For more than two decades Gary Owen has been growing a following with his comedy-based heavily on Black culture. It’s a “shtick” that’s gained him recognition by Ebony Magazine as “Black America’s Favorite White Comic.”
How does a White guy rise to that level of recognition with Black America? Well he’s married to a Black woman, something you’re sure to hear him mention at least once in his standup act, so that must count for something. It appears it does, helping Owen, 43, deliver on Black culture in an authentic and familiar way. His standup routine is a mix of good cheer and a touch of self-deprecation. He tells tales about his wife, his children, and of course the comedic favorite — sex.
How did Owen, a blue-eyed White guy who grew up poor in a trailer park in Ohio, come to be a Black-audience favorite. Voted the class clown of his senior class, Owen joined the Navy to escape his trailer park life and his abusive stepfather. In the service he began watching the HBO show Def Comedy Jam.
“On Friday nights, we’d all sit around and watch it, and we’d never go out until it ended,” recalled Owen, during an interview for BuzzFeed. “When I saw the way the crowd reacted, I thought, Oh, that’s the s*&% I want.”
In 1995, the military assigned him to a base in California and he began traveling the coast appearing at comedy clubs. He credits DD Rainbow, at the time the MC of an urban comedy night called No Color Lines, for helping him find his place in the comedic world.
Don’t Miss Gary Owen in Wichita!
After DD saw him bomb at a White club, she gave him her card, and suggested his act would play better to her audience, and it did. At No Color Lines, Owen’s routine didn’t change, but the audience did: It was mostly black.
“I was shocked when I walked onstage and told the exact same f*&(!%+ joke and it worked,” Owen said. “And that was when I knew.”
Besides a few bumps, it’s been mostly uphill for Owen since. In California, he grew his following with Black audiences, and in particular Black women.
“He started getting into the swing of things when there were certain key phrases he’d say that tickled ladies in the audience,” said Michael Williams who ran the Comedy Act Theater out of a nightclub in Los Angeles. “Mainly it was about wanting to have a relationship with a Black woman. That’s how he ended up getting so popular.”
His big break came when he got a chance to compete on BET’s Comic View, a long-running comedy competition show. Surprisingly, or may not surprisingly, Owen won that season’s competition. So in January 1998, he left the Navy, moved to Los Angeles, and started hosting Comic View. The only White comedian to ever host the show, he was a big hit, and his Black following grew exponentially.
In the two decades since, he has headlined Shaquille O’Neal’s All Star Comedy Jam, routinely sells out 2,000-seat venues, has had a series of comedy specials on Showtime and appeared in numerous movies and television shows. He was in the highly successful “Daddy Day Care” (2003) with Eddie Murphy, had a small role in Kevin Hart’s “Think Like a Man,”(2012) but was such a success his role was bumped up in “Think Like a Man Too” (2014). On television, he had a recurring role on Tyler Perry’s “House of Payne,” but in 2016, he returned to his television roots, BET, with a short lived “Gary Owen Show.”