Skip to main contentCenac will be at the Hawthorne Theatre Friday, Sept. 12. The Texas-raised standup talked to WW about Bill Cosby, puppetry and what, if anything, is off-limits to comedians.
WW: I just revisited your special, Comedy Person. Part of the way through, I started to think you punctuated lines like Bill Cosby. Then you wound up doing an impression of him. Was he your guy while growing up?
Wyatt Cenac: When I was very young, my grandmother gave me a book of his to read. That was my first introduction to him. His might have been one of the first standup specials I saw, apart from sporadic standup you'd see on Comedy Central back in the day. There are a lot of people I'd call influences, but at a young age, he was one of the first people I got to see, partly because a guy like Pryor, I knew him from movies, but in his standup, he cursed. And Carlin was the same thing. But Cosby was probably the first person I saw as a standup comedian. And I grew up at a time when everyone did a Cosby impression. Part of doing the impression was like, maybe this is the only time I'll be able to do it on television.
Did you watch The Cosby Show? I was always confused about how his office was off to the right of the staircase.
I always thought his office was the garage, which I always found strange, because the show takes place in Brooklyn, but pre-gentrified Brooklyn. It felt weird that you had these pregnant ladies going to see an ob-gyn working out of his garage in not-so-nice Brooklyn.
You have a lot in the works, including a new album. Did you think doing the Daily Show was going to grant you access to other projects?
It wasn't necessarily a plan. Working on The Daily Show, I learned a lot—it was a great experience. For me, leaving that, I could try to create my own thing. I spent a number of years at both King of the Hill and The Daily Show, working on other people's shows. You're doing it long enough that you're like, "I have a great idea." And you hope that it is and you just take it out into the marketplace.
One of the shows you're working on, Yellowbellies, involves puppets. You voiced the Michael Steele puppet on The Daily Show and also previously worked on a cartoon. Are those interests related?
Animation and puppets definitely overlap as far as my interests go. It was one of the things since childhood that I was always fascinated by. Doing work in animation was great, but one of things that sucks about animation is that it takes about nine months to make something.
Were you into Jim Henson as a kid? Where does the puppet infatuation come from?
That was a big part of my childhood. I had a Kermit puppet I played with and I had a friend who cut out a puppet theater-type of thing, and we'd do puppet shows. My friend's mom would take us to see puppet shows and she also signed us up for animation classes.
Do you remember any of your characters or stories?
I remember the animation classes. It was a community college class, and we were probably low double digits—11, 12? It was us and everyone else in the class was 18, 19, 20. I don't know if they dumbed it down for us, but we got to make a film as our final project. The 19- and 20 year-old burnout guys with long hair were like, "Let's do something like Heavy Metal." And the teacher was like, "We can't do too much gore, because of the children." So, the compromise was that we wound up doing a fairly gory cartoon about the Gummi Bears and the Care Bears attacking PBS. I just remember Mr. Rogers getting attacked by Care Bears.
Over the summer, you caught some flack for a bit that aired on This American Life where you mentioned Down syndrome. Is anything off-limits to comedians?
Nothing is off-limits whether you're a comedian or a politician or somebody who gets on a soapbox in a town square. What often happens is, we look at the person who says something and we don't necessarily look at the response to it. There are comedians who have told jokes that I thought were offensive, but it crosses the line to me—not to them and not to their audience. If they can tell that joke and an arena full of people laugh, then the joke works. It just doesn't work for me. I don't think anything's off-limits. I mean, we still live in a country where there's a football team called the Redskins.
SEE IT: Wyatt Cenac performs at the Hawthorne Theatre, 1507 SE 39th Ave., 503-233-7100. 8 pm Friday, Sept. 12. $20-$25. 21kknd. Tickets here.
WWeek 2015