Comedian Wayne Brady has been trying for a long time to shed his nice guy image.
Even though a high profile Chappelle Show sketch, in which Brady played a violent, foul-mouthed variation on the Denzel Washington character from Training Day, went a long way to showing he has some edge, he still struggles with the “squeaky clean” label.
Brady’s frustration was evident during a recent appearance on the Arsenio Hall Show.
After Hall expressed surprise that Brady has tattoos, the comic actor seized the opportunity to decry people that stereotype him.
“You know how it is, people place things on you. The thing is, I never asked for anyone to give me a squeaky clean image… And I do a lot of stuff at night, and I tour, I do Vegas, and I do films that are adult,” he said. “But people like to get things in their head like, ‘Oh, that’s the clean black guy,’ and that pisses me off to no end. Because when you generalize it’s just so easy sometimes for folks to go, ‘Oh, that’s what you are.’”
Brady admits that his performances on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and is former daytime talk show may have given people a one-sided impression of him. Still, he hates the idea of being put in a non-threatening box.
“You don’t know me. You know what you see in a compartmentalized version of me at this thing that you happened to watch at this time of day because that’s when you work, so you like this dude. So don’t judge me against being black, because being black is not a monolithic thing. We have many, many different ways of being black.”