinkly, and disgusting. He’d open his fly and he’d take out one of his balls, and the crowd would go absolutely crazy. That was how rough that club was. And that’s the club I wanted to perform in. I figured if I could handle this difficult of an audience, it would only make me stronger as a performer.
Veronica and I had been traveling around together auditioning for clubs since we’d come out of the comedy workshop, and I persuaded her to accompany me to Up the Creek. She was understandably concerned. “You sure you wanna do this?” she asked, surveying the room of shaved heads and blond perms. “Yup. If I can get this crowd, I can get anybody!”
As I looked into the crowd, I spotted a face I recognized immediately: Timothy. The guy who had made my life at Otis a living hell with his constant racist abuse. He was there with a group of friends, and I began to reconsider my decision. What if he started booing the moment I walked on? What if this room of white people decided to teach me a lesson for straying into their hallowed club? What if I just wasn’t funny to them?
I turned to Veronica. “See that dude? That’s Timothy! The guy who used to call me nigger at work every day. This gig might go tits up. If it does, I’ll meet you in the alley out back, and we’ll sprint to the car. If it doesn’t, I want you to watch him and his friends and describe every fucking facial expression to me afterwards!”
“The next person coming to the stage is a girl. She might be good. She might be shit. It’s Gina . . . !” That was Malcolm’s standard introduction. I walked up onstage and launched into my set with as much confidence as I could muster. Lo and behold, the audience began laughing and enjoying me. Timothy sat in almost the center of the room, only three rows from the front of the stage, so he was clearly visible to me as I performed. I looked straight at him but feigned a lack of recognition, as I didn’t think I would be able to adequately handle any kind of heckling from him or his friends. I just wanted to get this set done and get off.
Thankfully, Timothy’s friends laughed heartily with me, while his head spun. He stared at me as if he’d seen a ghost, then stared back at his friends, then stared back at me. This continued for the entirety of my set. After that set, I did that thing where you replay an event in your head with all the things you would have done or said differently, had you thought of them. In my new scenario, I would have humiliated him in front of the whole club, and he would have been forced out into the street with the sounds of jeering from his own community ringing in his ears. But it wasn’t to be. I was a new comedian and didn’t have the confidence or experience to disembowel this man in a club full of his peers. Plus we were two Black women in a room of white people, not far from where the infamous murder of Stephen Lawrence had taken place. So I just did my set and took solace in the fact that he saw me successfully slay the room. I’ve never seen Timothy since. Lucky him.
I left the stage to enthusiastic cheers and applause. “She was pretty good, wasn’t she?” Malcolm asked the crowd. The crowd cheered in the affirmative. “Should I give her a paid spot?” Again, positive applause. That’s how I ended up getting paid gigs at arguably the toughest club in London within a year of starting stand-up.
Up the Creek was also one of the first places where I died onstage. I was overconfident with my previous win there and was sure it was going to be a repeat kill. I learned that night that no two audiences are the same. That night they just stared at me. I couldn’t believe it. The same
jokes I’d used to great effect just a few weeks before. I was never a person who overstayed their welcome, so I got my ass off the stage before they started calling for Malcolm. I drew a coffin in my notebook that evening.
A guy came up to me after that set. “You know what?” he started. “You’d be funny if you stopped talking about all the African Black stuff.” He then offered me a hit of cocaine. I declined. Coke, in my mind, from there on out has always been synonymous with failure.
But I still kept going back to Up the Creek. It toughened me up a lot, and although Malcolm passed a few years ago, it’s still one of my favorite clubs to play to this day.
I took shows wherever I could. Travel was a large part of the job, and I loved it. I sometimes drove, but I also enjoyed long train journeys all over the country to all the places I’d never been allowed to go on school trips. I did shows in pubs and village halls. I did birthdays, hen parties, nightclubs where the mic was attached to the DJ booth and the cable was so short that I couldn’t stray more than three feet from the DJ. I even did strip shows. One particular show I did was for a bunch of rabid women who’d booked their local town hall for a girls’ night out. They’d also booked two male strippers. My job was to host the event and tell jokes between the two acts. I remember I drove two hours each way for a payday of £100 which was a lot of money for a night’s work at the beginning of my career. I threw myself into the show, and at the end of the evening, the male strippers and I took a bow together onstage. I was in the center, holding a large penis in each hand. The job had a lot of variety!
Eventually I started to get booked for shows out of the country. There is a large expatriate community all over the world, made up of teachers, financiers, doctors, and anybody else who emigrated to foreign lands for work or play. A few smart people among them set up music and comedy nights, and they’d fly in entertainment from the UK for Brits missing entertainment from home—there was a huge market for it. My new career took me to places such as the Netherlands, Spain, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and I worked on adding as many stamps to my passport as I could. This was a dream come true. I’d always wanted to see the world, and now I was being paid to do it. Nuts! I loved meeting different people and exploring different cultures and food.
There was the time I did shows in Indonesia for a British guy, Eamonn, who went from being a firefighter in the UK to working as a well-paid marketing consultant in Indonesia. He put on comedy shows just for the fun and joy of it and brought me out several times to Jakarta, the smoky, dirty capital of the country, and also the beach resorts of Bali.
I enjoyed going to Asia, but I encountered overt racism at the airports, constantly being singled out for drug searches. It got to a point where I’d have to factor in extra travel time for “traveling while Black.” While in Indonesia, I met a friend of Eamonn’s, another wealthy white man, who owned a small hotel on Gili Trawangan, one of the islands off the northwest coast of Lombok, Indonesia. He asked if I wanted to come and perform at his place. As payment, he’d let me stay at his hotel for a week. This island was tiny—so small that they had no petrol-driven vehicles anywhere on the island. People got around by foot, bike, or horse cart. It was an island frequented by divers, as the water was so clear. I took a forty-five-minute boat ride there from Bali and did the first-ever stand-up show in Gili Trawangan for around seventy divers and instructors, on a makeshift stage fifty feet from the sea. My opening joke was about how I’d once done a scuba dive in Mexico, where because my swimming lessons had ended at eight years old, I’d ended up sinking to the bottom of the sea and doing more of a scuba walk along the seabed. That was one of my favorite shows of my career, and it ended with a standing ovation, and many offers for free diving lessons. I called my best friend, Lila, in London. Lila, an accountant, loved to travel with me on my world tours and later became my tour manager. I told her to get a last-minute flight out to meet me, which she did, and we spent a week eating fresh fish caught by the local fishermen and sunbathing. This was the best job in the world!
Another of my favorite places to perform was Kuala Lumpur. Our first experience of Malaysia, a mainly Muslim country in Southeast Asia, did not start off well. Lila and I had just arrived from Singapore, where I’d done several shows in various clubs and bars in the previous weeks. Singapore and Malaysia are neighboring countries, with Singapore being the wealthier of the two. A favored joke among comedians in Singapore was that Malaysians were lazy, weed-smoking criminals. This theme came up a lot in shows I did in the weeks I was there. I remember Lila and me marveling at how Malaysians were stereotyped in the same way Black people were, and how racist we thought it was. The night we arrived in Kuala Lumpur, we went through more “random” drug searches at this airport, then checked into our hotel and went out for dinner nearby. As we walked back to the hotel, a moped rode up alongside us, and the rider grabbed the bag I was carrying, with my phone, camera, and credit cards, and sped off into the night. Lila, who had been a high school champion sprinter, threw off her flip-flops and chased him barefoot down the street, but he was gone. We reported the robbery to the local police, who told us this was a regular phenomenon, and we went back to our hotel, furious but unhurt. Luckily, the moment I had checked into the hotel, I had put my passport and the majority of my cash into the hotel safe before I went out, so though I was inconvenienced by the robbery, my trip wasn’t ruined. I had a show the next day in a sold-out four-thousand-seat theater, hosted by one of Malaysia’s most famous comics, Harith Iskander. I was informed that most of the audience would be Malaysian, not the British, Australian, and American expats I’d been used to performing to. This was going to be different. I walked onstage and began talking about how I’d just done shows for their rival country, Singapore, and how they’d been calling Malaysians criminals and thieves. I then followed with: “I thought that was unfair and racist, but within four hours of landing, I was robbed, you thieving motherfuckers!” It was a risk, but it paid off. It got a huge laugh, and I went on to tell the story of my robbery, peppered with a few Malay cuss words I’d gotten Harith to teach me before I went on. It was one of the best shows I’d ever done in my life, and to this day.
16
Warm Water Never Forgets that It Was Once Cold
Nigerians often don’t believe I’m Nigerian. They never have. I seem to not tick the boxes that deem me Nigerian enough. Whenever I announce my Nigerian heritage, suspicion and questions always follow.
“You are Nigerian?”
“Yep, that’s what I said.”
“You?”
“Yes, me. Well, my parents.”
“Your parents. The two of them?”
“Yes.”
“The mother and the father?”
“Yes.”
“The man and the woman?”
“Yes.”
“The sperm and the egg?”
“Jesus Christ.”
In a way, I get it. I was born in England. I have a distinctly Cockney accent. I don’t speak any Nigerian languages. Nope. None. Not my fault. My mum wanted us to be British. The mistake that a lot of African immigrant parents make when they have their children in another country is that they are so keen for their children to assimilate, they often prioritize the native language over their own, and my mum was no different. She wanted us to have all the opportunities that being British would afford us. My mum was well educated, and she had traveled extensively within Nigeria, as the daughter of a wealthy businessman. She could speak her own language, Edo, plus she could speak several other Nigerian languages, including Yoruba and Hausa. She never taught us any of them. As a kid, I was jealous of the Indian, Pakistani, and Greek Cypriot kids whose parents had taught them the language of their respective motherlands. When those kids wanted to have secret conversations among themselves, they’d often switch from English and leave the rest of us baffled. This made them no less English. They could easily switch back and forth from broad London accents. None of the African kids at my school seemed to ha
ve this skill.
Mum would often proclaim, “Yes, I want my children to be English!” And then she’d do her impression of the English accent that sounded like a cross between a seal and a ventriloquist dummy with its jaw unhinged. Even Nigerians in Nigeria sometimes insisted their children speak English, as it was considered a sign of higher education and class. My first cousin, Dorothy, was born in England but lived in Nigeria for eight years with her siblings and father. When she returned to London, she had a strong Nigerian accent, but she could not speak a word of Edo, our mother tongue. Her father had kept his children separated from Nigerian children so that they would not forget the Queen’s English.
In our household in England, everything else about our upbringing was very Nigerian. We ate mainly Nigerian food, from jollof rice to pounded yam to ogbono soup, and everything in between. We dressed in Nigerian finery for weddings, parties, and social events. To all intents and purposes, we were Nigerian children. But when the adults spoke among themselves, we didn’t understand them. Taiwo, my older sister, spoke some Yoruba from her eight years spent in Nigeria, but the rest of us, clueless. We were part of the “lost generation”—a generation of children born outside Nigeria, with no real ties to our home. We had lost our language and our customs, and had been assimilated into the more permissive society that was destroying our morals.
Mum always used Nigeria as a threat. If we didn’t behave, we risked being sent home. Taiwo had not had good experiences there, so Nigeria was the bogeyman of destinations. There were many stories of bad kids being sent back to Nigeria when the parents became exasperated with their bad behavior. A lot of them never came back, or if they did, several years later, they were . . . different.
