Halfway through his second set at the DC Improv in Washington last December, Gary Owen dropped a Cosby joke.
The room was packed. Owen’s originally scheduled six shows sold out so quickly that the club added four more, and those sold out too. It was Saturday night and the crowd was decked out, heavy imported leather coats draped over chairs in the dimly lit venue. Nearly everyone there was black. Except for Owen, who is as white as the Easter Bunny.
Matt Roth / BuzzFeed News
Owen wore a brand-new, $250 gray polo shirt, crisp jeans, and camouflage Del Toro high-tops, and he prowled around the stage as he worked. Servers bustled trays of chicken wings and Hennessy cocktails. Owen's road manager was setting up a merch table in the back of the club’s cramped lobby where Owen would sell “Black Girls Rock!” T-shirts along with $20 DVDs after the show.
Mixing good cheer and a touch of self-deprecation, Owen told tales about his wife, who is black, his children, and that familiar comedic fallback, sex. One had him at basketball star Dwyane Wade’s wedding a few months earlier, and standing at the urinal next to LeBron James, unable to resist sneaking a glimpse. “They don’t call him the king for nothing,” Owen chirped.
As a topic for humor, Bill Cosby felt like something else altogether, and a queasy tension sizzled across the room as Owen spoke his name. Somewhere a man grunted, a guttural question mark that sounded slightly menacing. Not even a month had passed since decades' worth of sexual assault allegations against America’s most important African-American comic began resurfacing. Just 12 days earlier, a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, declined to indict the white cop who killed Michael Brown. Three days before the show, another grand jury elected not to charge a white NYPD patrolman in the choking death of Eric Garner. It seemed far too soon for a blond, blue-eyed comic from the Midwest to mock a cultural icon in front of 300 black people in the heart of the Chocolate City.
But it turned out to be a carefully calibrated head-fake: Owen’s bit wasn’t about race at all. Instead, he riffed on the apparent agelessness of all the women coming forward to accuse Cosby. “Bill Cosby has the dick of life,” Owen guffawed. “His dick will cure Alzheimer’s! He’s got some Benjamin Button dick! You’ve got six months to live unless you want to fuck Bill Cosby. Then you’re good.” He had made, essentially, a rape joke. But in front of this crowd, at that moment, it somehow felt like safe ground, and the tension in the room boiled off in a burst of gleeful laughter.
Gary Owen almost went there but couldn't.
Photograph by Matt Roth for BuzzFeed News
Owen holds the distinction of being the only white comic to host the influential BET comedy show Comic View and has appeared in shows and movies with Tyler Perry, Eddie Murphy, Jamie Foxx, and Kevin Hart. For the past several years, he has headlined Shaquille O’Neal’s All Star Comedy Jam, routinely sells out 2,000-seat venues, and is currently touring arenas with Mike Epps. In January, his seventh comedy special, I Agree With Myself , premiered on Showtime.
He is, of course, far from the only Caucasian ever to make black people laugh, but it’s difficult if not impossible to think of other white comics who play almost exclusively to African-Americans — and, in particular, one who has found such a strong base of support among black women.
“I think I’m the first to do this, the route I’ve taken,” Owen said recently while trudging across the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood. He was there to film a guest appearance on Real Husbands of Hollywood, a hit BET show starring Hart. “It’s not like that was the plan; it just happened.”
He never says the n-word; he constantly reminds audiences he has a black wife; he tiptoes around societal problems and makes sure even the gentlest critique is tempered by an unvarnished, flag-waving admiration of black culture.
“There’s a couple of things about black people that bother me that I’d like to share,” he often confides, slowing his pacing to deliver what sounds like a trigger warning. But of course it’s a trick: He’s just going to tease them about how long black church services are, or what a saga it is to get a simple haircut at a black barber, or how distasteful chitlins are. These jokes are not judgments, they’re winking affirmations.
And yet, he can never be more than an outsider. The day after the Ferguson grand jury news in November, Owen posted on Facebook and Instagram that the situation was “bringing out the worst side of” people and that he wasn’t sure Michael Brown was completely innocent. “I don’t know anyone who gets shot doesn’t have a gun then decides to come back towards someone who just shot them.” The post, and a follow-up, generated fierce pushback.
“Yea he has a Black wife and stars in a lot of Black Films but at the end of the day, he wasn’t raised Black,” one commenter wrote. Added another, “Bro just shut up. Black people are ur only fans ur about to lose them all.” And a third: “Stay in yo lane.”
At 41, Owen is unquestionably successful. By his own account, he made over a million dollars last year, which goes a long way in southern Ohio, where he lives. He can tour as much as he’d like, is a close friend to Hollywood celebrities and star athletes, and he and his family want for nothing. Still he yearns for more, for the the kind of widespread recognition that any ambitious performer covets.
“I just want a big HBO special or a network or somebody willing to get behind my work and promote it,” said Owen, who had been pitching a sitcom idea while in L.A. “The most frustrating thing for me is to have this successful act that resonates across the country and the network guys just don’t get it. Everyone sees it except them. I want to leave a mark.”
Owen and Kevin Hart at the Think Like A Man Too press junket, June 2014
Jesse Grant / Getty Images for Sony Pictures
For all the work he’s put into building trust with his audience, Owen will never be a black comic or be able to carry a black movie; he’ll always be some version of the goofy white sidekick he plays in the two Think Like a Man films. In two decades of comedy, he has built no white following — among audiences or even fellow comics — and made little sustained effort to do so. He has little choice but to stay in his lane, and he's the only one in it.
So he sits in limbo, bound by his respectfulness to a culture that can never completely be his; some argue he'd have more of a career if he pissed people off. "He's not successful enough to really pull out the haters yet," said producer Will Packer, who cast Owen in the Think Like A Man movies as well as Ride Along. "When he really blows up, the haters will come out, because that's how it works."
But the mere notion of attempting to blow up carries its own risks. “If Gary goes to crossover, we will cross him out,” said Tom Joyner, host of a radio show that’s syndicated in nearly 100 markets, and on which Owen appears weekly. “That's just the way it is with black audiences.”
Photograph by Matt Roth for BuzzFeed News
Owen’s Instagram overflows with photos of him standing next to professional athletes, towering men wearing grins on their faces as they put their arms around the funny white guy they just saw perform.
But in person, Owen turns out to be surprisingly large — over 6 feet tall with a muscular build that he attends to in a mirrored gym in the basement of his home north of Cincinnati. Compared with other comics, Owen looks like a linebacker, and so his handshake, limp as a wet towel, comes as a surprise. “Hi, I’m Gary,” he said tentatively, standing outside the soundstage where Real Husbands shoots, eyes cast down. As athletic and likable as he is onstage, in person he proves laconic, slow-moving, and sometimes standoffish.
Childhood friends describe Owen as a late bloomer, a scrawny kid. He went out for sports, but wasn’t much of an athlete, playing on the JV football squad even as a senior. Schoolmates picked on him for that, and for the fact that he never had a girlfriend, and because he never had nice clothes, and especially because he grew up poor in a forlorn trailer park in the outskirts of Oxford, Ohio, a college town where class divisions felt particularly sharp.
His mother, Barb, had him at 18 with her high school sweetheart Gary Owens (Owen changed his last name to avoid confusion with the late former Laugh-In comic). They separated a few years later and Barb soon remarried, moving from Cincinnati to Oxford when Owen was 10 with her second husband, Rod Randall. Owen’s father was almost never around, and he spent the rest of his childhood crowded into a double-wide mobile home with his mother, three young half-siblings, an older stepsister, and his chronically underemployed stepfather.
These days, the trailer park is called Island Lake Mobile Home Park (manager’s current special: “Move your home to Island Lake and we will pay for the move and setup of your home”), and there is indeed a muddy pond with a mound of weed-crowned mud poking out of it on the far side of the property.
When Owen was a teenager, this place was nameless. Driving up its potholed road in his sleek, leather-lined Audi A8 on a recent Sunday, he rolled down the window and eyed a new generation of kids growing up like him, in patched thrift-store parkas and ill-fitting jeans, squatting in the grit. His old house was painted blue, with a sagging porch under which piles of junk lay scattered.
“This was the worst place to grow up,” Owen said, rolling the window back up and squinting through the tinted windows. “Humiliating.”
On Friday nights, Owen would slink out through a copse of trees and tall weeds to Highway 27 where he would wait for his friends to pick him up at a run-down old gas station called Jamie’s Market. When it was time to go home, he’d ask to be dropped off there as well, because he didn’t want people to see where he lived, or have to deal with his stepfather.
“Rod,” Owen said, stonily, “is an asshole” prone to frightening fits of rage, who punched Owen’s real father at Owen’s wedding; “a lazy motherfucker” who never held down a job for more than a few weeks, yet harangued his teenage stepson constantly to get a job; a “functional bigot” whom Owen won’t let get close to his own children to this day.
“Gary would volunteer for everything so he wouldn’t have to go home,” said Mike Heineman, one of Owen’s best friends growing up, now an insurance salesman in Kentucky. Sometimes Owen would just run away. “He called me one night and asked me to pick him up. I pulled up to the store and he jumped out of the bushes and got in my car. He spent a week at my house.”
Paul Johnson was one of the only black kids at Owen's high school, Talawanda in Oxford, which had over 1,100 students — the kind of place that still had sock hops. They met after Owen ogled a red, green, yellow, and black leather Pan-African medallion that Johnson wore around his neck, an emblem popularized by the Afrocentric movement in the late 1980s and glamorized by hip-hop artists.
“Gary was just in awe of it. The first thing he asked was, ‘Can I wear that?’” Johnson recalled. “I don’t know if it was so much of his understanding what it meant or trying to identify. He just thought it was cool and wanted to wear it.”
Owen’s mother, Barb, has worked at a factory making electrical connectors for 37 years and eventually saved up enough to buy a proper house a few miles closer to central Oxford. Not long ago, Owen surprised her with a brand-new Hyundai. “I got one of the little ones in a feminine, light-blue color so that Rod wouldn’t drive it,” he said, passing by the squat red brick house without slowing down. “I haven’t been in that house for five years because of him.”
"Gary Owens looks proud knowing that he was voted Class Clown and Most Obnoxious."
Owen was voted class clown his senior year, but he didn’t watch a lot of comedy growing up and can only remember listening to a Sam Kinison tape on his friend’s car stereo and maybe a few Eddie Murphy bits on TV. He said he was interested in the idea of stardom, but without any real plan or experience performing, Owen enlisted in the Navy midway through his senior year. “I had to get out,” Owen said in an appearance on the The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson. “I didn't want to be some proud American and serve my country. I just wanted to get out of the trailer park. That was my only goal in life.”
In Gary, the sitcom Owen was pitching, he’s married to a black woman and lives across the street from her well-to-do parents. Gary also features a bigoted father character who lives in a trailer that’s plugged into the house, siphoning its water and electricity. “It’s a metaphor,” Owen said. “He’s sucking the life out of me.”
Barb refused to put Rod on the phone for an interview, saying only that she wished things were different. Then she changed the subject and told a story about Owen at 12, when he got hold of a VHS recorder at a family Christmas party. He “taped himself saying he was going to California and make it big, and all the girls were going to love him,” she said, pausing for a moment. “Everything worked out the way he wanted.”
Photograph by Matt Roth for BuzzFeed News
It was in the Navy that Owen became a fan of the HBO show Def Comedy Jam, which helped launch the career of many leading black comics. “On Friday nights, we’d all sit around and watch it, and we’d never go out until it ended,” Owen recalled. “When I saw the way the crowd reacted, I thought, Oh, that’s the shit I want.”
When he visited family in Ohio on leave, he started hanging outside a local comedy club owned by former Family Feud host Ray Combs. Owen was too young to get in, but he’d stand by the door and listen to the routines and was occasionally let in by a sympathetic bouncer. “I knew I was better than whoever was performing,” Owen said.
Owen spent two years in the Honor Guard in Washington, D.C., and then trained as a Master at Arms, the Navy’s military police, which brought him to a base in San Diego.
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