Curtis Cook photo by CALLIE BIGGERSTAFF
“You wouldn’t believe the backlash we got the first year,” Tyrone Collins says. He’s fresh from a radio interview promoting the three-day NW Black Comedy Festival that he and his wife Courtenay Collins organize. “We didn’t realize we were gonna have so many people want to be a part of it.”
Tyrone—who goes by The Real Hyjinx onstage—doesn’t give a specific event that inspired the festival’s founding, but he says it was hurriedly planned through the fall of 2016. When the fest started up, the only other comedy showcase in town that promised a bill focused on people of color was the much-beloved Minority Retort. The Collinses wanted to take it further. They wanted to put on a festival.
