Stand Up, Don't Shoot!

Nick Cannon paces the stage holding a microphone styled like a handgun, performing in front of a backdrop of photos of himself at anti-police brutality rallies. It is an immediate, aggressive pivot away from his day job as the clean-cut host of America’s Got Talent. The core of the set is Cannon tearing down his own lucrative mainstream image, laying bare the polite compromises required to protect what he calls his ‘white money’ while dropping enough profanity and racial commentary to deliberately shock anyone who only knew him from network television.

Filmed in December 2016 at the Ebony Repertory Theatre in South Central Los Angeles, the special premiered on Showtime in February 2017. The fallout from the broadcast was immediate and highly publicized. NBC executives reportedly threatened to fire Cannon over his sharp jabs at the network, specifically a bit where he joked that the network’s name stood for a racial slur. Rather than apologize or self-censor, Cannon pre-emptively quit his hosting gig on America’s Got Talent, turning this hour of stand-up into a major turning point in his career.

Beyond the corporate criticism, Cannon spends the hour trying to bridge the gap between his high-profile celebrity life and his community roots. He riffs on the absurdities of the ‘All Lives Matter’ movement by comparing it to trying to save all the other fish when someone is screaming to save the whales. He also offers up some tabloid-friendly gossip, sharing how an ill-fated family trip to Australia served as the final straw that ended his marriage to Mariah Carey.

The special received mixed reviews, with critics noting that Cannon’s massive celebrity sometimes distracted from the actual stand-up, which relied heavily on loose crowd interaction. In one of the show’s loose moments, he halts his set to kiss a middle-aged white woman in the front row and riffs with rapper Too $hort, who happened to be sitting in the crowd.