Docuseries an inspirational oral history of Black comedy scene
“Phat Tuesdays,” a three-part docuseries now streaming on Amazon Prime, tells the story of the weekly show that brought Black comedy and Black audiences to West Hollywood and the Comedy Store, from 1995 to 2005, as well as what came before and what’s come after. Directed by Reginald Hudlin, it’s an oral history with pictures, interspersed with clips of comics in their youth, that details what Dave Chappelle calls “an under-recognized cultural moment.”
Moved along by a cast of famous and less famous faces from older and less old generations — including Tiffany Haddish, Cedric the Entertainer, Regina King, Luenell, J.B. Smoove, Jay Pharoah, Nick Cannon, Steve Harvey, Chris Tucker, Snoop Dogg, Lil Rel Howery, Bill Bellamy and George Wallace — it is surprisingly sweet and inspirational for something also quite raucous and more than occasionally raunchy.
That might have something to do with the character of its central figure, comedian and actor Guy Torry, who created Phat Tuesday, and though it is true that Torry is the executive producer of the series, there is much testimony to his generosity, openness and all-around niceness, qualities that also come through in his on-stage segments. He seems to be using the documentary as a platform to thank all the people who helped him, and to give credit to the people he helped.
It’s a Golden Age story, looking at a special place in its years of glory; the pitch is both to people who remember and the uninformed ripe to be amazed and jealous — nostalgia and nostalgia by proxy. (“Phat Tuesday was something very, very special to witness, to say you were there,” says Anthony Anderson. “Isn’t that what this whole documentary is about?”) As an instrumental stage, seemingly, of most every comedian who has gotten famous since the 1970s, the Comedy Store has itself been the focus or the incidental setting of many documentaries; the very fact that Phat Tuesday took place there gave the showcase cachet. “It put a lot of weight on it,” says comic Kym Whitley. “This is the big time.”
Before there was Phat Tuesday, there was the Comedy Act Theater, where in the early 1990s Guy’s already established older brother Joe Torry was working as the emcee; running through the docuseries is a story of sibling rivalry and support.
Like most any documentary determined to tag every base, it taps some lightly, others firmly; the third episode is largely a grab bag of themes. We learn more about Guy and Joe; Guy’s teeth; the sexual
scene; Guy’s openness to female comics when women had to fight or, let’s say, barter for stage time at many other venues, and his booking transgender comedian Flame Monroe (“long before,” says Monroe, “trans was all over TV”); Phat Tuesday comics who weren’t Black (the late Bob Saget worked there for six months); the similarities between music and comedy, rappers and comics; bombing and the demands of the Black audience (Harvey is especially funny on this); and the fact that comedy, at a high level, is hard work, an art and a science, inspirational and experimental, requiring not just talent but also discipline. A generous amount of time is devoted to the new generation of comics, who do their work through social media, independent of any place or scene.
And finally, there is the Comedy Store wall, and the importance of having one’s name written there — “It’s immortalizing,” says Pharoah — which leads to an overtly sentimental but genuinely moving conclusion.
Where to watch: Amazon Prime