D.L. Hughley has moderated The View and covered politics for CNN, but that doesn’t mean he’s a card-carrying member of the establishment. “The capitol’s surrounded by criminals, pedophiles, and drug addicts,” the actor and comedian once quipped of Washington D.C., “and that’s just the House of Representatives.”
Because of his role covering news for various outlets (he currently hosts the widely syndicated D.L. Hughley Show on radio), Hughley’s standup routines are like a revving engine at the intersection of race, politics and sex; he’ll manage to make jokes out of Nelson Mandela’s funeral or about the lack of women’s rights in Quatar, and then swing directly into the travails of marriage or the labyrinth of online porn.
And even though Hughley’s 2012 book is titled I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up: How the Audacity of Dopes is Ruining America, he doesn’t solely point fingers, even calling out his own community: “We were havin’ a real hard time with this gay thing, man,” he says in a recent standup routine. “Seventy percent of black people that identified themselves as Christian are opposed to gay marriage, but yet 70 percent of our children are born out of wedlock. So that’s a hell of a hypocritical thing… let he among us who is without sin wear the first rubber.”
