The world according to REGINALD D HUNTER
THE LACONIC STAND-UP WON’T LET ANYTHING GET IN THE WAY OF COMEDY, HE TELLS
IMAGINE being so dedicated to the craft of stand-up comedy that you pause halfway through making love to your girlfriend to write down a joke that’s popped into your head. ‘I made a rule with the universe,’ says Reginald D Hunter, the committed stand-up comedian in question, relaxing in what he describes as his ‘palatial estate in east London’. ‘The rule is that whenever a joke hits, I stop what I’m doing and write it down. I’ve had moments when I was like, “Hey baby, just a second while I get a pen and paper…” She’d be like, “How dare you!” And I’m like, “Baby, if I get this right, we could be eating off this one for two or three years!”’
The jokes are for next year’s tour and range from Trump to Black Lives Matter to whatever pops into his head in intimate moments, especially during lockdown, which Reg has spent working on a new novel and an upcoming podcast.
‘One of the good things about lockdown is it’s forced me to take a vacation I never would have taken for myself,’ he says, in that laidback Georgian voice of his. ‘I’ve been reading, writing jokes, unf****** up my life,’ he says, explaining that it’s hard to get a show together when the world is likely to change so drastically at any minute.
‘Oh, Trump was impressive,’ he says of the outgoing President, but not impressive in that way. ‘I think it was harder for comedians to comment on Trump while we were in the midst of Trump. It got so crazy, we got withdrawn, it made us crazy-punch drunk. We’ve just got past four years of insanity, now we can look back and go, “That s*** was crazy!” Hopefully now we’ll be re-emboldened.’
Not that he’s particularly euphoric about President-Elect Joe Biden either. ‘It shows you how bad the world is right now that it took someone like Biden to be the antidote to Trump,’ he says, ‘The election was a choice between the end of American democracy and straight-up American corruption. He’s been in the pocket of big business for some time. Quite openly! Just look who he’s choosing for his cabinet: bankers! He was one of the authors of ‘three strikes and you’re out’ so he’s responsible for a lot of the over-incarceration, he voted yes on attacking Iraq… I’m sad to say it but I’m pleased American corruption won it this time. And he makes nice Presidential
speeches.’ As far as UK politics go, now that he’s based here, he reckons it’s the same ‘monkey business’ as with American politics, where all power has been devolved to Big Tech companies.
‘How do you make sense out of the Tories or Labour?’ he says. ‘I have friends who are Tories who don’t see nothing wrong with Boris. They think he’s kind of cute. What do you say to that?’
Which clearly brings us onto one of the year’s other big stories, Black Lives Matter. ‘Racism has never really been the problem in America,’ he says, serious for a moment, ‘white supremacy has. A racist person can be cool as long as you live over there. A supremacist is going to need either your death or your servitude. And Trump emboldened a lot of white supremacists. So it’s obvious what Black Lives Matter was born out of.
‘But there’s a large section of white supremacists just dying for black people to kick off so they can have this race war they’ve been dreaming of since they lost the Civil War. For them, that’s still not over. Here, it doesn’t quite have the urgency that it does in America, where we just basically need the police to stop killing us.’
Heavy times for a comedian who’s just coming to terms with the fact that he’s turned 50 and has discovered he now gets treated as a senior citizen – ‘maybe that means I can start getting free s***!’ – but it was at the age of 50 that his own father welcomed baby Reginald into the world. Is that making him broody?
‘There’s part of me that thinks the world needs more of my DNA,’ he says, back with a laugh. ‘Because I read this article that said decent, educated people are having fewer and fewer children while psychotic motherf****** are breeding like rabbits. And someone’s got to offset Boris.’ Big laugh. ‘But then I thought, “How much more can you give, Reg?” Man, I wish there were people in my family as easy to talk to as you!’
‘We’ve just got past four years of insanity. Now we can look back and go “that s*** was crazy!” Hopefully now we’re re-emboldened’