One thing is pretty certain about Larry Wilmore’s new show on Comedy Central. Viewers will want to hear what he has to say on Tuesday night.
Because on the debut of The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore on Monday, his comments about Selma; Ferguson, Missouri; race relations; and also life in general were funny, unexpected and provocative.
Wilmore made fun of the outrage over the paucity of Oscar nominations for Selma, a biographical movie about the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr; he was irreverent about the Rev Al Sharpton and Oprah Winfrey; and he carved out a joke from the controversy over the death of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who was killed when the police used a chokehold on him.
Noting that China and the United States recently agreed to curb greenhouse gas emissions, Wilmore said with mock gravity that if the world doesn’t figure out a way to deal with climate change, “it won’t just be black people saying ‘I can’t breathe.’” When some in the studio audience murmured, Wilmore snapped back: “Oh, too soon? Yeah I choked him, thank you very much.”
Opening nights can be treacherous for comedy shows — expectations can be too high and jitters can derail the jokes. Wilmore’s debut wasn’t perfect, but he made it perfectly clear that as a replacement for Stephen Colbert, who takes over for David Letterman in September, he is witty and appealing in his own quite different way.
Wilmore, 53, isn’t young, but he has dimples and a disarming way of laughing at his own jokes and those of others.
Most of all, his contrariness stands out on a network where many stars are white, male and sensitive about it. Put it this way: Jon Stewart is less likely to make that kind of joke about Garner; Colbert would have said such things only in character as a loopy, right-wing cable news anchor. Wilmore uses humour to point a finger at racist attitudes in the culture, but he also pokes fun at racial pieties. In some ways, he seems closer in spirit to Bill Maher than to Stewart.
That’s also because he had a panel of guests who seemed chosen to clash and confound: Sen. Cory A. Booker of New Jersey; the rapper and activist Talib Kweli; Shenaz Treasury, a Bollywood actress and now a contributor to the show; and Bill Burr, the pugnacious comedian with a Boston accent.
The discussion about the film Selma and the protests in Ferguson went in all directions but mostly at the expense of Booker, who tried to be diplomatic. When he sought to stand up for the protesters and also the police, Kweli set him straight, saying, “In activist movements you have what’s called solidarity, and you realise what we are fighting for, so you don’t go to a rally to beat cancer and say, well you know, all diseases matter.”
Wilmore smiled and interjected wryly, “All diseases do kind of matter.”
Out of date
As host of his own programme, Wilmore was able to show his range much more than he did as a correspondent on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he was cast, with obvious irony, as the fake news show’s “senior black correspondent.” Wilmore could be amusing doing facetious reports, but the pose was limiting and oddly out of date — it seemed like a joke from Saturday Night Live in its early seasons.
Cable news networks like CNN and MSNBC have a lot more diversity on air and off than The Daily Show or The Colbert Report; for years, the almost all-white, all-male teams of writers who would show up onstage in black tie for Emmy Awards looked like the stag line at a debutante ball in 1959.
Wilmore will talk about all kinds of subjects — he has a broad spectrum of interests, including magic. He said he would address the sexual abuse charges against Bill Cosby on Tuesday’s show. But he let his audience know on Monday that he would chime in on race whenever necessary, with his own sly brand of humour.
In his opening remarks, Wilmore said how excited he was to have his own show.
“I feel like there’s so much to talk about, you know, oh, especially if I had the show a year ago.” He paused and sighed. “Man, all the good bad race stuff happened already.”
He’ll rightly prove himself wrong on future episodes of The Nightly Show.
