Race, Comedy and West Omaha
Sometime while I was living in Phoenix, Joker’s Comedy Club in the Old Market closed. My friends and I spent many a night in that dirty little dungeon of a place, laughing our asses off at comics none of us had ever heard of. It was magnificent cross-section of Omaha’s demographics — old, young, black, white — we just wanted to go sit in the basement of a record store and laugh at somebody with a microphone.
On a lark, I got free tickets to go see Theo Von at the Funny Bone tonight and it made me long for Joker’s. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Funny Bone, except everything is a little too new and a little too nice (and being in Village Point, it’s a little too far out west).
This might seem like an odd complaint from somebody who lives in Papillion which has got to be one of the statistically whitest towns around, but it was incredibly awkward to sit there as the comedian said, “Where are all the black people at… make some noise!” and the response was 30 seconds of dead air. The whole thing went completely off the rails for me when the comedian continued to do his black people jokes even though literally nobody in the audience was black. Combine that with some drunken crosstalk from Nascar Moms in the front row and the whole thing started to feel a little Klanny.
Would the jokes have been any funnier if the audience hadn’t been so WASPy? Probably not. But I’m fairly convinced white comedians don’t do black people jokes for the sake of other white people.
