In the 48 hours after a woman said a racist phrase during black stand-up comedian Jay Whittaker’s set, he’s still playing it over in his mind, thinking of all of the ways it could have gone differently.
He’s still getting messages from people who think he overreacted. And getting messages from people who think he underreacted.
He tried to defuse it peacefully — in the “lowest-level” way, he said. He told her she could stay at the show but couldn’t drink anymore. He riffed on what he called an “awkward moment in the show,” for just over two minutes. Then the show got back on track.
“Our job is to make people laugh,” Whittaker told The Salt Lake Tribune on Monday night. “By nature, that makes us peacekeepers.”
He heard her mumble it the first time about 20 minutes into the set, but it was drowned out by laughter between jokes, he said. He heard it a second time later in the set.
But about 45 minutes in, he finished a joke about his 10-year-old son wanting to be an engineer. In the silence after the laughter faded, a woman in the front row said, “White power.”
That third time he heard it, the front few rows — “which had black folks sitting right up front stage left” — did, too.
“I had to speak up,” Whittaker wrote on social media Sunday. “I called her out and told the waitstaff to cut her off from drinking. I didn’t call her any disrespectful names despite her drunk hatred.”
The last time he heard that phrase, he said, he was a teenager and was jumped by neo-Nazis in Dana Point, Calif.
He and other comedians field hecklers often, but this time was different.
“I just want to make people laugh. But I keep having to talk about s--- like this because people need to know it happens,” he told The Tribune. “I don’t want this to happen.”
But, he added, “I look at people who pay good money to see me and get away from that type of harassment that does happen in Utah, and now I’m put on the spot.”
On and off the stage, he has experienced many “racial discrepancies,” he said.
He turns the racism he experiences into jokes as catharsis, he said. He wants people to know racism happens. But he also wants a comedy show to be an escape from negative stereotypes for black people and other people of color, he said.
“I don’t want to start a witch hunt for [the heckler]; I just don’t want this to happen anymore,” he said.
He opted to not ask security to kick the woman out because there was 10 minutes left in his set. It would take longer to kick her out, he wrote, and he didn’t want to affect the waitstaff’s tips.
After the interruption, he went back to his jokes, took pictures and sold merchandise.
“I just want to do jokes,” he said.
After the show, he received love and support from his friends and fans, he said. And he thought that was the end of it.
But in the 48 hours since it happened, he’s still getting messages on Twitter about how he handled the heckler. Some say he overreacted. Some say he underreacted.
Some people on Twitter asked why Wiseguys security didn’t kick the woman and her three companions out of the show.
“That’s not their fault,” he said. “It was my show; I made a judgment call.”
He woke up Sunday morning to social media messages about the incident, so he wrote a post to straighten out what happened in West Jordan.
“I handled it the best I could,” he wrote. “I’ve seen comedians unleash pure fury on audiences and call them every name in the book. That’s not my style but I had to say something. Sure I knew she was drunk but the Black people sitting up front and in the back that came out to just enjoy a night out didn’t deserve that. So I called her out.”
“I just want people to get along better,” he told the Tribune.
Whittaker, who is an actor and an Air Force veteran, moved to Salt Lake City from California with his 10-year-old boy in 2003, when he was assigned to Hill Air Force Base.
He recorded Saturday night’s show and released the audio of the racist outburst on his podcast called “The Incredibly Vocal Minority.”
“Excuse me? Did you just yell ‘white power’ at me?” he says in the audio clip of the show. “Confirm that. Seriously.”
Other audience members react incredulously. Some boo her.
“Comedy is hard,” he continues on the podcast. “You never know what’s going to happen onstage when you’re up there. You try to just roll with the punches. I made a judgment call.”
Drunk or not, there is no excuse for racism, he says. What she said may have made someone else feel scared or uncomfortable, he adds.
But, he told The Tribune, he didn’t want to dismiss the comments and let her think they are OK to say to other comedians. And he doesn’t fault the venue.
“Wiseguys is a phenomenal comedy club and this story should never deter you from going there,” he wrote in his Sunday post. “It’s a great club. I just had to deal with a terrible person in the audience.”
Despite the tension, he considers the incident a victory because it didn’t escalate.
He called it one of his “favorite shows EVER.”
