Carrying a bowl of baby carrots with him, LA’s Quincy Jones dropped Mitch Hedberg-like one-liners, while pausing between jokes to take a crunchy bite from a carrot.
Carrying a bowl of baby carrots with him, LA’s Quincy Jones dropped Mitch Hedberg-like one-liners, while pausing between jokes to take a crunchy bite from a carrot.

“I’m a little bit nervous. Not for the whole ‘stand-up’ thing. It’s just, I’m from the South, and so I’m conditioned to be nervous in a room full of drunk white people.”

So began Richard Douglas Jones’ set at the New Negroes show at Doug Fir Lounge.

“And to top it all off,” he continued, “this is a goddamn hunting lodge.”

Comedian and actor Baron Vaughn brought his New Negroes show back to the Bridgetown Comedy Festival for a third year—and, yes, the room was predictably packed with drunk (mostly) white people, which did not go unnoticed or uncommented on by the performers. Local comic and recent Kill Rock Stars signee Nathan Brannon co-hosted with Vaughn, and the two comedians riffed easily with each other, warming up the crowd instantly.

This year’s comics hailed from north to south, and their styles shifted dramatically from one to the next. Austin’s Yusef Roach opened by confessing that, “the whiter the girl I’m hitting on, the blacker my voice gets,” then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “I don’t know if anyone else can relate.”

Atlanta’s Mia Jackson followed Roach, holding it down as the night’s only female comic. With the same genius for timing and delivery that led her to the semi-finals on Last Comic Standing, Jackson delivered a set that, while funny as hell, perhaps resonates more deeply in the South. She began by tracing her deteriorating relationship back to an argument over a biscuit—“not a Red Lobster biscuit,” she explained, “which would’ve been worth it, because it has cheese inside.” Probably zero percent of the Doug Fir audience has ever been inside a Red Lobster, or eaten a biscuit with cheese inside.

Taking the stage next, and carrying a bowl of baby carrots with him, LA’s Quincy Jones (not that one) dropped a rapid succession of Mitch Hedberg-like one-liners, all the while pausing between jokes to take a crunchy bite from a carrot. “I love how packed this room is of white people, to watch a show called New Negroes,” he observed at the end of his set. “What the hell are you guys doing here?”

Richard Douglas Jones—Memphis native and host of the Black Nerd Power podcast—came next, testing the audience’s comfort level by carpetbombing them with the N-word, defending it by calling it “the country club of words, and white people are just dying to get in.”

Solomon Georgio was next onstage—dressed, in his words, like a “gay, black lumberjack going to a business meeting.” A Seattle-raised comic, actor, and Bridgetown regular, Georgio introduced himself as “a professional homosexual,” then went on to proclaim that “straight dudes that refuse to eat pussy are the gayest thing in the whole wide world. Who are you for? Why do you exist?”

The energy (and volume) rocketed skyward when the kinetic David Gborie took the stage. He elicited equal parts laughter and groans when relating how his Google image search for black people with Down’s syndrome resulted in “one picture of a black guy with Down’s syndrome… one picture of an Asian guy with Down’s syndrome, and then a picture of rapper Jadakiss.”

The show closed with LA-based actor and comic Tone Bell, who had a halting start to his set, then admitted he was “drunk as fuck. This goddamn city is killing me.” He struggled to bring it together, but midway through his set he found his groove, during an extended riff on his father, who answers his Samsung smartwatch, “Dick Tracy here,” and calls his lone pair of jeans, “the jeans.” Bell’s indifference (or, sure, his inebriation) was, unexpectedly, a refreshing way to close the night.

So what did the drunk white people think of the show? I couldn’t honestly tell you. While getting post-show drinks at B-Side with a handful of white friends, the overall consensus at the table was that the show was “great.” But I found myself wondering, as I often do, what white people talk about, and what they laugh about, when I’m not there.