The stand-up who is serious about comedy

THERE might not be a funnier act in Ireland this year than Reginald D Hunter, who is performing in 14 venues over the next three weeks, with a later date at the end of May, at Vicar Street.

The American stand-up, who has lived in London since 1997, first visited Ireland in 1998, and is friends with Irish peers, including Ed Byrne. “There’s that underlying tension that a lot of my Irish friends have,” he says, “that duality: ‘You’re doomed, you’re doomed, you’re doomed, but you should try and succeed’.” Hunter, who was shortlisted three times in a row for the Perrier award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, at the start of the last decade, is a familiar face from British television’s panel shows, including Have I Got News For You. TV viewers get a sense of his easy, Deep South charm from these vignettes, but they have little of the force of his stand-up shows.

Hunter’s performances, usually with a glass of vodka in tow, are carefully crafted, like one long sermon, and he has the poise and delivery of a good actor, unsurprisingly so, as acting was his first calling. His move to the UK was precipitated by selection (one of six from 1,500 applicants) for New York RADA. His lines have a dark, Wildean artifice to them. The British, he once mused, don’t like “women unless they’re mothers or children unless they’re missing”.

He explore ideas, contentious ones. He is, as the paradox goes, serious about his comedy; his polemics bring to mind some of his dead countrymen, notably Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks. Candour is his defining trait. Nothing is off limits: race, paedophilia, rape. He loves to question: was forced sex a necessary evil in the early days of human evolution? Is childbirth as painful as we think it is? Audience members leave their auditoriums charged with energy, and, you can be sure, mull over items for days. Either that or they’ll be cursing him, and giving him up for a misogynist, among other lazy labels people have directed at him.

“Great stand-up is about being fearless,” he says. “Each year, you’re supposed to incrementally conquer more of your fear. What eventually happens is that you move from being afraid of failure, you get educated and you get a wild hair up your ass about something. It becomes almost obsessive.

“At my age, I’m less self-conscious about what I seem like to others. I’m less self-conscious about saying the wrong thing or not being cute enough. I’m less worried about my decisions for fear that they will stop me from getting the woman of my dreams.”

Hunter has more faith in his opinions now. “That’s because I know that, most of the time, the world doesn’t know what it’s talking about. You have to age to get good at that. Since I was about 35, I can look at the news, even economic news, and go, ‘Well, that’s bullshit. That’s a lie.’

“I don’t have to go,” he says, adopting a childish voice; “‘Wow, I wonder if that’s right. Do you think, is that right?’.”

Hunter was born in Albany, Georgia, in 1969, the youngest of nine children. He visits, although the longer he’s exiled, the more anomalous he becomes there. He notices changes to America since he left it.

“I’m surprised at how contemptuous America is of its trade unions,” he says. “America has been crushing union movements for over a hundred years. I would say largely to great success, disappointingly so. Whatever apparatus is in charge of America — some people call it ‘the banks’; some people call it ‘capitalists’; some people call it ‘the devil’; I refer to it as ‘the resident evil’ — it has been able to convince middle-class people that even though the upper 1% and bankers have stolen all their money, that they should blame working-class people. It’s like: ‘I know the banks took all your money, but look at that lowdown, non-working mother. She’s to blame.’ It’s like, ‘Wow, what a snowjob.’ And we fall for it.

“Americans have become more like Europeans since the financial problems. Everywhere I’ve gone in America, recently, no-one makes eye contact anymore. People are not quite as welcoming. When money’s tight, it makes people less generous, less outgoing. It makes relationships more competitive.”

Hunter discounts the notion that he’s well-read, more “spottily read”, he says, mentioning Philip Roth, who recently retired as a novelist, as a favourite. Hunter’s not giving up the road, although a life apart from comedy is a constant consideration.

“I think about that all the time, man,” he says. “Wistfully, I’d be dreaming about it. I’m 44, and more and more I read stuff about men who come to the end. Sometimes, I’m looking at various forms of the end for men, so I can recognise it when it’s coming: ‘Oh, shit, so it’s cancer of the nose I got. I’m probably not going to tell any more jokes’. “Sometimes,” he says, “I’m out with people and I get so intensely bored it makes me furious. I mean vomitously so.

“My fear is not caring anymore. I care enough about stand-up to go through discomfort. I care enough to worry about it, and it’s one of the sure things that I don’t wait until the last minute to prepare for a gig.

“I guess my fear is not loving it, not caring anymore, of going through the motions, or being washed-up, and not knowing it, and being shown the door,” he says, chuckling.

“I might be like Muhammad Ali, those last three fights. I’ll be taking on my Leon Spinks audiences.”

* Reginald D Hunter is currently touring Ireland, including the Cork Opera House, which he plays Sunday, Apr 7; www.reginalddhunter.com.