Almost Black

Andrew Kennedy builds his act around visual misdirection. He steps to the microphone looking like an East Coast prep school graduate, then proceeds to speak fluent Spanish and recount an upbringing split between Bogotá, Venezuela, and Hong Kong. Much of the set hinges on that disconnect: the friction of having a Colombian mother, a British father, and a complexion that makes strangers and border agents drop their guard around him.

Recorded at a comedy club in San Antonio and released as an audio album by Comedy Dynamics in 2016, the 53-minute set came two decades into Kennedy’s stand-up career. By that point, he had already produced a network television pilot based on his family life and logged a Comedy Central half-hour, settling into the steady rhythm of a veteran road comic.

The title refers to his mixed ancestry, which he examines through family history and the arbitrary rules of racial classification. When he steps away from cultural identity, the material shifts into standard club territory: domestic routines, aging, and a closing run of celebrity impressions that leans on Christopher Walken and Arnold Schwarzenegger.