*Comedian Sam Jay hangs out with I Heart Radio personality and EURweb Spotlight host Jazmyn ‘Jaz’ Summers as we head into LGBTQ pride month this June. And while Sam Jay eschews strict labels, she is proudly a gay Black woman and hilarious. Her new series “Pause,” which she is co-creating recently debuted its second season Fridays on HBO.
“I guess I just wanted to make a show that was having the conversations I felt like I was having and having them the way I felt like I was having them. I just wanted to bring something to the table that offered an honest discourse about difficult topics,” she tells Jaz
In one bit she pits the Slick Back Booty boys, up against her team the Ravens. And you got to see this. They are straight-up naked. Everything — I mean everything — is hanging out.
“It’s part of an entire episode in which we just talk about ni**er, sexuality within homosexuality and also just Black expression and freedom and kind of the guardrails and the parameters we put around ourselves, especially as a community. And why are we doing that? And where are the spaces for ni**as to nig and especially gay? And we have it on Booty naked basketball,” she explains.
MORE NEWS ON EURWEB: Question? Did Beyonce Steal Amerie’s Sound and Killed Her Career | WATCHtheDebate
The show features uncomfortable conversations with Sam’s homies, one on ones, and bits. It is provocative, funny, and doesn’t shy away from controversy.
Sam has found love and is engaged after an on and off a 16-year relationship with now-fiancee Yanise Monét – Vanity Vixen. I ran into them at a Harlem eatery.
“We take care of one another,” Sam Jay says. “She is my family.”
View this post on Instagram
In her Netflix special “3 In the Morning” Jay jokes about a recent flight they took, during which Monét expected her to carry all the bags. “She forgets, I’m not a man. … I don’t have any chivalry, I don’t give a f—,” she quips in the special.
“We argue a lot and wipe boogies on each other,” Sam jokes. “It’s very immature, but I think we also take care of one another. She prays for me a lot. That’s a big showing of love, and she sages me a lot. So I take that as an act of love, for sure. And I pay for stuff.”
Sam painfully lost both parents and a step-parent at a young age, she and Monét have built their own chosen family over the years. “I think life kind of put me in a situation where I had to lean on friends and people more than normal,” she reflects.
“After my mom passed and I kind of drifted away from my family, I had to find that connection with people through going to Atlanta for school or coming out,” she says. “And so now my definition of family is truly more based on the individual connection than it is necessarily a bloodline.”
But their relationship is turbulent at times. Most recently Yanise posted on Instagram that Sam Jay may have been cheated with an “extra teeth, ugly, turkey neck, bad built court jester.” When I asked Sam about it she quipped
” Yeah, she was mad. So you got to ask her about that.”
Whatever caused the post and Jay doesn’t deny overcoming infidelity in their relationship, Sam says the couple is going strong and they expect to walk down the aisle in the fall of next year.
“Name a better dyke duo, I dare ya!” Yanise bragged on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
Sam Jay’s career started when she was 29 years old, relatively late in the game.
“I had a bunch of regular jobs. I think the last job I had was with this tracking company in Boston. We would, like, track actually sperm all over the country.”
Then she realized she could make as much money doing what she loved.
“Maybe like a year and a half into doing comedy, I make $500, and that was at least enough money to live. I was like, oh if I could make two gigs a week at $500, I’ll be able to pay my rent and be okay. It would do as much as my job at the time was doing, maybe sometimes more. So I think that’s when I felt like, oh, this is something I could survive off of. I don’t know if I thought about it past that until opportunities just came and it kept building. But I think my first goal was just like, can I survive doing this? Because I really love doing it.”
The comedian has endured criticism for using the N-word a lot in her show. She even invented the verb “to nig out.” Why?
“No, it’s just how I talk, just hanging out, talking to my friends. I say it a lot in my stand-up as well. I don’t think I’ve ever been a person who ran from the word,” she responds. “I grew up using the word. It’s a word of my generation. So I don’t know. It doesn’t strike me as odd until someone says it. And it’s always weird because it’s always Black people who call it out and go like, you say ni**a a lot, but then they listen to the Migos and I’m like, I don’t know. I think as a culture, we say nigga a lot. But, hey.
Battling racism in the LGBTQ community and homophobia in the Black community is a topic she tackles on the show.
“I think it’s like anything you bump into people who are going to judge you for your life choices and for how you look, how you dress, how whatever. And I think that can happen, ” she tells EURweb Spotlight. ” Being gay, being black, being a woman. I don’t know that I make these distinctions in that way. I’ve been a black woman my entire life, so I was kind of been aware that that type of stuff is going on and will go on. And I came out later in life, so I was aware that I added a layer. I just live my life the way that I want to and kind of handle it that way.”
She has joked about “sucking a lot of D” and came out as gay later in her life as an adult.
“I was just discovering my sexuality late I dont think everyone has a clear path to it. I think things were a lot more grey for me and it took me a while to figure myself out.”
Check out the full convo in the video at the top. We dive into racism and the LGBTQ community, more about wifey and coming out and more. And please subscribe to Jaz’s YouTube channel.
Interview/article by Jazmyn Summers. Follow her @jaztalk1 on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Video editing by www.patrickhousefilms.com
We Publish News 24/7. Don’t Miss A Story. Click HERE to SUBSCRIBE to Our Newsletter Now!
