Cack-Handed: A Memoir

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Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go get caught up on her appearance in Season 2 of The Standups on Netflix.

But as someone who loves stories about family and immigration *as well as* being a person pursuing a stand up comedy hobby, I was here for all of it. After coming to comedy in the mid-1990s she encountered a different racism, feeling herself the victim of a ‘one on, one out’ mentality that restricted the best of the already limited opportunities to only one famous black comic at a time… and Lenny Henry had that sewn up. One last tiny little niggle though, I dislike being referred to as "ignorant" or having lived under a "Jupiter sized rock" because I've not seen Black Panther (I've not seen any of the Marvel universe films). Same with her sexual discovery (she is a lesbian, I knew that going in), she talks about questioning her sexuality and slowly discovering it but we don't really get to know how or when she really accepted herself (she clearly does if you have seen her stand up or follow her social media).She consistently works harder and is funnier than the (mostly white, male) other people in the room, and that's why she has succeeded. I learnt so much about African culture in the UK in the 70s and 80s (the time when Gina was growing up).

From birth, Gina carried a similar birthmark – a sign that she was her grandmother’s chosen heir, and would fulfil Patience’s dreams. Not believing her life was difficult enough, she later left engineering to become a stand up comic, appearing on numerous television shows and becoming one of the top comedians in the UK, before giving it all up to move to the US, a dream she'd had since she was six years old, watching American kids on television, riding cool bicycles, and solving crimes. She explains that she thought that if she worked hard, played by the rules and proved her popularity, she would get her own show, get to make her own decisions about her programmes.She grew up in the poorer parts of London, raised with her siblings by a single mother who emigrated from Nigeria. Not me thinking I spaced out in the later half , only to relisten to this again to find out I didn't space out and it was infact how the book ended. I found this a little grating and maybe unnecessary, surely there is enough cultural cross over now, if not a glossary at the end would have been preferable. It was good reading it, plus my mother and her mother were good friends; it took me back to my own Nigerian-British upbringing, and I chuckled inwardly with some of her descriptions growing up, because my mother was identical to Gina's mother. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

I was sad to read about the racism she experienced as a child and adult, plus the prejudice from fellow black kids of west indian descent in school, making some of her school days a nightmare and also the antagonism from her fellow black male counterparts in the the UK comedy arena - this was really eye opening (hey Gina, how envious all these people must be of you now, you have made it big in the US, what are they actually doing now.The first half of the book is about her upbringing in a British Nigerian family and the conflicts and cultural differences that come with living with an immigrant parent, but the second half is very much a deep dive into how Gina cultivated her comedy career. It's comedy worth watching and in this memoir, Yashere introduces her family and the hardship that she laughed her way out of and into making a name for herself as an entertainer in England, traveling the world and finally landing a dream position in the US.