Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Sometimes you don’t want too much out of your comedy. You just want to laugh. You don’t want to think.
With his first Netflix special, Marlon Wayans: Woke-ish, Wayans accomplishes the former while almost forcing you into the latter. Almost-ish.
Marlon, the youngest of the 10 Wayans siblings, is clearly at his most woke-ish when it comes to homosexuality and gender identity.
An early bit finds him wanting to sit out a dance in the nightclub once he hears hip-hop lyrics that suggest gay sex. Later, an elaborate act-out of “Martin Luther Queen” delivering a gay activist version of the “I Have A Dream” speech suggests little in the way of progress, as Marlon’s MLQ could sit side-by-side with his older brother Damon’s “Men On…” caricature from In Living Color, a quarter-century ago. He also offers this not-so hot take on LGBTQ rights: “Do you! Do you! Just don’t do me!”
And yet.
Marlon also turns a mockery of Caitlyn Jenner back upon himself, joking: “I ain’t seen a white chick that ugly since me and Shawn in the f—ing movie!”
More importantly, Marlon wants his audience to know that he’s “not just preaching. I’m living. And I’m trying to grow, and I’m trying to evolve, and I’m trying, and that shit is hard for people to digest,” adding: “But when it comes home to your house, that’s when shit changes.” He drives the point home with a story about his teenage daughter wondering if she might be gay, and how he responds to her with both love and humor.
The bulk of his hour is much lighter, though, reminiscing about the early hip-hop hit, “Rapper’s Delight,” making fun of contemporary rap, and delivering his own rhymes on what he’d consider more age-appropriate and more financially prudent topics. He also imagines scenarios in which a white man has to apply for his hood pass, and the hoops he must jump through before getting cleared to say the n-word. Marlon, who has written or co-written many parody films (White Chicks, the Scary Movie and A Haunted House franchises) this century, prefers the act-out so much, he even prefaces one routine by describing the premise – the Kardashians meet Get Out – as a possible new installment of one of his film franchises, A Haunted House 3.
Marlon may not be the first to notice that President Trump treats the White House like a reality TV competition, or even that “Donald Trump is the Flavor Flav of white people.” He probably does win a “too soon” award, however, for his impression of Wendy Williams fainting, though, now that we know more about what’s really ailing her.
In the end, though, Marlon Wayans isn’t trying to offend anyone. Heck, he’s currently starring in an NBC family sitcom, Marlon, appealing to the mainstream. He’s still the youngest kid at the table, hoping the whole family notices him and loves him.
As he tells the audience in D.C., where he briefly attended Howard College before dropping out to join his family on In Living Color all those years ago: “This world is going through shit, and laughter is healing. And I think we all need to do more of it.”
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
