by Gina Yashere
I never saw Sharon again after that. She kept away from the club, and I heard rumors of her moving away and living life as a man, where nobody knew her. Despite the loss of my vinyl collection, and her attempt to murder me, I still wish her well.
If you think you have someone eating out of your hands, best count your fingers.
Early on, I realized that I seemed to attract two types of suitors. One type was the guy who saw my fierce independence and my lack of emotion as a challenge and wanted to tame me like a wild beast. Those relationships ended up being a battle of wills, and eventually I’d tire of being told I wasn’t feminine enough. I’d just stop answering their calls and disappear from their lives. This is now called “ghosting.” It took a lot more effort to complete a ghosting with just landlines. It meant getting someone to answer the phone for you, never answering the phone again, or changing your number, which back then involved money and paperwork. One such guy, Frances—who, as well as constantly comparing me to his exes, had a horrible habit of blatantly staring at other girls when I was with him—was still upset with me several years later when I bumped into him unexpectedly. “‘I’ll see you around’?” he spat. Apparently, that had been the last thing I’d said to him before not seeing him around ever again.
The other type of guy I attracted liked strong, dominating women. My masculine energy was very alluring to these types, as I wasn’t prone to playing games, and I had no problem bossing them around. This would start off as fun for me, having a guy who basically did whatever I wanted, but soon I would become bored, and then unreasonably demanding, just to see how much I could get away with. I’d eventually drive him away or revert to my tried-and-true ghosting method.
Steven belonged to this second group. I met him while collecting my car from the repair shop when I was around twenty-two. He was tall, dark, muscular, and very chatty. He made me laugh, and I found his confidence attractive. When he asked for my number, I told him to give me his, as I was still living at home, and I was keeping my dating life as far away from my mother’s consciousness as possible. At the time we began seeing each other, I was building elevators for Otis, and he repaired train lines, and we were both intrigued by each other’s jobs. We spent a lot of time watching movies, listening to music, and making out in his bedroom in the house he still shared with his Jamaican mother, as he insisted he was saving money to buy his own house. He was a massive Funkadelic fan and introduced me to the sounds of George Clinton.
Steven and I lasted around five months before things ended with me driving him away with my excessive demands. There was at that time an epidemic of people breaking into cars to steal car stereos, so stereos had been invented that you could pull out and carry around like a briefcase. Your stereo couldn’t get stolen from your car now, but it could get stolen from anywhere else, because you tended to put it down places because it looked ridiculous and was heavy as hell. They soon invented the more convenient face-off stereo, where the front clipped off and could be carried in a much smaller, less cumbersome case, which fit in a pocket or purse. It was significantly more expensive than the other type. For my birthday, Steven bought me the briefcase type. I told him to take that bullshit back and get me the better one. He did. We had been dating less than two months at that point, and I became brattier as the relationship developed. We were doomed. I did like him a lot, though, and he was the one I selected to take my virginity at the grand old age of twenty-two. He was patient, sweet, and gentle. But I still left that experience thinking, What is all the fuss about? And I largely felt this way with subsequent men I had sex with. I didn’t have that aha moment till the first time I slept with a woman. But I did make sure to give the penis several opportunities to change my thinking.
14
Smooth Seas Do Not Make Skillful Sailors
When I started out performing on the Black comedy circuit in the mid-1990s, the majority of the comedians had a Caribbean background, and many of their jokes poked fun at Africans. The stereotypes of us varied. There were the guileless fools, constantly being outwitted by Tarzan. There were the poor, hungry children on TV, looking sadly into the camera, while flies landed on their eyelids, and a soothing white voice asked for donations. There was the swag-less unfashionable African man trying to win the affections of much more desirable Caribbean women with corny lines while wearing crocodile-skin shoes, with no socks, and pants too short, revealing his ashy ankles. Then the favorite comedy go-to was the officious jobsworth, always upholding petty rules to the detriment of humanity, and common sense. That character was usually a parking attendant who would stick a ticket on your car right in front of you while shouting in the most obnoxiously loud, usually Nigerian, accent: “My friend, you cannot park here!” I’d sit in the audience and wonder, Where are the African comics rebutting this crap? Where are the jokes pertaining to Caribbean stereotypes? One Nigerian comedian, Toju, was working on the scene before I came out, but he was also an extremely talented impersonator and leaned towards that in his act. I decided I was going to be the Nigerian crusader.
I wrote a ton of jokes about my Nigerian heritage, how proud I was of all my names, even if I could barely pronounce them. I also aimed most of my Caribbean jokes at the Jamaicans. Mainly because they were the most vocal and boastful of all the islanders at any show, and just as the Nigerian accent was the go-to African voice, the Jamaican accent was the go-to Caribbean accent. Even non-Jamaican Caribbeans would default to it. One of my earlier routines was about how easy it was to create a Jamaican curse word—all you had to do was add “clart” to the end of it: “bomboclart,” “raasclart,” “pussyclart.” I then took random words from the English language and added “clart” to them, to great comedic effect. “Washer-dryer-clart! Table-clart!” As I said, it was my early work, but it was a crowd-pleaser.
Another routine was about how my mother didn’t understand Jamaican slang, and that she misunderstood the word punani, the Jamaican word for “vagina,” thinking it was some kind of tropical fruit, saying things like “I would really like to taste some of this punani!” This joke and various other routines of mine ended up being stolen by a Canadian comedian, Russell Peters, who used to visit the UK to perform, and we ended up on a few shows together. Unbeknownst to me, he had cherry-picked my best bits to take back to Canada, turning my Nigerian mum into his Indian father, going on to use these and several more jokes stolen from other comics in his specials, becoming famous from material he never wrote. I confronted him later, after being accused by his fans of stealing his material. He apologized, promised to pay me, then reneged, ignoring me, and continued to use my material, only admitting the theft during an interview twenty years later.
But I digress.
My fledgling comedy career was going very well, and after six months I decided to put off going back to work as an engineer for the foreseeable future. I was going to throw everything I had at this new vocation. I had been a good engineer, but I was never going to be the best engineer, and I felt that I could really be great at this comedy thing, judging by how well I was doing, and by how much I had fallen in love with the whole process of creating and taking it straight to the stage. The immediacy and freedom of it was intoxicating.
I decided early that if I was going to make this my new career, I had to broaden my audience by encompassing shows on the white circuit. Although shows on the Black comedy circuit paid well, with opportunities to play shows at large theaters in front of appreciative and lively Black crowds in pretty much all the major cities in the country, there was an even larger and more vast network of comedy clubs and pubs on the mainstream, or white, circuit, with opportunities to work more often. On the whole, these paid less, as people tended to go to those places regardless of who was on, whereas the Black shows were built around the people who were performing, so they were more of an event. With the Black events, I could work maybe a show every ten days to two weeks, but on the white circuit I could work every night. I wanted to get as much experience as I could, and also earn more
money, so I took every show offered and pestered bookers to audition me for their spots. I would go anywhere in the country, often driving 150 miles to audition for a club, then drive back the same night, taking naps in lay-bys on the way home, as I didn’t have money for hotels. I loved every minute of it.
Competitions were a way to gain exposure, and the most prestigious of those was the Hackney Empire’s New Acts of the Year Showcase for emerging comedians and variety acts. The Hackney Empire, a big, old vaudeville theater in London, had previously been a music hall, hosting performances by the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy, and Julie Andrews. The New Acts of the Year Showcase always sold out and was attended by a who’s who of industry executives looking for the next comedy star. I entered the competition in 1996 and came in second—a very respectable performance, especially as I was the only person of color in that competition, and probably in that entire fifteen-hundred-seat theater.
Although I didn’t win the showcase, there had been TV scouts in the audience, and I was selected to perform on a talent show called . . . wait for it . . . The Big Big Talent Show, hosted by Jonathan Ross, a hugely popular talk-show host, kind of the UK’s version of Jay Leno. It was based on a nationwide search for the next big talent and was aired on one of the biggest TV networks in England. Oh my days! I had been doing comedy for less than a year, and I already had a gig on TV. I was gonna be a star!
I couldn’t wait to tell my mum that I hadn’t been crazy to leave a good job as an engineer to become what she called a talking clown, and that I was about to be a millionaire TV entertainer. Up to that point, I had never invited her to any of my performances, due to her disapproval, but now she was finally going to see me in my element, in my first TV appearance. With Jonathan Ross, no less!
The day I informed my mum of my impending big break, she was reasonably impressed, but her fear of me embarrassing her live on TV took precedent. “This is a competition. I do not want to come there to watch you be eliminated from the first round. I will come when you get through to the final.” I wasn’t surprised or disappointed. I just had to be the best.
For my first performance on the show, I was asked to invite a friend or member of my family to come on and be interviewed by Jonathan Ross. The TV executives loved the story of my engineering roots, and so I invited Salim, my old Otis partner. He would sit on the couch, have a short entertaining chat with Jonathan, then Jonathan would throw to me, standing by my mic at another part of the stage, and I would do my five-minute set. Unfortunately, I was so preoccupied with my first TV set that I didn’t have time to prep Salim for his first and only TV gig, or even check that he was a suitable representative of my brand. To this day I don’t know whether Salim was harboring bitterness towards me for not being the assistant that he’d expected when I was assigned to him or he just froze in front of the cameras on this live taping, but after Jonathan Ross introduced Salim and asked him, “So what are your best memories of Gina while she was working with you?” Salim blurted out, “She would never clean the pit!” Jonathan, like 99.999 percent of the watching population, had no idea what Salim was talking about, that he was referring to the times we argued about who should clean out the bottom of the elevator shaft, so he asked, “Wouldn’t clean the pit?” And Salim’s response was “Yeah. She wouldn’t clean it!” I stood frozen, watching this debacle unfold. Luckily Jonathan was an experienced talk-show host. He made a quick joke, tapped Salim on the knee, and introduced me. I collected myself and delivered my set. Despite Salim’s epic fumble, my set was well received, and the TV audience voted me through to the final. I didn’t invite Salim back.
Later my mum berated me about having Salim on, and reiterated how glad she was that she had not been there to witness this embarrassment live, but true to her word, she was in the audience for the final. She attended with a bunch of her Nigerian friends, all dressed in their best embroidered finery and most sparkly gold trinkets. Just as Jonathan was to introduce me, he noticed Mum in the crowd. I mean, she wasn’t hard to spot in this mainstream TV audience. It was literally white people, white people, white people, and then a bank of what looked like African royalty.
“Is that your mum?” Jonathan Ross asked me. Yup. “Gina’s amazing-looking mum, everybody!”
My mum didn’t need any further encouragement. She stood up with her arms outstretched and basked in the applause, as if she had been my number one comedy fan from day one. “Yes, I am the one. I am the mother of the clown. She is here because of me!”
I smiled inwardly.
I didn’t win the final, losing to a young ventriloquist, Paul Zerdin, who went on to win America’s Got Talent over twenty-four years later. Such is the hustle. I didn’t mind. There was no money prize that I missed out on, just a trophy, and besides, a more important victory had been won. Mum had finally acknowledged my new career. From that day, she never again asked me when I was going back to my proper job. I had been validated by Television.
15
It Is When There Is a Stampede that a Person with Big Buttocks Knows that He Carries a Load
It didn’t take long to realize that the comedy scene in England was very segregated. White comics didn’t feel the need to perform for Black audiences, as they were the majority in the entertainment field, live and on television, in front of and behind the cameras, and therefore they had no incentive to broaden their viewpoint to include an audience they didn’t have to care about, much less cater to.
White talent scouts never looked for talent outside their middle-class white comedy enclaves, so TV was mainly middle-class white guys espousing. Even white working-class comics felt shut out after their 1970s heyday, when most UK stand-up talent on television was sourced from working-class clubs and music halls, where the poorer white entertainers resided. It wasn’t very surprising that most Black comics felt marginalized by mainstream TV and so only did Black shows. Their material was relatable to Black audiences and bonded them in recognition of their shared experiences of being Black in Britain. The Black comics who had been successful during the 1970s had done self-deprecating humor that belittled them before white audiences, like talking about moving next door to them to lower their house values, talking about being lazy, and generally enforcing stereotypes. Basically, the UK version of the Uncle Tom/Stepin Fetchit characters of old American movies. The only Black comics doing white shows in the 1990s were Lenny Henry and Felix Dexter.
Lenny Henry started his career as a teenager working in men’s clubs in the 1970s and became the only high-profile Black comedian in the country for decades that was truly accepted into the hierarchy. He did some questionable stuff when he was younger, like performing on The Black and White Minstrel Show, a variety show that ran on the BBC for nearly twenty years, on which the performers wore blackface and depicted Black people as buffoons. That made many Black people highly disdainful of Lenny. But to be fair, you didn’t really have much of a choice in those days if you were a Black comic trying to achieve some success. Lenny Henry later became an outspoken critic on the lack of diversity in British TV and film.
Felix Dexter was a talented stand-up and actor who more successfully traversed the lines between Black and white circuits, having created several memorable characters on the UK’s one Black sketch show on TV, The Real McCoy, therefore becoming famous in the Black community while still performing at mainstream comedy clubs among the royalty of white British comics. He never quite reached the success he deserved, as there seemed to be only room for one Black comedic star, and Lenny Henry was it. In fact, in one of my stand-up routine’s I enthused that the TV industry had a nightclub “one in, one out” policy, and in order for any other Black comics to get a look in, we had to wait for Lenny Henry to die.
The Real McCoy featured mainly Black and Asian actors at a time when Black faces on comedy shows—or any other show, for that matter—were rare, unless a mugger, drug dealer, or prostitute was needed. All the players on the show became stars within the Bla
ck community, selling out theaters to predominantly Black audiences. There was a lot more money in the Black circuit then, which is why a lot of Black comedians never really felt a need to make that jump to white audiences. The attitude was Why am I going to do this white comedy club for twenty bucks when I’m getting three hundred to do this Black show? Obviously, there was a specific audience that came out to see them. When you watched comedy on TV or went to mainstream comedy clubs you never really heard comedians talk about their experiences as Black, Africans, or Caribbeans living in England or about their parents coming from a different place. The Black circuit filled that void.
The final season of The Real McCoy in 1995 featured up-and-coming stand-ups from the Black circuit. Scouts from the show were out hunting. I had become one of the hottest young comics on the circuit at that time, alongside people like Toju, the aforementioned Nigerian comic and impressionist; Slim, a talented comic of Jamaican heritage; and Richard Blackwood, a good-looking guy whose comedic style was modeled on the American Def Comedy Jam comics of the ’90s.
I was killing stages all over at that point and being booked regularly. I happily continued to carve out a niche for myself within the Black comedy community as the outspoken African among a sea of Caribbeans, and it was a successful strategy. The instant TV stardom I’d envisaged after getting to the finals on The Big Big Talent Show had not materialized, so I had simply returned to the white circuit and continued to appear at the clubs, gaining more experience.
There was already talk that I had been selected for a guest appearance on The Real McCoy, and I believed I was a shoo-in for that gig. Unfortunately, I still had an engineer mindset: you’re supposed to get the right qualifications to get the right job, then do good work to get the promotion. It hadn’t worked that well for me with Otis, but I still believed in the formula. I still had faith in the system of merit. In showbiz, however, I soon found out there was no such system. You may be the funniest, but you can still be passed over for your look, your voice, your age, your background, your size—anything.