
“I was born and raised in the United States of America,” Ziwe Fumudoh chuckles, almost maniacally. ”I’ve had to talk about race all my life, much to my chagrin.”
The day I’m chatting with the comedian, who goes by her first name alone, the nation holds its breath awaiting the verdict for Derek Chauvin. Tensions are rising over the murder of Daunte Wright. And the trailer for Ziwe’s eponymous Showtime variety comedy series has just premiered. Our phone call is celebratory, bouncy, and undercut with a layer of grief, a collision of energies Black people in this country are quite accustomed to.
Ziwe embraces that unease dead-on, both in our conversation and on her show. The concept first took form in 2017 as a messy web series titled “Baited With Ziwe,” where she would “bait” her white Above Average Productions coworkers into answering uncomfortable questions about race, bluntly asking questions like “Did your family own slaves?” and “How many Black friends do you have?” A mischievous smile curled on her lips as she watched friends fumble through answers, knowing those squirming moments are particularly delicious for us, the viewers.
As she slowly garnered a fanbase from the videos and on Twitter, the show evolved to various digital platforms, live shows in NYC theaters, and, in 2020, as the pandemic forced performers to pivot to digital content from isolation, Instagram Live.
“Suddenly, with COVID-19, live shows were dead,” she says. At the height of the pandemic, a time when “everyone was going ‘live’ every five minutes,” Ziwe decided to take her live show and make it appointment television. “I thought: What if I did a weekly show? It didn’t start off very popular,” she says. “There were like 30 people watching, initially. But over the course of booking larger and larger guests and having the consistency of being every Thursday at 8pm, it became a form of television.”
“When you watch the Instagram Live show and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe she said that.’ You’re also thinking, ‘What would I say?’ Because we are all a part of this collective conversation in American history about race.”
Instantly iconic moments with famous white women like “canceled” Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway, New York Times columnist Alison Roman, and actor-activists Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan, seemingly took over the internet last summer. Clips of these women stuttering about the day they “discovered racism” and other out-of-context moments began circling around Twitter, where they went viral over and over again. Ziwe’s follower count multiplied, and with those eyes on her, she caught the attention of the “real” television industry. “The show itself did a lot of work for me,” she points out. “With this machine behind me of creating something that huge, the natural progression is, ‘OK, how do we scale this even more and put it on a network?’ ”
With this moment, she’s ready to pull every single trick out of her multitalented bag. “You’re going to see live interviews that we’re shooting the week of the show’s release. You’re going to see sketches. You’re going to see musical numbers. Every single week, I’m the musical guest. You’re really going to see a wide range of my breadth and talent as an artist.” Comedians Cole Escola and Jane Krakowski make hilarious appearances in the “Truly Iconic” trailer, alongside chaotic moments like Ziwe and Phoebe Bridgers smashing ukuleles on the ground.
“All these people I’m already huge fans of—to see them on my show is so rewarding,” she says. “Every single guest star, I’m so thankful for because it helped make the show a reality. They really brought the words and all the hard work of the writers, Cole Escola and Jordan Mendoza, Michelle Davis, and Jamund Washington—they brought it to life.”
Ziwe feels the extra weight on her shoulders of hosting a comedy show as a Black woman, but buckling underneath it isn’t an option. “I feel a lot of excitement and responsibility,” she says. “So many people have paved the way for me to be able to work in this capacity. I stand on the shoulders of so many brilliant Black women. My goal is to keep the door open behind me.” She hopes this proves to all networks that “it’s actually not a ‘risk’ to give someone who’s been performing for years an opportunity like this.”
There’s no doubt Ziwe’s comedy has a connection to a larger conversation about race in this country; her steepest rise in views and attention followed the death of George Floyd. “We’re all alive during this very horrible period in history,” she says. “When there’s not a school shooting, there’s someone being unjustly murdered in the streets. We are always experiencing that as a collective, especially as Black people.”
Her frustration with these failing institutions is whipped up into comedy gold. “My fight-or-flight response is to create. When I feel sadness, I write, I make art, I try to make something cathartic for me. I’m lucky I get to do that in such a public sphere, but, ultimately, I’m just trying to cure myself and, hopefully, cure other people in this process.”
“My fight or flight response is to create. When I feel sadness, I write, I make art, I try to make something cathartic for me.”
The late Robin Williams also understood the healing powers of laughter. “Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma,” he once said. We as a country need to have these uncomfortable conversations about race, our trauma both personal and collective, so why not laugh through it? The uneasiness of those conversations is exactly “what my show is imitating,” Ziwe says.
“When you watch the Instagram Live show and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe she said that,’ you’re also thinking, ‘What would I say?’ Because we are all a part of this collective conversation in American history about race. Because we exist in this space and we are part of these institutions, whether complicity or implicitly.”
Ziwe hopes the show gives people, both white and Black, permission to laugh through what can be painfully awkward conversations.
“If you’re someone who’s maybe afraid of feeling uncomfortable who is watching my show, I say, embrace it. Embrace discomfort. We are human, we’re not here for a long time, and all these sensations are part of the shared experience of humanity.”
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