I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (16 page)

I’ve experienced this sort of narrow thinking at various points in my career. When I got my show on CNN in 2008, I was proud that I had become the first comic to have a series on that channel. Yet when I called into Al Sharpton’s radio show to promote it, I got heat for my choice. “Why you got to do it on CNN? How come you can’t do it on BET?” Well, why am I talking to you about what I want to do with my career? How come I can’t do what the fuck I want to do?

No matter who you are, freedom means having more choices
by definition
. It doesn’t mean going from having one, and only one, shitty option to having one, and only one,
great
option. I am certain that later in her life, Rosa Parks
sometimes
sat in the back of the bus. Maybe she liked the view or whatever. I am certain that after segregation laws were repealed, black people
sometimes
sat in the back of the Woolworth’s counter. Maybe those were the only seats available.

I’ve had this kind of racial criticism several times in my career. I understood it, but I have never agreed with it in the slightest. Early on, I did BET’s
Comedy View
and then
Def Jam
. Both were all black. Then I was an actor on the series
Double Rush
, which was created by
Murphy Brown
’s Diane English. When we first did
The Hughleys
, it was on right before
Home Improvement
. Depending on what TV series I was on at the time, my stand-up crowd would change color. When I started doing frequent appearances on
Politically Incorrect
, for example, the audience got whiter. Picasso had his Blue Period, and I would have my white periods.

All the varied contexts I was involved in informed my perspective. I read different things from what I’d read before. I started
including more jokes about current events in my set, and a lot of political material. My scope was not as narrow. It wasn’t as much about “being black” anymore. My focus was on experiences that I had and that I thought were interesting.

After one set with a mixed crowd, my road manager pulled me aside. “Man, you see this?” he said.

“See what?”

“You’re losing your black audience, man. You should just stick to the shit that we’ve been doing.”

It would be one thing if I was losing my audience, period. If I wasn’t selling tickets, then something was clearly wrong with my material or my performance or my publicity. But to claim that selling tickets to a whiter crowd was
bad
made no sense to me. If I made a person laugh, if I made them get in their car, buy a ticket, and sit down and listen to me talk—and they enjoyed the experience—
then I’ve done my job
. As a black man, am I somehow not entitled to enjoy Spanish food or sushi or Italian food? That’s an absurdity. But I would argue that humor is
as
universal as food is. You can judge how content a community is by how easily its people laugh. Laughter is much more indicative of a thriving society than material concerns.

My loyalty is always to the truth, not to a race. I don’t think of myself primarily as a
black
comedian or as a black
comedian
. I think of myself primarily as
myself
. And sometimes, being yourself can cost. I learned
that
the hard way.

I am no stranger to having jokes backfire. In the early ’90s I was a sidekick on an L.A. radio station run by Stevie Wonder called KJLH. One day on the air I made the mistake of saying, “Do you
think this station would be this raggedy if Stevie Wonder could see?” Forty-five minutes later, Stevie Wonder came barging through the door and he was
livid
. He must have driven his car down to KJLH as fast as he could, honking at all the people on the sidewalk to get the fuck out of his way.

He started dressing me down. Of course I’d always loved Stevie Wonder, so to have an icon like that yell at you was more weird than anything. He kept going on about how it was disrespectful and it wasn’t funny, and that I don’t understand. Maybe I shouldn’t have pointed out that I was sitting over
here
, and not where he was yelling over
there
.

I was so fired.

As a comic, I say incendiary stuff
all the time
. I have the right to tell a shitty joke or to be offensive, and I refuse to take away a right that I enjoy from somebody else. I’ve defended Tracy Morgan and I’ve defended Rush Limbaugh. Going back further, I defended John Rocker in
The Original Kings of Comedy
. I am
consistent
. But when I defended Don Imus, shit hit the fan.

Imus had called the Rutgers women’s basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed hos.” They weren’t hos, but they sure were nappy-headed. I defy a sister to play basketball for four quarters and keep a perm. You start out looking like Halle Berry, and by that fourth quarter it’s Ben Wallace. But America wasn’t interested in hearing any more jokes. A women’s college basketball team had been insulted! Our country was in
crisis
! A joke?
Women’s basketball?
Those terms should
never
appear together!

My defense of Don Imus was as follows: I thought that what he said was hurtful; I thought it was malicious; I thought it was a bad joke on a slow news week. I wasn’t defending Don Imus the
person
. I was defending his
right
to say something dumb. If
Americans have earned no other right, it’s the right to say something dumb.

I’ve been asked, “How would you like it if your daughters got called that?” My reply: “My daughters would know what they were and what they weren’t. I didn’t prepare them for the world that I wished existed; I prepared them for the world that I believed
did
exist. I always told them it’s never what you’re called, it’s what you answer to.” Is it more prudent to prepare your children for real life, or for a made-up fantasy world where everything is great and people love each other and respect each other? If I’m wrong, even better. I’ve prepared them for a bad scenario that will never come. It’s a
good
thing if you have a fire drill but no fires. That’s just insurance.

But few were hearing what I was saying. I had to argue with Al Sharpton about it. Everybody was angry and no one would talk to me. It was the first time I’d ever had any kind of interaction with the black community where I wasn’t their darling. Yet it never occurred to me that saying what I believed would draw this kind of ire. Steve Harvey wouldn’t let me on his show, because he said black women were mad at me. I could see why. He plays specifically to that audience, and he wasn’t about to have it jeopardized.

Many people wanted me to apologize, but I didn’t feel like I had done anything wrong and I wasn’t going to. I knew I could take it. What I now know about myself is that I’m tough. I can last. I’m not scared to give an ass-whupping, and I’m not scared to take one. I’m not scared to be wrong; I’m not scared to be right. Even now, if you Google my name you’ll see people are still talking shit about it—and I don’t care. Any fear or reservations that I had about saying
anything
that I wanted to onstage died during this period.

If I
had
apologized, it would have made my comments more
sinister than they were. It would have meant that I had something to apologize
for
. To me, I was being more
ironic
than I was
malicious
. Apologizing would have given my critics credence. It would also have changed my whole mindset—a mindset based on feeling comfortable being uncomfortable.

Apologizing is not the answer to controversy.
Honesty
is the answer. I defended Tracy Morgan when he went on about how he’d stab his son if the kid turned out gay. I said Tracy should have never apologized. Not only did he end up apologizing, but he had to do it more than once. Every week it seemed like he was sorry again. But was he sorry for his views, or for the reaction that they caused? He may have expressed himself in a particularly incendiary way, but what he meant was pretty straightforward and uncontroversial.

A similar thing happened in my family. In 2011, my nephew came out of the closet. He came out to his mother, and then he came out to my wife. He came out to his father and my kids and his sister. I don’t know why he felt the need to come out, because he goes to Morehouse and he designs women’s dresses. I’ve
known
he was gay. I’ve never judged him and I’ve always loved him. He and I are very, very, very close. Yet the last person he came out to was me. “Why am I the last person in the family that you’re telling?” I asked him.

He didn’t really know what to say. “It was difficult to tell you,” he finally said.

“There’s two things I want you to understand,” I told him. “First off, I will love you no matter what you do. I want you to be safe and happy. I want you to know that. And second, I’m glad you’re not my son.” He stopped and he laughed. Then I called his father to tease him about his son making dresses. That’s all I could do.

I meant both things that I told my nephew. I
am
going to love
him unconditionally. It’s just the extra bullshit I didn’t want.
Everybody
wants it easy. The coward lives to tell how the brave man died. It’s
easier
for my kids to marry people of the opposite gender. Everywhere in the world, everything seeks the easiest route. The lion goes for the easiest gazelle to kill. Even water automatically finds the easiest path to flow, that of least resistance.

Forcing comedians to apologize doesn’t even make sense on a strategic level. Everyone remembers Imus’s comments and the brouhaha, but people forget what the consequences to his actions were. First of all, they had to pay off his contract. I don’t give a fuck what you did that caused the networks to succumb to public pressure. You still get your money. Even Charlie Sheen got paid off. So Imus didn’t lose any income.

Six months later, Imus got a new show with a bigger audience on more stations than the show he had before. His
agent
couldn’t have done as well by him as his critics did. Every radio show’s
goal
is to have as much of an audience as possible. In other words, a show’s success is directly tied to how much
attention
it gets!

There’s a reason comedy and tragedy are so often tied together, two sides of the same coin. By trying to destroy Imus, his foes ended up making him a bigger success. Isn’t that absurd? Isn’t that ironic?
And aren’t absurdity and irony two of the greatest sources of comedy?
We really only have two choices in life: We can either take a joke—or we can end up as the punch line. Sadly, the more contemporary civil rights leaders focus on frivolous throwaway comments like Imus’s, the less powerful they are in fighting actual grievances. It’s exactly like the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

The attacks on Imus set a terrible example. The message was:
If you say the wrong thing about race, then you will be vilified
. Even though it worked out for him, I’m sure Imus didn’t like the gauntlet
he had to run to get there. But since this is such an uncomfortable subject to begin with, many aren’t sure what “the wrong thing”
is
. As a result, they avoid the subject altogether.

It wasn’t always this way. Black sitcoms, for example, were universally beloved. But nowadays there are
no
black shows on network television—and I would wager that there probably won’t be any in the near future. My show,
The Hughleys
, was among the last of this dying breed.