Comedian Rhoma Spencer launches comedy album

Comedian, actress, director and playwright Rhoma Spencer premiered her Caribbean Comedy Album 6.0 to Trinidad and Tobago audiences at Kafe Blue, Wrightson Road, Port of Spain on October 19. This performance was the TT premiere of her album, which has already been launched in New York.

While better known for her background in theatre, Spencer has a long history in comedy. Her first experience was in 1991, when the late Dennis “Sprangalang” Hall told her Paul Keens-Douglas was looking for women to perform in his Talk Tent.

“Sprangalang gave me his number and I went to perform for just one show – and I was clearly a hit enough to stay there for eight years, (until) I migrated to Canada in 1999.

"My career there mainly focused on acting and directing in theatre, so comedy took a back seat, but people who knew what I used to do would still hire me to do shows, and that way I could still get that part of my performing-arts genre in.”

In 2018 Spencer was hired to appear at the International Multi-Arts RUTAS Festival, where she curated and hosted the event Word Up! An Oral Cabaret, which featured spoken word and comedy. She said seasoned comedians were so taken by her performance that they encouraged her to get onto the mainstream Canadian comedy circuit.

“That’s when I decided to make the move from performing only for my Caribbean/Trini (compatriots) to the mainstream, performing for the whole of Canada. Once I did that crossover, performing at the Kenny Robinson Nubian Comedy Show, called the Nubian Disciples of Comedy, that’s when I was being seen by the mainstream.

“I felt my comedy would only be appreciated by my Caribbean people, but the white people and the mainstream people got it. My accent also helped, as people marvel at that, and then my sense of comedy is also very different from what my other colleagues do.

"For me, comedy is storytelling. I’ll take local and international trending news situations and turn them on their heads to the point of stupidity.

"I’m also not afraid to talk about myself – I deal with my ageng process, menopause, senior moments, and that is what makes my work a little different from the others.”

Spencer said her style is heavily influenced by Sprangalang, and remembered that his brother, the late Tony Hall, had said it was mindblowing watching her, as their styles were so similar.

She performed at the first Black Women Comedy Festival in Detroit, headlined An Evening of Caribbean Comedy, the Black Women in Comedy Laugh Fest at the Gotham Comedy Club in New York in June 2022, and in Edmonton, Alberta, with Jamaican/Jamaican-Canadian comedians Blacka Ellis, Gunta Na Laff and Keisha Brown. Her last performance in TT was in 2020 at the Little Carib Theatre and Folk House with Lisa Allen-Agostini and Louris Lee Sing.

Before the pandemic, Spencer was invited to work on the play Solitudes, based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book 100 Years of Solitude. The play was in development for two years and was performed just as the pandemic began: it was one of the last plays to be put on in Toronto.

In 2022, she was called back for a role she hadn’t auditioned for, in Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, and was immediately cast. Her performance gained her a Dora Mavor Moore Award nomination (the Toronto equivalent of the Tony Awards) for Outstanding Performance.

Spencer said she also used the pandemic to reimagine herself as a documentary filmmaker, as theatres and entertainment spaces were shut down between 2020 and 2021. She said the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the premier queer theatre in Canada, put out a call for people to submit projects for what they called Queer Pride in Place.

“I decided to do a project called Queerantine, a physical theatre presentation on the sidewalk outside my house, with two dance artists. Although I’m a director and an actor, I’ve always felt that I could do choreography, and I could talk the dancers through the images I had in my head. I used a particular style of theatre movement to tell the story of how two lesbians navigated the pandemic, all in movement, with no text. It was highly successful.”

Her first film, My Execution Will Be Televised, was inspired by the support shown worldwide for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement following the murder of George Floyd in the US in 2020.

“I took footage from Queerantine to create a film about how and why black lives matter, because I was taken aback by the amount of people taking to the streets all over the world to say Black Lives Matter when we were told to stay home and quarantine, and I felt it was something that needed to be amplified as art. The title came when I saw a placard somewhere in a protest in the States that said my execution will be televised.

“It started as a one-minute film, which I submitted to a one-minute-film festival, and it was selected, which I was so happy about that I made it into a five-minute film, which was selected for the Caribbean Tales Film Festival, and there it won an Impact Award, for a film that speaks to human rights and injustice, anti-racism and sexual orientation.”

Spencer said the pandemic, BLM, and "leaning into" her queerness in her work have brought her many new opportunities. She is now artist in residence at the Queer and Trans Lab at the Mark S Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies in Ontario, where she is developing and creating a musical about Calypso Rose. Last year, with support from the University and hosted by ad-hoc forum Roots of Calypso, she organised their first-ever calypso symposium, and this year is hosting a symposium on Calypso Rose on October 22.

Her comedy album consists of works from throughout the years, and focuses topics such as size, Me Too, the proliferation of beads and bikinis in Carnival (but only for women), and some of her experiences in TT over the past month.

She was to be joined by local standup comedians Errol Fabien, Wendell Etienne, Simmy the Trini and humorous calypsonian Abebele. Louris Lee Sing, aka Lyrix, was down as host of the event.