She strutted into the tomes of television history as the first black woman ever to star in her own comedy sketch show, but Jocelyn Jee Esien is convinced that she should have been born a man.
“I have a lot of male energy,” explains 30-year-old Esien, with a girlish giggle. “The fear that other female comics talk about, I’ve never felt. I come on stage and bully the audience. It’s oestrogen talking when people want to help the crowd have a good time, but I want to go out there and sort them out so that they have no choice but to laugh.”
Born into a large Nigerian family in Hackney, Esien always played boys in her school shows and gave what she calls the best performance of her drama school days as libertine lothario Don Juan. But despite spending her childhood perfecting cheeky impressions of her relatives, she came to comedy only after being coaxed into an impromptu stand-up set at the Hackney Empire. Now, the self-confessed tomboy is a small screen fixture, starring in BBC sketch show Little Miss Jocelyn, named after the comedian herself, and hidden camera comedy 3 Non Blondes.
But Esien still feels most at home in the haunts where she first found humour. She lives in De Beauvoir, “but not the posh bit”, and favours East End entertainment over West End wonders. “In the last 10 years, I’ve seen almost every show at the Hackney Empire,” she says. “They automatically put my name down now because I just turn up. I loved Anansi and the Magic Mirror, and I’m going to see The Hounding of David Oluwale next.” She will become an even more familiar face at the Empire this week when she begins rehearsals for its new production of The Vagina Monologues. “I love TV, but theatre is the reason I started acting. The stage is my natural habitat,” she smiles. “The Vagina Monologues has a great cast, including Sharon D. Clarke and Jessie Wallace, and it’s nice to join that girls’ brigade.”
Despite this foray into femininity, Esien credits her comedy career to a series of male muses: Jerry Lewis, Steve Martin, Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy, and one Barack Obama. “President Obama,” she corrects herself quickly. “I feel disrespectful when I say Barack. He has really, really, really inspired me. I’m pretending he’s my prime minister but he lives in another country.”
Esien does not expect this daydream to become reality anytime soon. “In this country, people still struggle with seeing black people in certain positions,” she says. “I can’t see us having a black prime minister, not for many years. In America, they have police shows where the black guy is the head of the Vice Squad, not the head of the Multicultural Department of Ethnic Minorities Squad. Someone can come from the streets there and become a multimillionaire rapper. But you don’t see any of that happening here.”
Despite this “greater openness” in America, Esien was the first black female on either side of the Atlantic to secure her own television sketch show. “I’d always assumed there must have been someone in the States who’d got there before me,” she says. “I only found out that I was the first just before the show came out. It’s ridiculous, but very exciting. I need to speak to the Guinness Book of Records, actually. Mum and dad would be proud if I got in there. But they’ll probably ask how many eggs I can eat in a minute or something.”
Breaking international records has caused a few cracks to appear on home turf, however. Gina Yashere, a British comedian brought up in a Nigerian family in Finsbury Park, has complained that the success of Esien’s television show means that she will never get one herself “because they’ve got their ‘black female comedian’ token slot filled”.
“I know what she means,” responds Esien carefully, “but I don’t think it’s true. The population of the UK is extremely diverse, and yes, TV doesn’t represent that. I got my show three years ago, and there haven’t been any others since. But I hope I’ve opened doors and allowed more people to see what’s possible.”
Yashere swapped London for Los Angeles in a bid to boost her comedy career, but despite her penchant for the American president, Esien has no plans to trade Hackney for Hollywood. “I love the diversity, the energy and the noise here,” she says. When she’s not flexing her funny bones, Esien zips around Hackney on her “Mary Poppins bike” and frequents Dalston’s Turkish eateries “because they’re open until 5am and they serve alcohol. What more could you ask for?”
Plenty of the characters she meets in these Hackney haunts end up on the stage and screen with her. “I have a brain that’s like a sponge, and also a bit like a sieve,” she giggles. “I get inspiration from people I’ve met on the bus, on the train, in shops, in my own family. But no one ever recognises themselves on TV. It’s individual quirks and ticks that I’m interested in, not the whole character.”
Once the lights dim on The Vagina Monologues, Esien will be scouring the streets for more humorous habits to write into a new series for the BBC, a Little Miss Jocelyn live show, and another hidden camera programme. “I need counselling and a glass of sherry for taking on so much,” she laughs. “Any minute now there’ll be a phone call to tell me the delivery dates for these projects, and I’ll have to work like mad towards them. But I know I can do it. After Obama, anything’s possible.”
