We’re used to standups making shows about their minority identities, whether they derive from race, disability, sexuality or beyond. Fair enough: being in a minority can give you plenty to say, an urge to say it and a particular angle from which to do so. Then there’s the fact that, in a crowded marketplace, standups zero in on their USP, what makes them stand out from the perceived norm. Being in the majority, on the other hand, has seldom been considered an experience much worth talking about. Artistically, comedically, it seemed a dead end – until now.
The majority experience I have in mind is being white, about which there are a handful of comedy shows on this year’s Edinburgh fringe. This isn’t a phenomenon confined to comedy. Much as men are increasingly joining in the feminist conversation, interrogating masculinity and patriarchy from the inside, so too white people are realising that blindness to one’s own racial identity and privilege probably won’t help defeat racism. (I speak as someone who recently attended a workshop called A Space for White Folks Working Towards Racial Justice – every bit as eggy as it sounds – at a theatre conference in the US.)
Such is the thinking behind, to cite the example that’s caught the most people’s eye, Fin Taylor’s show Whitey McWhiteface. “We don’t talk about being white, do we?” he begins, before shattering that silence with some clattering comedy on the subject. The show provokes more than pontificates, as you’d expect, not least given its late-night time slot. But there’s some subversive and constructive thinking in here beyond the playful goads and lateral jokes about ethical porn and human cuisine.
Those latter gags pop up in a routine deriving from Taylor’s claim that whites manufacture sub-identities (vegan is one example) to claim their share of victimhood. That’s not, for me, his most persuasive argument. But he’s strong on the redundancy of the language of “tolerance”, and the inadequacy of “I don’t see colour” as an anti-racist attitude. The show ends with a section on other races’ negative stereotypes of whites, premised on the idea that white people may need to feel racism before we’re ever moved to help fix it. It’s a striking set from a comic who’s got himself a soapbox and is determined to use it – to make you think as well as laugh, and laugh hard.
On the free fringe, Brendon Burns is ending his set about race with an unexpected twist. It feels like 2007 all over again, when the belligerent Aussie did much the same in his show So I Suppose This Is Offensive Now? and won the Edinburgh Comedy award. Nine years on, Burns is a little mellower and on fine form with Dumb White Guy, a show affiliated to a podcast of the same name, in which Burns travels the world performing in environments that render him the ethnic minority.
Like Taylor, Burns is exercised by white oversensitivity – as if we’re the ones with a right to feel offended. The setting for this interrogation of his privilege is his homeland, whose annual national love-in, Australia Day, he can’t bring himself to celebrate. Burns performs as if the iniquity (or at least, ignorance) of white people is a done deal: “I’m white,” he’ll say, offhandedly, “my opinion is worthless.” And then, a moment later, he’s performing as if his opinion is the gospel truth, from which – in a show that recounts the best-buddy relationship he formed with Indigenous Australian comic Craig Quartermaine – it often seems not a million miles away.
The angle on whiteness as an identity is more tangential in Canadian standup Peter White’s show, Straight White Male. Yes, there’s some explicit material about race, which includes a shaggy dog story about a Chinese cabbie with a funny (to White’s ears) accent. That uneasy anecdote is here to demonstrate the effects of growing up, as White did, in a white, monocultural backwater. He acknowledges the privileged status of each of the three identities itemised in his show’s title. But the show resolves itself into autobiographical storytelling rather than disquisition on privilege, as White recounts an abusive relationship from which he once struggled to extricate himself.
There’s a bit of grafting going on, as White tries to draw lessons about race and entitlement from an experience that seems to have had little to do with either. “As a white dude, I’d never had everyone ignore my problems before,” he says, arguing that the helplessness he experienced in this relationship gave him an insight into what those less privileged must suffer all the time. It’s a sweet show, with some good gags; White is stronger on gender than racial politics. And if that thesis felt like overreaching, well, how interesting that White – just as Burns, Taylor and others are suddenly doing – felt moved to acknowledge and address his white privilege in the first place.
