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SHEFFIELD. — The British-Zimbabwean comedian is one of the year’s breakout stars thanks to characters like posh drill rapper Unknown P, hilariously skewering hypocrisies around race and class.
Any time there’s an incident that highlights the racism in British public life, Munya Chawawa will have skewered it while it’s still trending.
The lightning-fast sketch comedian has recently lampooned PureGym’s 12 Years a slave-themed workouts, the white outrage at Sainsbury’s Black History Month initiatives and the complaints to ITV over Black Lives Matter protests on Britain’s Got Talent, within hours of them making headlines.
His rapier satire has earned him half a million Instagram followers and a nomination at last week’s Mobo awards.
Chawawa also landed a major label record deal for his character Unknown P, a posh drill rapper.
The 27-year-old’s unwavering confidence and humour are being celebrated at a time when few black people can speak about racism or critique the government without receiving swathes of abuse.
He created the character of racist newsreader Barty Crease after attending a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest and seeing the media characterise it as violent.
“There’s nothing funny about what happened to George Floyd, but there’s something very maliciously comical about how the press is treating this pain,” he says.
Nevertheless, critics have said he straddles a fine line between confronting white viewers and trivialising racism.
We meet in a Mayfair restaurant pre-lockdown, where Chawawa’s signature caterpillar eyebrows seem to enter before he does. He is quickly becoming a celebrity, but says he’s “trying to be an anti-influencer. I joke about my hairline and my eyebrows because I’m a human being,” he says.
His self-confidence was forged at school in Zimbabwe, where “we were encouraged to be proud of our personalities”, he says. “At school one day the teacher was like, ‘Right, we’re having a self-esteem lesson today’. I learned to not have any shame attached to being expressive. Then when I moved back to England, I felt many layers of my personality being sheared off. It was like your status was proportional to how discreet you were.”
Chawawa’s family moved to the UK when he was 11.
“Rappers in England walk around with chains on their necks — in Zimbabwe if you’re a rapper you walk around with a loaf of bread on your neck because it meant as much,” he jokes.
He landed in the east on England on the cusp of his teens.
“Where can they take me to grow up where I won’t instantly join a drug cartel?” he says, imagining his parents’ thought process. “Norwich. The biggest risk to your health is being run over by a reversing cow.”
As a mixed-race boy in the small village of Framingham Pigot, Chawawa grappled with new notions of class.
His white mother had started working as a PA for the parish’s landowner, and he took up a role at a silver service catering company.
He wanted to become a comedian or TV presenter, inspired by his uproarious grandfather; in the meantime, he waited at opulent weddings, polo festivals and even a swingers’ party.
“I didn’t even know what it was,” says Chawawa. “I was like, why is everyone putting their keys in a hat?”
His experience at university in Sheffield was more intimately jarring.
“The white people there expected me to be a typical black guy, but I didn’t know black culture because I hadn’t grown up in a place like that in England,” says Chawawa. “Meanwhile, I didn’t necessarily know how to relate to white people.”
He admits it knocked his confidence.
“My life up until this point has been a battle of being comfortable enough to express my personality shamelessly, and I think the only reason I’m on that journey is because of what Zimbabwe has done to me,” he says. — theguardian.com
Online Reporter