I said to the camera crew, “I’m going to do a joke about my mum, so it’ll be good if you can just find her in the crowd and just get her facial expression.” That was all I said. That’s what makes it even funnier, because I didn’t even know where she was sitting in the audience. For her, it wasn’t a comedic moment - it was like, “This is my moment, look at me.” It wasn’t like, “Oh, let me help my daughter out and give her a funny moment.” She was like, “Yeah, I’m the reason why she’s here - you all look at me.” That seems like someone who has impeccable comic timing. The Hammersmith Apollo set you did a while ago - the one that first brought you to the attention of Chuck Lorre - had that great moment where you show your mom in the audience and then she instinctively stands up regally to accept everyone’s cheers. I really liked him, but he was just a dude on television - comedy wasn’t in my consciousness like that. Like, he had a character called Cupid Stunt, and it wasn’t till I was a grown woman of twentysomething before I realized, “Oh my god, if you swap the letters round, that was Stupid Cunt!” He’d do things like that, and the characters would do outrageous things. His sketches were very irreverent and a bit nutty, and he also slipped some swear words into his sketches on primetime TV.
#Abishola hearts bob tv#
There was comedy on TV - there was a guy that I loved when I was a kid called Kenny Everett, and his stuff was sketches. I was watching cartoons and TV shows that were geared toward kids. It’s like, “These are not real people.” So I never listened to stand-up or watched stand-up as a kid. When I’d watch people on TV, they were like aliens to me: “Oh, those are people on TV.” You never think that you can be that person. I never saw anybody like myself doing it, so it didn’t even come into my imagination that someone like me could do that. They mainly were from the northern part of England, which is very different from London, and it was just guys telling jokes. There were dudes on TV doing stand-up, but in England in the 1970s and 1980s, it was mainly old white dudes in working-men’s clubs. Back then, did you even have a conception of what stand-up was?
You grew up in London, and you weren’t a big comedy person as a kid. You’re not going to come and see the same show twice - I’m always writing.” (I’m) trying to get people to go, ‘Oh, that’s the same person.’ People who are coming to see me are people who are fans of my stand-up, which is great, because I’m always trying to get new material going. “I don’t know whether it’s because CBS is traditionally an older audience who maybe don’t go out to live comedy as much - or the fact that people don’t know that the woman who plays Kemi and created the show is also a very established and well-known stand-up comic. “Only a small percentage right now are coming via Bob Hearts Abishola - I’m not quite sure why that is,” she tells me. Despite the success of Bob Hearts Abishola, where she also plays Abishola best bud Kemi, Yashere still notices that those who come out to see her live don’t necessarily know the sitcom. Soon, she’ll be back on the road with her “Woman King of Comedy” tour, which allows her to pursue her greatest passion, stand-up comedy. But the writers’ strike has shut down production, and so she’s out on the picket lines, proudly so.ĭuring our conversation, the 49-year-old comic, who’s also the author of the 2021 memoir Cack-Handed, makes it clear how important this ongoing strike is for the future of writers in the entertainment industry - even if that’s only one aspect of her career. It’s one of the few traditional, multi-camera sitcoms left on network television, and normally Yashere, one of Bob Hearts Abishola’s showrunners, would be immersed in putting together the new season. The series, which stars Mike & Molly’s Billy Gardell as a blue-collar businessman who falls for the Nigerian nurse (Folake Olowofoyeku) he meets in the hospital after a heart attack, was renewed early this year for its fifth season. And the sense of dislocation she’s often felt wherever she’s lived has helped inform Bob Hearts Abishola, the CBS sitcom she co-created along with (among others) sitcom powerhouse Chuck Lorre. The difficulty of coming out to her mom became the foundation for great jokes she’d tell around the world. The misogyny and racism she faced at 19, when she worked as an engineer at Otis, got turned into fodder for stand-up routines. Picked on in school, where she didn’t see many other Black faces, she used humor to defang tense situations. resident, has a sense of humor about the bummer weather, just as she’s been able to find the funny in myriad disappointing aspects of life.
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