Comedian Booed Off Stage at Variety Comics to Watch Showcase and That’s Not Even the Worst Part of the Story

We missed Variety’s Top 10 Comics to watch showcase at Just for Laughs this year, but it’s a show everyone at the festival was talking about today after the last comedian to perform ended the night being boo’ed by the crowd, and with a lot of his fellow honoree’s pretty pissed.

This year’s Variety Top 10 list was and is mostly a murderers row of up and comers. Julio Torres, Sam Jay, Joel Kim Booster, Hari Kondabolu, Dulce Sloan, Amanda Seales, Jabookie Young White and Taylor Tomlinson, all comedians we’ve loved and written about before.  We weren’t familiar yet with Darren Knight, listed as “Southern Momma” in his Variety description, but according to the write-up, he has a “windfall of social media page views, 175 shows and his own documentary.” Not something we’re normally impressed with– our focus tends to center on stand up comedians rather than Facebook or YouTube stars, so we don’t know too much about him, but he’s certainly getting a lot of attention now after his performance at the Variety Top 10 showcase and backstage afterwards.

Apparently, according to those in the room Knight couldn’t remember the name of the festival and spent much of his set bragging about his fame. Potty humor and strange jokes normally more acceptable in a schoolyard than on a prestigious stage were followed by Knight seeming to knock the others on the panel for talking about race or sexual orientation, saying that people didn’t pay to be there for that kind of material. The crowd booed and SNL’s Chris Redd, who was hosting the show acknowledged that oddness of Knight’s “performance.”

Some of the other panelists commented on social media about the strange twist of events- Amanda Seales posted an Instagram video about it, calling knight a “clown ass hack”, Jabookie Young White tweeted how hard it is to get booed by Canadians, but maybe the worst part of this story was posted by Dulce Sloan, who added that he called her “Precious” on his way off stage.

It’s hard to believe that something that’s usually so celebratory took a turn at an event put together by Variety and Just for Laughs.

Watch the video the guys at Comedy Hype put together showing what went down on stage and off.

this comic said, on stage, that comics shouldn’t talk about race or sexuality and got booed by canadians do u kno how trash u gotta be to get booed by canadians

— jaboukie (@jaboukie) July 28, 2018