Marlon Davis's experimental gig

Marlon Davis has revealed how he blacked up for his first stand-up gig - despite being black.

The comic also told ten ‘nigger jokes’ at the 2005 show, which he filmed as part of his degree in art and design at the University of Westminster.

Speaking to fellow comic Dan Nightingale on his In The House podcast, Davis revealed that he applied shoe polish and red lipstick to his face, ‘the full fucking minstrel thing’, before telling ’10 nigger jokes back to back’ at a Laughing Horse show in Soho, London.

He said it was an experiment in ‘authorship’, telling Nightingale: ‘You know how you’ve got nigger jokes, “niggers are so lazy, niggers do that, blah, blah, blah?”

‘These things are not funny, but if you put it in an environment where it’s supposed to be funny, will people laugh at it? If I told you a racist joke at a bus stop, you wouldn’t laugh at it. But if I said it in a comedy club, would people laugh at it?’

The experiment was filmed by his sister, although the VHS is lost in an attic somewhere. But Davis recalled that when he told the first joke, people were laughing. ‘But [as] the third and fourth went in, everyone was cringing, “Oh God”.

He told Chortle that he thought the audience were reacting to the ‘novelty’ of the performance initially, but that he’s not even sure if he finished his set. ‘They might have pulled me off,’ he said.

The only person still laughing was comedian Josh Howie who ‘fucking loved it’.

Davis adds that although ‘no one knew what the fuck’ his performance was, he was awarded a first by his tutors who ‘saw it in an erotic way… they wanted to put me in some big, huge art magazine, they wanted to take me around the world doing this installation’.

By way of clarification, he told Chortle: ‘It was because of white guilt. I knew with my tutors that if I submitted anything to do with being black they would give me a first. I knew that that would give them a hard-on. That was another joke in itself.’

Nevertheles, the performance was also prompted by his anger at casual racist humour. ‘Those jokes anyway, the use of the n-word, they were old hat’ he says.

And he has no plans to repeat the blackface experiment, ‘probably not for my next Edinburgh show’.

• Davis is appearing at Black Lives Matter, a fundraiser for The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust at the Comedy Store on June 8, with Nathan Caton, Dane Baptiste, Jason Patterson, Ola, Prince Abdi, Funmbi Omotayo and Nabil Abdulrashid.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 1 May 2015