Controversy is an interesting thing in show business. Even in an age of heightened scrutiny of celebrities’ words and behavior, a comment or event that could end your career in any other field can sometimes send it to a higher level in the entertainment industry. Taking on controversial material can also be artistically satisfying. Paul McCartney dug into some serious sex talk on his latest album, Egypt Station, and it seemed to reinvigorate him musically. And some comedians seem to thrive just as much on shocking their audience as on making them laugh, as the great Lenny Bruce used to do.

Arsenio Hall

Arsenio Hall

What follows is a tale of two comedians, Arsenio Hall and Darren Knight, both of whom are performing in Columbia this weekend. One is a veteran performer who’s returned to the stand-up stage after a lengthy absence and is diving into material that you might never expect. The other is a young up-and-comer who ended up causing controversy by trying to avoid it. Both seem to have benefitted from being on the edge, even if they got there via different paths.

Veteran Hall is back on tour as a stand-up comedian a few decades after his stint as a popular talk-show host and actor in films like Coming To America and Harlem Nights. Hall was brought back to his first love by a fellow comic, George Lopez.

“About two years ago, George called me and said he was doing this gig and asked me to come with him,” Hall says. “At that point I hadn’t done stand-up in 15 or 16 years. Right before we left for the gig he said, ‘Why don’t you do five minutes?’ He talked me into it and I ended up doing 10 minutes, because it got good to me. So I did 10 minutes, and I haven’t been offstage for more than two days since.”

Instead of returning to the relatively clean material he performed in his early stand-up days, Hall headed straight for charged-up political material, largely aimed at our current president. Hall competed on a season of Donald Trump’s hit reality show Celebrity Apprentice in 2012 and ultimately won the competition. But he had an uneasy relationship with Trump during and after the series, and he has no problem speaking his mind about the man.

“He and I had an argument about the birther situation,” Hall says, referring to Trump’s former contention that former President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. “So I thought I’d be a punk to start flying on his plane and staying in his hotels. I had to talk to him face-to-face, because every brother don’t get a face-to-face with Trump. I had to talk to him about the birther thing and I didn’t like his answers, because they were bulls#!t. He and I never spoke again after that. I thought we’d get along; we both like sports, we both like politics, we both really like his daughter. I thought we had a lot in common, and we did not.”

From that spark, Hall has expanded his perspective to include other Trump-era people and controversies. Among them are the infamous Omarosa Manigault Newman (“She hated me before when she was flyin’ on Trump’s plane and staying in his hotels, but she owes me a f#!kin’ apology because now because she’s saying what I was saying!”); Kim Jong Un’s suddenly cozy relationship with the president (“Dennis Rodman is on the verge of winning a Nobel Peace Prize for going to North Korea!”); and the recent twists and turns of Trump’s associates (“Paul Manafort is in jail and O.J. Simpson is out!”).

Hall says that the stand-up stage is the only place he can truly speak his mind about all of these topics.

“It’s so cathartic,” he says. “I love acting, but there’s nothing more unfulfilling than reading something that you know you could make funnier, but you’ve got to be respectful to the writer. I can’t tell you about my encounters with Trump on nobody’s television show. For me to be able to rock ‘n’ roll, I gotta be live onstage with a microphone. The only cathartic freedom I have is stand-up.”

At the other end of the spectrum, in terms of subject matter and experience, is Darren Knight. The Alabama comedian didn’t start out as a stand-up; he was more interested in making YouTube videos in which he imitated an irritable Southern mom trying to herd her kids through the store or getting ready for school. Filming himself wearing a wig and speaking to off-camera, eternally misbehaving children, Knight’s Southern Momma character typically becomes frazzled to the point of hysterical threats. It was only after the video series went viral three years ago (garnering upwards of 8 million views on YouTube alone) that Knight began considering stand-up.

Darren Knight

Darren Knight

“We went to a local pub and they were doing an open mic,” Knight says. “I got onstage and it felt great. I was doing the videos at the same time, and they both started taking off. Pretty soon, anytime people heard I was doing open mics they’d start lining up outside the door and that’s when we knew that we’d tapped into something bigger than we planned. So it was just something that I fell into.”

Onstage, Knight tends to joke about his Southern upbringing or his miles-deep accent, topics that he says “people can relate to if you were raised in that Southern type of way. We just made fun of everything from my experiences.”

In Knight’s case, controversy didn’t come from his actual material; instead, it’s some comments he made about other comedians’ material that gained him some infamy.  

Knight was one of 10 comics chosen by Variety magazine to perform at the Montreal, Quebec event Just For Laughs, one of the largest comedy festivals in the world. Knight took some of the other comedians to task, both in a pre-show panel and onstage, for talking too much about racism and sexism. “Comedy is not about race or sexism,” he reportedly said at one point. “Comedy shouldn’t be about attacking racists. That is ostracizing your audience. People come here to laugh.”

As one might expect, that turned the crowd and many of the other comedians present against him. His set reportedly bombed, with the Just For Laughs crowd booing him and at least one comedian, Saturday Night Live cast member Chris Redd, confronting Knight backstage after his show — video of which appeared on Instagram. The fallout from his comments saw Knight being taken to task as a racist and a homophobe on social media by scores of comedians from Alex Edelman to Paul F. Tompkins and dropped by his management company, ICM Partners.

It’s been about two months since that no-doubt harrowing event, and Knight stands by his remarks and his general philosophy about comedy.

“We live in a world where what’s good is bad and what’s bad is good,” he says of the fallout from his appearance at Just For Laughs. “Something negative can be said about me on social media, and it’ll be shared 100 times, but I can defend myself with my own videos and statements from people who were there, and it’ll only be shared 10 or 15 times. I could sit here and play the role of victim all I want to, but that’s the world we live in. So it’s unfortunate, but I still have my morals, I have my points I’m going to make and I’m going to stand beside them.”

Much like Hall’s dip into controversial material has invigorated him artistically, Knight says his comments and the fallout have helped him commercially.

“As far as our crowd attendance is concerned, it hasn’t affected us at all,” he says. “In fact, on social media we gained something like 30,000 fans during that whole episode. I’m not proud of the fact that negativity brought us more followers, but I guess it kind of stems back to the idea that any publicity is good publicity. It’s been quite lucrative for us. I stood by what I said then, and I stand by it today.”   


What: Arsenio Hall

Where: Comedy House, 2768 Decker Blvd.

When: Oct. 5-6

Time: 8 p.m., 10:30 p.m. (Friday); 7 p.m., 10 p.m. (Saturday)

Price: $27.50

More: 803-798-9898, comedyhouse.us

[Update: This event is canceled.]


What: Darren Knight

Where: Koger Center, 1051 Greene St.

When: Saturday, Oct. 6, 7:30 p.m.

Price: $25-$65

More: 803-777-5112, kogercenterforthearts.com

Similar Stories