Advertisement

Culture Stage

Trixx

KUUMBA COMEDY NIGHT: CELEBRATING OUR IDENTITY with TRIXX, JAY MARTIN, NICK REYNOLDSON, MARLON PALMER and DJ LISSA MONET, at the Brigantine Room, Harbourfront Centre (235 Queens Quay West), Friday (February 7), 8 pm. $18. 416-973-4000. Trixx also appears this week at Comedy Bar, Baltic Avenue, Rose Theatre and Rivoli. See listing.


When I sit down with Frankie “Trixx” Agyemang and tell him I’m happy he’s finally on NOW’s cover, he’s modest at first, saying he’s amped and honoured. Then his eyes light up.

“This should make some comedians happy,” he says, smiling mischievously. “Can’t wait for the Facebook messages afterwards.”

Boom. In less than a minute he’s revealed the kind of brass-balls honesty that makes his stand-up act so funny. This is Trixx the fearless truth-teller, the comic who doesn’t like performing at certain open mics frequented only by other comics who never laugh.

Why not? I ask. Are they bitter?

“Comedians bitter?” he says, his face deadpan. “Never.”

Okay, the guy’s got attitude. It’s there in the snarl or cocky look he sometimes adopts in publicity photos. You can also see it when he crosses a stage to begin his act, even before he picks up the mic, scanning the audience for any sign of dissent.

All this would be hard to take if he didn’t have the goods to back it up. But his astute insights into human behaviour and his willingness to be vulnerable make his act stand out.

Tomorrow night he headlines Harbourfront’s annual Kuumba showcase of black comedy. He’s hand-picked the other stand-ups: Jay Martin, who’s helmed the night several times, as well as Nick Reynoldson and internet sensation Marlon Palmer. The post-show DJ, Lissa Monet, was also chosen by Trixx.

Speaking of DJs, that’s how he first made his mark, spinning music and cracking jokes to crowds of thousands – an experience that trained him for comedy.

“I learned early on how to control a crowd,” he says, relaxed in a room at the NOW offices. “As a DJ, you’re the centre of attention the music is all you, people are looking at you and pointing to you. I would make hacky jokes like, ‘Hey, Africans, leave the white girls alone,’ but I’d also riff on people’s birthdays, make the crowd feel like they were part of the show.”

Whether in a comedy club or at one of his sold-out, self-produced theatre gigs, his material is solid. I’ve seen him riff on Drizzy and Lil Wayne like an expert jazz musician. He can cleverly deconstruct how gender roles are established in the schoolyard. His depictions of women and children are dead on, likely because after his parents split, his mother’s two sisters from Ghana emigrated to Canada and he babysat nieces and nephews.

When he himself was a kid in Malton, his hairdresser mom let him stay at home watching R-rated VHS tapes of Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor weekend evenings while she was busy with clients. He studied those routines and imitated them – at school (where he got addicted to making people laugh) and then by himself in the shower.

Even now he’s got a geek-like excitement about comic technique.

“I just want to get better,” he says. “I still watch [George] Carlin. He’s got these opinions some of them aren’t even jokes. I see how he conveys the message to the crowd so even if they don’t agree they don’t turn on him.

“Then I’ll watch someone like Kevin Hart, who’s the new guy. I used to hate him. But I love seeing how he moves around onstage. Chapelle’s like that, and Chris Rock, too. Look how clear and precise Rock is with his words. He repeats a premise sometimes so it’s drummed into your head. I love those minute details.”

Trixx – the name comes from playing pranks as a child, and he adopted it for his DJ persona – often headlines at Absolute Comedy clubs across the province, does Kenny Robinson’s Nubian night regularly, hosts a podcast (the Unruly Podcast) and performs regularly in the U.S. But although he’s auditioned many times, he hasn’t yet been invited to one of the big Canadian comedy festivals like Just For Laughs or the Winnipeg Comedy Festival.

“I’ve done JFL showcases clean, dressed up, dressed down, dirty, with all-Canadian material – every possible way I can imagine,” he says. “But…,” his voice trails off.

He enjoys producing his own solo shows. He mounted his first, 2009’s Trixx: Mistrial, to clear his name after being unfairly fired from his overnight on-air job as a host at Flow 93.5. It was inspired by his own expletive-filled onstage rant after the station tried spreading rumours about him.

The steady stream of solo shows keeps the new material coming.

“My biggest fear is that people will say, ‘He’s still doing jokes from the 90s?’ Everybody likes greatest hits, but you shouldn’t be able to sit in an audience and predict the act: ‘Okay, here he’s going to talk about the bus…. Now he’s gonna talk about telephones….’ When you can supply a comic’s punchlines, you know something’s wrong.”

Robinson is a mentor, as is Russell Peters, who’s given him some opening slots he stays at Peters’s place whenever he’s in L.A.

“His generosity is unreal,” he told me in an earlier interview. “He’s done a lot for comedians, even down to putting money in your pocket without being asked. I’ve never seen anybody give back like him in my life.”

Rather than study Peters onstage, however, Trixx looks at him offstage.

“I like seeing how Russell treats people, not just in his immediate circle, but his fans,” he says. “He has a great memory. He’ll see a fan he met four years earlier and know what they were wearing and where they were sitting. It’s uncanny. He makes his fans feel like they’re his friends.”

Opportunities like the Kuumba show are related to the colour of his skin. But he says he doesn’t like to overplay the race card in his act.

“I hate ‘White people do this, black people do that’ material,” he says. “It’s annoying. People don’t want to go to a comedy show and feel segregated.”

In fact, one of his most memorable shows was in North Carolina, opening for a redneck comic. Trixx, as usual, didn’t use the N-word a lot or rely on BET-approved material.

“And this old redneck came up to me afterwards and told me it was refreshing to see a black guy talking to everyone and not just to the black people.

“When I write a joke,” he says, “I always wonder, ‘Will this work in Indonesia or Thailand?'”

Interview Clips

Trixx on working out new jokes with a crowd:

Download associated audio clip.

On entertaining his classmates with plays and Pee Wee Herman impressions:

Download associated audio clip.

On being shunned by his friends because they thought he was gay, and taking that time alone to focus on becoming a DJ:

Download associated audio clip.

glenns@nowtoronto.com | @glennsumi

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted