Wayans is ‘Woke-ish’ in New Comedy Special

When stand-up star Marlon Wayans decided to call his new Netflix comedy special ‘Woke-ish’, the man was right on the money.

A play on the title of the hit ABC show ‘Black-ish’ but also connoting something not fully realised enough to lose the the suffix, ‘Woke-ish’ is Wayans dabbling in such hot button issues as race, gay rights and ‘Rapper’s Delight’.

Forty-five years old and taking the stage in skinny jeans and a black bomber jacket, the youngest of the Wayans clan is as baby-faced as ever explaining his seemingly perpetual youth in lines like “black don’t crack unless you smoke it”.

Young in the face, old in the knees but still out in the club, Wayans begins his set throwing it right back to The Sugar Hill Gang’s hit as an example of fun rap everybody likes before firing shots at the Molly-centric and mumbling rhymes of Future and Desiigner.

Physical, rubber-faced and over the top in his skits, Wayans is a comedian who isn’t afraid to talk about how much a man likes a literal a** licking while (graphically) directing the audience to the area between his balls and anus.

Giving props to Jay Z for elevating his aesthetic to “grown man sh*t”, in his hour-long set, Wayans imagines more rappers rhyming about diabetes, hemorrhoids and arthritis in an era of age-appropriate rap.

The crowd out in Washington DC eats it up.

From his long jokes about the Kardashians via ‘Get Out’ (2017), white people trying to get a “n*gga pass” and the ability black people have to turn our pain into positivity, Wayans is pop culture savvy, always doing the most and borderline acrobatic in a bid to earn his laughs.

Problematic in his gay caricatures in a bit imagining Martin Luther Queen and in his appraisal of Caitlin Jenner, revealingly, Wayans’ shallow mining of LGBTQI realities stems from the fact that his 15-year-old daughter confessed to kissing a girl and liking it.

Hopefully rather than outing his daughter to countless viewers in the name of comedy, these inclusions are a sanctioned and genuine attempt to create tolerance in a world where she will have four strikes against her from the jump – being black, a woman, queer and a Wayans.

Touching on police brutality, suggesting fair but firm black women be partnered with gun-happy white law enforcers but a little indolent in his Trump and Obama bits, the youngest Wayans flexes his social conscience while angling some zingers at the likes of Kevin Spacey and Wendy Williams.

Tune in if you like ‘White Chicks’ (2004) throwbacks, easy, mostly mindless laughs and that distinctly Wayans penchant for parody.

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