Why are people so offended by this comic? Surely they realise he's joking?
Reginald D Hunter
Pride and Prejudice and Niggas
I rarely take offence, but were I to be offended, I agree with Reginald D Hunter: it would not be by comedy. As he says in his current tour: "How do you enter a comedy club and not work out that the motherfucker on stage might be joking?" Hunter is a 38-year-old American comedian who has lived in Britain for a decade. Back home in Georgia, he says lightly, racism is anything white people do that you don't like. Over here, it is more complicated. It must be, because Hunter, who is black, has been accused of racism himself.
For the first of my occasional day releases from radio reviewing into the world of comedy, I was keen to review a comic less puckishly bland than Radio 4's current selection. I was recommended Hunter, but didn't know the trouble he had caused. I wouldn't have guessed from his act, either, except that so much of it refers, in a faux-puzzled way, to the controversies he has fallen into. Hunter has such a beautifully paced and soft-voiced delivery, is such a gifted storyteller, and possesses such indefinable innocence, that I cannot imagine anyone not being charmed into laughter. More worryingly, perhaps, I found that I did not disagree with the sentiments behind his comedy, either.
Hunter is currently weathering criticism about this show's title, a dig at Jane Austen if anything. Pride and Prejudice and Niggas succeeds his 2004 show A Mystery Wrapped in a Nigga. He is thinking of calling his forthcoming Edinburgh show Coonraker, or else Reginald D Hunter Finally in a Show Without Nigga in the Title. He chooses the titles because they make him giggle. But he accepts that he has made his choice and that it has had consequences: some venues won't book him and some papers won't take his adverts, so he gets smaller audiences.
He doesn't blame squeamish middle-class white people: we just want to know how to behave with black people. He is less happy with black folk who remind him that the great Richard Pryor stopped using the "N" word at the peak of his success. Hunter responds that he does not feel beholden to stand by choices made by someone else, let alone one whose other choices included guns, heroin and Superman III. The reason we still have problems with race is that "we refuse to have a conversation about the subject".
Hunter, in contrast, is not afraid to explore the truth in the riskiest stereotypes. Why, for example, do mothers attract so much more respect and fond sentiment among black Americans than fathers? His conclusion is: "Mama's baby. Papa's maybe."
Yet it is not just his take on racial stereotypes that causes offence. Alex O'Connell, the Times's former comedy critic, called him "flagrantly misogynist". In new material he is trying out after the new show's second interval, he admits that there is a part of him that wants to bed every woman of every age and type, but actually, I'd call him a feminist. He riffs on how, in our patriarchy, men oppress women but do not have the time to do it every day, so they train women to do it to themselves, by persuading them to obsess about their appearance and safety. He holds in particular contempt a poster that shows the face of a battered woman. Its slogan reads: "Want to know the price of an illegal minicab? Ask a rape victim." The price of a fare is the last thing he'd ask someone who had just been raped, he says, succumbing to the kind of punchline that his routines need less than he thinks.
Hunter values freedom of speech very highly, which is why he has got into more trouble for a fantasy in which the Austrian authorities wonder what to do with a Rwandan Holocaust denier. But freedom of speech has consequences, too, which is why his next show will in fact be called Fuck You in the Age of Consequence (a Churchill reference). His father once told him that people did not want his truth because they have their own. Hunter puts it another way. It's not whether you can tell the truth, nor even if you can tell it humorously: it is if you can make it palatable. I'd say he passes the test, but then maybe I need to find a comedian who will offend me by taking the piss out of crap white blokes. Except - oh, yes, they all do.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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