‘Gary Owen: #DoinWhatIDo’ On Showtime: The Wannabe King of Catchphrase Comedy

Stand-up comedians Bill Burr and Gary Owen both released new stand-up comedy specials this week. Both are longtime friends of Kevin Hart. Both are married to black women. Only one of them needs to remind us he’s white.

In his fourth Showtime special, Gary Owen: #DoinWhatIDo, jokes about not having to worry about any scandals hitting him anytime soon, even though he knows anyone could accuse him of anything. So he hopes it’s a white woman who does. “Now you know you lying,” Owen cracks, as the audience hoots and hollers in knowing approval.

I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to hear and see a comedian try to make catchphrases happen, but Owen is here with two new phrases he hopes will stick in your brain: The aforementioned hashtagged-title to his special, and a nickname for himself: “White cracker bread.”

Owen recorded this hour in San Antonio well before Hart’s recent car accident (or even the HBO clip from The Shop that circulated days before that in which Hart tried to gaysplain to Lil Nas X), so forgive him for thinking out loud that “it seems like every other year Kevin Hart’s gotta go through something.” So Owen instead focuses on how Hart lost his bid to host the Academy Awards. “I don’t like how the Oscars did Kev,” Owen says, adding: “Let me tell you, that guy is not a homophobe.” How would Owen know? Because Hart didn’t object to Owen cuddling him for a half-hour to shoot a scene in the Ride Along movie, apparently.

That makes no sense.

However, Owen does find funny in describing his own misunderstandings when he auditioned for his role in the movie.

Owen has much less sympathy for Roseanne Barr’s firing from her own ABC sitcom, amazed at what other white people think they still can say about black people. Despite having Black Twitter tell Owen to stay in his lane, he’s in fact rather astute about his particular place in the stand-up comedy pantheon.

“I sent a black boy to college who ain’t even mine, and you going to tell me to stay in my lane?” he jokes.

For those of you still unfamiliar with him, Owen grew up in a trailer park in Ohio before enlisting in the Navy. He reported to the Naval Technical Training Center in Lackland outside of San Antonio before working as military police in San Diego, where he started his comedy career. His big break came via BET, where he appeared on and later hosted Comic View, and more recently starred with his mixed-race family in a reality series called The Gary Owen Show.

Owen catches viewers up on how sad his high-school wrestling years were, how the military provided an escape from that life, and how he quickly learned that he wasn’t cut out for life as an MP, either.

While his career may not have made him a household name or a superstar yet, he’s not one to complain.

As he says in this hour: “Here’s the thing about the entertainment business, man. When you ain’t in movies like you think, or TV shows like you think, your brain starts playing tricks on you. You start thinking there’s a conspiracy against me. People don’t like me anymore. That’s really not the case. Because you never know when your name’s coming up behind closed doors for a movie or a TV show.”

After he tried to point that out to Mo’Nique via Instagram, however, Owen found himself dealing with backlash online for days. On the bright side, that’s where he found he loved being insulted as “white cracker bread.”

When he’s not convincing you to call him that now on the regular, Owen is jokingly advising us on how we all can live our best lives on social media. By faking it. Why pay for bottle service at nightclubs or private jets, when you can simply pose for pics near them? When you see him use the hashtag #DoinWhatIDo? “That is code for me lying.”

And he’s providing us with updates on his family life, in case you wondered what future episodes of The Gary Owen Show would have entailed. Both of his sons, unlike Owen himself, are attracted to white girls. His fairer-skinned daughter, on the other hand, went to homecoming with a black teen who towered over the comedian. Owen’s wife, meanwhile, continues to surprise him with the things she does (such as suntanning) or things she says (one of which resulted in a viral post).

If the “white cracker bread” nickname doesn’t stick, at least you can still confuse him for Tommy from Power. Either works for him.

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.

Watch Gary Owen: #DoinWhatIDo on Showtime Anytime