Cack-Handed is comedian Gina Yashere's entertaining memoir celebrating the adventures and improbable life journey that led to her successful international stand-up comedy and TV career. Yashere--British correspondent on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and co-creator of Bob ♥ Abishola--catapulted into the American comedy scene in 2008, with a vibrant onstage presence and irreverent style showcasing hilarious anecdotes from her Nigerian immigrant upbringing in London's East End.
Cack-Handed opens with an introduction to the author's African ancestors from the Kingdom of Benin, an extremely advanced, prosperous community in what is now Southern Nigeria. Yashere, who now lives in Los Angeles, refers to her ancestral homeland as "the real Wakanda" and explains how colonization destroyed many of the region's prosperous societies. This fascinating abbreviated history of Nigeria helps contextualize for readers many of the post-independence challenges the country faces to this day.
Yashere's formative years were defined by her Nigerian mother's fiercely protective parenting and interpretation of everything fun as a threat to her five children's career prospects. Many years on, Yashere deploys memories of her mother's extreme strictness in her stand-up routines to brilliant comic effect, peeling away any resentment she felt as a child to reveal the love behind such a demanding maternal presence.
She suffered as a teenager at the hands of an abominably behaved stepfather and rebelled against her mother's rigid rules, culminating in a suicide attempt. After a strong academic performance in school, Yashere became the first female engineer at the elevator company Otis. She explored her sexuality and let off steam in London's thriving nightclub scene. Drawn to acting, Yashere took a detour from engineering to pursue her dream of performing comedy on stage in England, the U.S. and beyond. The term "cack-handed," meaning awkward and clumsy, also represents the author's embrace of an unconventional career and free-spirited lifestyle that her ancestors would have appreciated.
British racism, more genteel than the American kind, featured prominently in Yashere's early comedy career. She deploys her homegrown humor to expose the blatant absurdity of all forms of discrimination--a victim she is not. Enhanced by Yashere's splendid storytelling and generous wit, Cack-Handed honors the emotionally resilient, cosmopolitan, proud Black lesbian identity Yashere confidently claims as her own. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer
Shelf Talker: A Nigerian-British comedian with a commanding American presence generously shares her path to stand-up comedy and television fame.