Comedian Ziwe Famudoh Makes Time’s “Next Generation Leaders” List

Ziwe Famudoh, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants has been featured on Time’s “Next Generation Leader” list as the “pandemic’s most provocative comedy star”.

Although her live comedy shows were canceled due to COVID-19, during the pandemic, Ziwe Fumudoh spent more time on her IG live shows asking her guests valid questions like  “How many Black friends do you have? Did your family own slaves? What does white privilege mean to you?”

The IG Live show is a weekly broadcast inspired by her 2017 riotous YouTube series “Baited“, where she asks her guests, made up of friends, public figures and fellow comedians from different races, questions about race.

In her chat with Times, she says the educational show provides an avenue for people to to have difficult conversations about race in their personal lives.

“While it’s ingrained in every fabric of our nation, it is something that we are explicitly told: do not talk about this; it makes everyone uncomfortable, all I’m trying to do is have substantive conversations about race in a way that’s funny and light and jovial” says the 28-year-old comedian.

“I’ve been preparing my whole life to talk about race because as a Black woman, I am confronted about race all the time, people want to talk to me about race all the time, so to turn that lens back on people, I find that easy. These are things that I’m constantly talking about”, says Fumudoh who hopes that her show offers, beyond laughter, the kind of growth that comes from identifying where there is a problem.

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