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MEET THE MAKER
Spotlighting the people and projects you need to know
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Meet the Maker
Ziwe Fumudoh, “Ziwe” creator, EP, and star
By C. Taylor Henderson
Ziwe Fumudoh on “Ziwe”
“I WAS BORN AND RAISED IN
the United States of America,” Ziwe Fumudoh says with an almost maniacal chuckle. ”I’ve had to talk about race all my life, much to my chagrin.”
The day that I’m chatting with the comedian, who goes by her first name alone, the nation is holding its breath as it awaits the verdict of the Derek Chauvin trial, tensions are rising over the murder of Daunte Wright, and the trailer for Ziwe’s eponymous Showtime variety comedy series has just premiered. Our phone call is celebratory and bouncy, but undercut with a layer of grief—a collision of energies Black people in this country are quite accustomed to.
Ziwe tackles that unease dead-on. The concept for her series first took form in 2017 as a messy web series titled “Baited With Ziwe,” in which she would “bait” her white Above Average coworkers into answering uncomfortable questions about race, bluntly asking questions like, “Did your family own slaves?” and, “How many Black friends do you have?” As she slowly garnered a fanbase on YouTube and Twitter, the show evolved to encompass various digital platforms; live shows in NYC theaters; and, in 2020, as the pandemic forced performers to pivot to digital content during isolation, Instagram Live.
“Suddenly, with COVID-19, live shows were dead,” she says. At the height of the pandemic, a
time when “everyone was going ‘live’ every five minutes,” Ziwe decided to take her show and make it appointment television. “I thought: What if I did a weekly show? It didn’t start off very popular,” she says. “There were, like, 30 people watching initially. But over the course of booking larger and larger guests and having the consistency of being every Thursday at 8 p.m., it became a form of television.”
Instantly iconic moments with famous white women like “canceled” Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway, New York Times columnist Alison Roman, and actor-activists Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan seemingly took over the internet last summer. Clips of these women stuttering about the day they “discovered racism” and other out-of-context moments began circulating around Twitter, where they went viral over and over again. Ziwe’s follower count multiplied, and with those eyes on her, she caught the attention of the “real” television industry. “The show itself did a lot of work for me,” she points out. “With this machine behind me of creating something that huge, the natural progression is: OK, how do we scale this even more and put it on a network?”
There’s no doubt Ziwe’s comedy has a connection to a larger conversation about race in this country; her steepest rise in views and attention followed the death of George Floyd. “We’re all alive during this very horrible period in history,” she says. “When there’s not a school shooting, there’s someone being unjustly murdered in the streets. We are always experiencing that as a collective, especially as Black people.”
She whipped up her frustration with our failing institutions into comedy gold. “My fight-or-flight response is to create. When I feel sadness, I write, I make art, I try to make something cathartic for me. I’m lucky I get to do that in such a public sphere, but, ultimately, I’m just trying to cure myself and, hopefully, cure other people in this process.”
In the end, Ziwe hopes “Ziwe” gives people, both white and Black, permission to laugh through what can be painfully awkward conversations.
