Comic hits back in racism row

CJ Harper came under fire this week following walkouts at a corporate gig for the Hull Daily Mail, causing the paper’s managing director to call a halt to the show.

However, he now says he was ‘gobsmacked’ over the protest, saying. ‘In 24 years, that’s the first time the act has been stopped.’

He says only two people walked out of the show when he adopted an Indian accent for a joke.

‘What is racist about that?’ Harper wanted to know. ‘If I do a joke about southerners and put on a Cockney accent, is that racist?

‘I’ve got Asian friends who make Asian jokes and I’ve performed in front of Muslims and Rastafarians with no problems. The other day this Rastafarian stood up in a show and put his arms round me and called me his brother.

‘The world’s gone PC mad, everybody wants to jump on the political correctness bandwagon. We’ve been doing “Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman” jokes since Moses was a lad.

‘Most people were laughing. Most people were enjoying it,’ he told Chortle. ‘This is really affected my confidence, all because of the PC brigade.’

Harper added that he put on a Rastafarian wig in another part of the act he performed for thenewspaper staff.

The offending gag was about being getting directions from locals with a heavy Indian accent, and being told to ‘turn left at the Tesco store’ to which the lost driver replies: ‘I don’t know anything about cricket…’ Although the gag doesn’t work in print, the confusion is that ‘Tesco store’ sounds like ‘Test score’ given the right accent.

When people walked out in protest, Harper said he led the rest of the audience – who he said were all white - in a chorus of ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye.’

It was at that point that Hull Daily Mail managing director Phil Inman got on to the stage and stopped the show, apologising for the content of Harper's set. Back at the office, editor John Meehan later apologised to the entire newsroom for any offence caused

Inman told journalists’ trade paper UK Press Gazette: ‘The event was going very well until the performer began to tell offensive jokes. We stopped the act very quickly and apologised immediately to all the staff.’

Harper, who previously won a Talent Trail competition run by the newspaper, believes the paper is using the incident as a reason not to pay him. ‘That do did not require entertainment,’ he said. ‘They’d all sat through this corporate presentation and they wanted to go home.’

Responding to claims he’d been warned not to perform racist material, he said he’d previously run through his act with organisers, who only asked him to remove one ‘racy’ gag, which he said he was happy to do.

He added: ‘They did want me to do more humour on Hull, but I wasn’t going to take the piss out of my home town and the people who live there.’

Published: 4 Nov 2006