Only one year ago CBC made the call to let Shaun Majumder go, ending a 15-year career as cohost of Canada’s (should have its own heritage minute) hilariously patriotic and satirical This Hour Has 22 Minutes. As a writer on the show, Majumder was able to contribute some wise cracking politically charged jokes, many that inevitably inspired his touring show HATE.
“My focus of the show is inspired by something that happened on 22 Minutes,” says Majumder. He says it began around the Trump presidency in 2015, and the kind of humour and hate that was rising at that time.
He proposed to CBC’s This Hour’s producers to let him tour the US, talking to “white supremacists and Nazis” to ask them: “this guy is trying to be one of you, is he a poser, is he the real deal?” However, after unsuccessfully finding people to comment, This Hour sacked the idea.
“This is real and its actually bigger and more connected than ever before,” he says about white supremacy and Nazi supporters, “and I started seeing the connection between Trump and the emboldened nature of these people who felt they had an ally.”
He went on to write a satirical hip-hop song titled Beige Power, hoping to inspire others to create “mix-y mixes” as he calls them, babies born between mixed race couples: “genetic kriss-crossin” the “brown and the white”. The comment section on Youtube is disabled for the video, due to the reaction Majumder received.
They saw his video “as a propaganda video, a call-to-action for all brown and white people to start fucking,” he says, “and its not, it’s a comedy sketch.”
He then made sure to confirm whether I, in fact, was a white supremacist, and when I questioned how many were possibly in Canada, Majumder confirmed in true Canadian form “They’re everywhere bud, they’re among us.”.
After receiving a “barrage” of internet trolls on Twitter and heckling online from his video, Majumder saw the opportunity to include these reactions in his show. The show will include those tweets, a one-on-one interview with himself about his parting from This Hour (which he says was at the right time, creatively speaking) songs written by Majumder, and a lot of laughs.
Check out Shaun Majumder’s “Multimedia, fun, one-man show about hate” July 27. Tickets available at hahaha.com
