TO me, saying someone is a “black comedian” can mean one of two things. It can either mean that a comedian is of African descent, which is simply a genetic fact. But it can also mean a comedian who plays solely to a black audience—and that is not something I ever wanted to be. To be a black comedian in the second sense would really be like being a “black chef.” A good chef, just like a good comedian, can tailor his product to a variety of audiences. He should be able to improvise and not have a narrow purview to draw from. Thankfully, I’ve never been a “black comedian.”

Early on in my career, I was supposed to go on a twenty-city tour opening for Harry Belafonte. The first gig was at the Melody Fair in Buffalo, New York. The venue was theater in the round, and to get to the stage I had to walk down this very long ramp. As I was making my way to the stage, I looked over at the crowd. I had never seen so many old white people in my life. It was like a Golden Girls rally. Finally, I made it up to the mike. I stared at them, they stared at me. “What the fuck are we gonna talk about?” I said.

I killed that night. I probably did end up actually killing at least one person there. Statistically speaking, someone must have died during my thirty-minute set. But after everyone had a great time and they were all applauding, Harry Belafonte called me into his dressing room. He sat there in a chair, with his back to me. “You’re a funny man,” he said in that famous raspy voice. “A very funny young man—but you’re not for my audience. You won’t come back with me for the rest of the tour. I put a call in to Jeffrey Osborne. Tomorrow morning, you’re going to get on a plane and you’re going to go to Vegas to perform at the Golden Nugget.”

The next day, I was staying at a suite at the hotel. I brought LaDonna out with our three small kids, and my mother-in-law came too. I wasn’t going to be making much money, so when we ordered room service we were very conservative. When the food came and I went to sign the bill, the room-service dude waved it away. “It’s gratis,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“It’s gratis,” he repeated. “You don’t have to pay, as long as you’re performing here.”

After that, all fucking bets were off. We ordered so much shit that the manager of the Golden Nugget called the room. He gave me an intervention, and that too was gratis. “We love that you’re performing here,” he said, “and feel free to order what you want, but you have got to relax. Just relax.”

That Harry Belafonte show was a learning experience for me. First off, I learned what words like “gratis,” “prix fixe,” and “per diem” meant. But I also proved that I could perform in front of an entirely white crowd—an entirely white and old crowd—and make them laugh. So when I got approached to do a part on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, I wasn’t scared at all. The show was produced by Aaron Sorkin and was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. The series was very insider and was trying to appeal to the type of urban sophisticates who read the New Yorker. Clearly, it was going to be a show only watched by white people.

I was on the road when my manager gave me a call. Sorkin was casting the series, and he was red hot after the success of The West Wing. “But he can only meet you today,” my manager said. They didn’t even send over the script. Aaron’s assistant called me while I was on the treadmill at the gym. I put my cell on speaker and the guy read me the sides, which was basically the breakdown of the character and the overview of the series as a whole. After I was done with my workout and with the call, I quickly grabbed a shower before heading down to meet Sorkin in his office. I was excited because the cast on the show was spectacular. They had Matthew Perry in there, Amanda Peet, Steven Weber from Wings, and Brad Whitford from The West Wing.

Sorkin and I talked for about an hour, and he reiterated what the character was. I knew that I could deliver what he wanted, so I bullshitted my way through the conversation as though I had read the whole script. After it was over, I not only got the part but I got named as a producer. I’d be writing some of the comedy, since the series was about comedic actors. I never had to audition, and I know that there were a lot of actors who were hungry for the part. I actually didn’t end up reading the script until the first day of shooting, and that fact got out somehow. Even now when I take meetings, people will sometimes ask if I read the script this time for real.

One of the highlights of the run was working alongside John Goodman. Everyone knows that John is a tall, huge dude, but he is also a superb actor in every way. His character was this racist judge who kept disrespectfully calling my character “Sammy” when his name was actually Simon. This was when John was close to his heaviest, and he kept falling asleep in his chair as we filmed—but it worked for the character. It was a two-part episode, so he and I ended up working together a lot. I thought he was going to die in the middle of shooting because he kept falling asleep and sweating so much; it was horrible. But not only did John not die, obviously, but that performance of his was so outstanding that it garnered him an Emmy nomination.

After the episodes aired, I found out that a really good friend of mine had died. Growing up, he lived across the street from me. The funeral was attended by everyone from the old neighborhood. After the service, we all did what black people like to do at these times: We headed to the repast where everyone can eat, laugh, and remember their friend who passed. It’s like a big party.

In the back of the house sat my father with all his old cronies. His group is full of the kind of old dudes who put their napkins in their shirt and just hang out talking shit. I ventured over, making conversation, and then my father caught my attention. “I saw your show,” he informed me.

“Oh, okay.”

“You let that white man talk to you like that?”

“What are you talking about?” I had no clue what he meant—none.

“I’m talking about your show. He kept calling you ‘Sammy’ or ‘nigger.’ You let that white man talk to you like that?”

Now I realized “that white man” was John Goodman. “Daddy, it was a script.”

“But it made you mad, didn’t it?”

“Not at all. I never even thought about it. I promise you it was something that didn’t even register, not even a little.”

“I can’t believe this,” my father said. “Are you going to tell me that man is going to keep calling out your name, and you didn’t care?”

“Daddy, it’s a script. They wrote it; I was the guy; I did it. I thought it was great. It was some of the best and most challenging acting I’ve ever had to do, and I was working with the pros. It was great.”

My father is not a funny dude. He’s never been a jokester. The way he speaks to people, especially me, is gruff. When I visited him in the hospital one time, the first thing out of his mouth was a sarcastic: “Wow, the superstar is here to visit his dad.” But what he was saying was absurd, even given my relationship with him. I knew that he understood that a television was not a window, that he wasn’t looking through the glass at something that was happening outside at that exact moment. Yet I started to realize that, crazy as it sounded, he was actually serious about what he was saying.

I looked at his buddies to see their reactions. All I saw was a bunch of old dudes eating and looking around, drinking their beers as if nothing was going on. “I bet it pissed you off,” my father insisted.

“Charlie,” old Mr. Russell said, “that’s enough. Leave the boy alone”—“the boy,” of course, meaning me, a grown man in his forties with his wife in the other room helping people serve food. I talked to Mr. Russell for a little while and then I just left them all sitting there. I told LaDonna what had happened, and she wanted me to let it go. “Oh, come on,” she said. “He’s an old man. Leave him be, he’s set in his ways.”

He was older, sure, but he wasn’t feeble. He wasn’t suffering from dementia, where he wasn’t aware of what he was saying. I don’t think age is an excuse for bad behavior in general and it certainly wasn’t in this case in particular. My relationship with my father hadn’t been great before that, but this was the first time he’d ever been mean. He wasn’t just mean, he was insistently mean. He usually didn’t give a fuck and eventually kind of let me go, but not this time. This time he dug in and he wasn’t going to back off. To this day, our relationship hasn’t recovered.

My wife was wrong about why he said what he did. It wasn’t that my father was set in his ways. He and I simply had a fundamental difference of opinion. When I was the only black guy on Studio 60, I viewed that as a source of pride. I could be myself in South Central, and I could be myself in a meeting with Aaron Sorkin. The more rooms a man can feel comfortable in, the more places where he is welcomed in as a person, the greater the opportunities for him to see the world and to explore and learn about it.

My father clearly didn’t see things that way. I wasn’t “crossing over.” In fact, I don’t think he even had a concept of what “crossing over” would look like to him. It bothered him that I was on that series. He wasn’t alone. It bothered a lot of other people to a greater or lesser degree. From their perspective, I was simply a token. I was Isaac on The Love Boat, and I had promised myself that I would never be Isaac or some other sort of caricature.

I’ve experienced this sort of narrow thinking at various points in my career. When I got my show on CNN in 2008, I was proud that I had become the first comic to have a series on that channel. Yet when I called into Al Sharpton’s radio show to promote it, I got heat for my choice. “Why you got to do it on CNN? How come you can’t do it on BET?” Well, why am I talking to you about what I want to do with my career? How come I can’t do what the fuck I want to do?

No matter who you are, freedom means having more choices by definition. It doesn’t mean going from having one, and only one, shitty option to having one, and only one, great option. I am certain that later in her life, Rosa Parks sometimes sat in the back of the bus. Maybe she liked the view or whatever. I am certain that after segregation laws were repealed, black people sometimes sat in the back of the Woolworth’s counter. Maybe those were the only seats available.

I’ve had this kind of racial criticism several times in my career. I understood it, but I have never agreed with it in the slightest. Early on, I did BET’s Comedy View and then Def Jam. Both were all black. Then I was an actor on the series Double Rush, which was created by Murphy Brown’s Diane English. When we first did The Hughleys, it was on right before Home Improvement. Depending on what TV series I was on at the time, my stand-up crowd would change color. When I started doing frequent appearances on Politically Incorrect, for example, the audience got whiter. Picasso had his Blue Period, and I would have my white periods.

All the varied contexts I was involved in informed my perspective. I read different things from what I’d read before. I started including more jokes about current events in my set, and a lot of political material. My scope was not as narrow. It wasn’t as much about “being black” anymore. My focus was on experiences that I had and that I thought were interesting.

After one set with a mixed crowd, my road manager pulled me aside. “Man, you see this?” he said.

“See what?”

“You’re losing your black audience, man. You should just stick to the shit that we’ve been doing.”

It would be one thing if I was losing my audience, period. If I wasn’t selling tickets, then something was clearly wrong with my material or my performance or my publicity. But to claim that selling tickets to a whiter crowd was bad made no sense to me. If I made a person laugh, if I made them get in their car, buy a ticket, and sit down and listen to me talk—and they enjoyed the experience—then I’ve done my job. As a black man, am I somehow not entitled to enjoy Spanish food or sushi or Italian food? That’s an absurdity. But I would argue that humor is as universal as food is. You can judge how content a community is by how easily its people laugh. Laughter is much more indicative of a thriving society than material concerns.

My loyalty is always to the truth, not to a race. I don’t think of myself primarily as a black comedian or as a black comedian. I think of myself primarily as myself. And sometimes, being yourself can cost. I learned that the hard way.

I am no stranger to having jokes backfire. In the early ’90s I was a sidekick on an L.A. radio station run by Stevie Wonder called KJLH. One day on the air I made the mistake of saying, “Do you think this station would be this raggedy if Stevie Wonder could see?” Forty-five minutes later, Stevie Wonder came barging through the door and he was livid. He must have driven his car down to KJLH as fast as he could, honking at all the people on the sidewalk to get the fuck out of his way.

He started dressing me down. Of course I’d always loved Stevie Wonder, so to have an icon like that yell at you was more weird than anything. He kept going on about how it was disrespectful and it wasn’t funny, and that I don’t understand. Maybe I shouldn’t have pointed out that I was sitting over here, and not where he was yelling over there.

I was so fired.

As a comic, I say incendiary stuff all the time. I have the right to tell a shitty joke or to be offensive, and I refuse to take away a right that I enjoy from somebody else. I’ve defended Tracy Morgan and I’ve defended Rush Limbaugh. Going back further, I defended John Rocker in The Original Kings of Comedy. I am consistent. But when I defended Don Imus, shit hit the fan.

Imus had called the Rutgers women’s basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed hos.” They weren’t hos, but they sure were nappy-headed. I defy a sister to play basketball for four quarters and keep a perm. You start out looking like Halle Berry, and by that fourth quarter it’s Ben Wallace. But America wasn’t interested in hearing any more jokes. A women’s college basketball team had been insulted! Our country was in crisis! A joke? Women’s basketball? Those terms should never appear together!

My defense of Don Imus was as follows: I thought that what he said was hurtful; I thought it was malicious; I thought it was a bad joke on a slow news week. I wasn’t defending Don Imus the person. I was defending his right to say something dumb. If Americans have earned no other right, it’s the right to say something dumb.

I’ve been asked, “How would you like it if your daughters got called that?” My reply: “My daughters would know what they were and what they weren’t. I didn’t prepare them for the world that I wished existed; I prepared them for the world that I believed did exist. I always told them it’s never what you’re called, it’s what you answer to.” Is it more prudent to prepare your children for real life, or for a made-up fantasy world where everything is great and people love each other and respect each other? If I’m wrong, even better. I’ve prepared them for a bad scenario that will never come. It’s a good thing if you have a fire drill but no fires. That’s just insurance.

But few were hearing what I was saying. I had to argue with Al Sharpton about it. Everybody was angry and no one would talk to me. It was the first time I’d ever had any kind of interaction with the black community where I wasn’t their darling. Yet it never occurred to me that saying what I believed would draw this kind of ire. Steve Harvey wouldn’t let me on his show, because he said black women were mad at me. I could see why. He plays specifically to that audience, and he wasn’t about to have it jeopardized.

Many people wanted me to apologize, but I didn’t feel like I had done anything wrong and I wasn’t going to. I knew I could take it. What I now know about myself is that I’m tough. I can last. I’m not scared to give an ass-whupping, and I’m not scared to take one. I’m not scared to be wrong; I’m not scared to be right. Even now, if you Google my name you’ll see people are still talking shit about it—and I don’t care. Any fear or reservations that I had about saying anything that I wanted to onstage died during this period.

If I had apologized, it would have made my comments more sinister than they were. It would have meant that I had something to apologize for. To me, I was being more ironic than I was malicious. Apologizing would have given my critics credence. It would also have changed my whole mindset—a mindset based on feeling comfortable being uncomfortable.

Apologizing is not the answer to controversy. Honesty is the answer. I defended Tracy Morgan when he went on about how he’d stab his son if the kid turned out gay. I said Tracy should have never apologized. Not only did he end up apologizing, but he had to do it more than once. Every week it seemed like he was sorry again. But was he sorry for his views, or for the reaction that they caused? He may have expressed himself in a particularly incendiary way, but what he meant was pretty straightforward and uncontroversial.

A similar thing happened in my family. In 2011, my nephew came out of the closet. He came out to his mother, and then he came out to my wife. He came out to his father and my kids and his sister. I don’t know why he felt the need to come out, because he goes to Morehouse and he designs women’s dresses. I’ve known he was gay. I’ve never judged him and I’ve always loved him. He and I are very, very, very close. Yet the last person he came out to was me. “Why am I the last person in the family that you’re telling?” I asked him.

He didn’t really know what to say. “It was difficult to tell you,” he finally said.

“There’s two things I want you to understand,” I told him. “First off, I will love you no matter what you do. I want you to be safe and happy. I want you to know that. And second, I’m glad you’re not my son.” He stopped and he laughed. Then I called his father to tease him about his son making dresses. That’s all I could do.

I meant both things that I told my nephew. I am going to love him unconditionally. It’s just the extra bullshit I didn’t want. Everybody wants it easy. The coward lives to tell how the brave man died. It’s easier for my kids to marry people of the opposite gender. Everywhere in the world, everything seeks the easiest route. The lion goes for the easiest gazelle to kill. Even water automatically finds the easiest path to flow, that of least resistance.

Forcing comedians to apologize doesn’t even make sense on a strategic level. Everyone remembers Imus’s comments and the brouhaha, but people forget what the consequences to his actions were. First of all, they had to pay off his contract. I don’t give a fuck what you did that caused the networks to succumb to public pressure. You still get your money. Even Charlie Sheen got paid off. So Imus didn’t lose any income.

Six months later, Imus got a new show with a bigger audience on more stations than the show he had before. His agent couldn’t have done as well by him as his critics did. Every radio show’s goal is to have as much of an audience as possible. In other words, a show’s success is directly tied to how much attention it gets!

There’s a reason comedy and tragedy are so often tied together, two sides of the same coin. By trying to destroy Imus, his foes ended up making him a bigger success. Isn’t that absurd? Isn’t that ironic? And aren’t absurdity and irony two of the greatest sources of comedy? We really only have two choices in life: We can either take a joke—or we can end up as the punch line. Sadly, the more contemporary civil rights leaders focus on frivolous throwaway comments like Imus’s, the less powerful they are in fighting actual grievances. It’s exactly like the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

The attacks on Imus set a terrible example. The message was: If you say the wrong thing about race, then you will be vilified. Even though it worked out for him, I’m sure Imus didn’t like the gauntlet he had to run to get there. But since this is such an uncomfortable subject to begin with, many aren’t sure what “the wrong thing” is. As a result, they avoid the subject altogether.

It wasn’t always this way. Black sitcoms, for example, were universally beloved. But nowadays there are no black shows on network television—and I would wager that there probably won’t be any in the near future. My show, The Hughleys, was among the last of this dying breed.