Reginald D Hunter: 'I don’t have to constantly be aware that I’m black'
Reginald D Hunter plays Cork and several other Irish centres. (Photo by Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images)
Reginald D Hunter was living in his hometown, Albany, Georgia, in the mid-1990s. He was in his twenties, kicking around, going nowhere fast. An attempt at an acting career had stalled. He filled his weekends gambling. He had a gambling partner, who had an engineering job; Hunter was teaching. On weekends, from about eight o’clock Friday evening until six o’clock Monday morning, they disappeared into the subterranean world of card schools.
Hunter always read the room. He liked playing against guys who were high because they were loose. Hunter’s weakness was that he was cocky, too cocky. “I look back at the chances I took,” he says, “and I wonder, why did I think that would work?”
One night, things took a turn for the worse. A guy he was playing against, who was high on crack, accused him of cheating. He had good reason. Hunter had stacked the deck. The guy demanded that Hunter return the money he had won. Hunter refused. A gun was pulled out and put up against his face.
“It’s true what they say that when you’re faced with imminent death your life flashes before your eyes. In the space of a few breaths, I saw my birth and events right up to that moment right there. I thought to myself, do I have any regrets? I regret that I’ve never gone to Britain. If I last through this, I’ll look into that.”
And he did. The next day, he started researching how to get a place at Rada, the acting school in London, where he enrolled in 1997. A couple of years later, after getting kicked out of Rada, he turned to comedy. For more than 20 years now, his mix of polemics and philosophy with a funny kick, have made him a popular presence on the stand-up circuit in Britain and Ireland, as well as on TV panel shows.
Hunter’s fixation with the UK went back to his childhood, growing up in America’s Deep South. As a 10-year-old kid, he watched a film about the famous heavyweight black boxing champion, Jack Johnson, which made a vivid impression.
At the turn of the last century, Johnson, as a black man in a relationship with a white woman, fell foul of the federal government in the United States, who trumped up charges against him. Facing a prison sentence, he went on the run, and ended up living overseas for several years. It was around the time of the First World War.
In the film, Johnson praises British civilisation, which had, for example, embraced the anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglass in the nineteenth century. It was this idea of British fairness which appealed to Hunter as a child growing up in a Southern American state, one rife with racism, in the 1970s. Ever since then, he wanted to meet those kind of “fair” white people.
After a quarter of a century living in London, he gives his verdict about how that went: “In my honest opinion, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh white people generally care for fairness. They don’t always pull it off, but they give it a go. In America, as a big, black man from the South, you don’t expect the game to be 50-50.
“In this time zone, it’s the only part of the world that I’ve been in, where consistently I go to places where white people are generally pleased to see a black man. When I show up to parties here, when I walk into the room, white women don’t start hiding their purses or getting extra polite. I feel like a regular dude over here. I don’t have to constantly be aware that I’m black. You’ve no idea what a burden is lifted.”
Hunter is touring his latest stand-up show in Ireland this month, where he stops by Cork for a couple of gigs. He recalls a moment of enlightenment on one of his first visits to the city after he’d finished gigging: “It was maybe 15 years ago. It was a Saturday night late. I'm sitting outside and I see about five or six women. They've been dressed up for the evening and they're all walking barefoot with their shoes in one hand and a bag of chips in the other. And I looked at that and I thought, Yeah, if you can't find love, you could always find some chips.”
- Reginald D. Hunter’s The Man Who Could See Through Shit is at Cork’s Cyprus Avenue (19-20 October) and Town Hall Theatre, Galway Comedy Festival (26 October). See: www.reginalddhunter.com
