Fringe Festival and RP Award

[Jennifer]

Well, as you all know by now, I went over to Edinburgh to hand out the award to the first recipient of the RICHARD PRYOR ETHNIC COMEDY AWARD...the three judges saw the shows-only 16 were elligable out of over 440 shows, which tells you why we put the word ETHNIC in there-very fucking white in Scotland...very snobby too!
They sent us the tapes of the four comics they narrowed it down to-and Richard chose Ahmed Ahmed, an Arab American ...he had the most innovative and dangerous material in this post 911 era in which we are living; I then went over there to present him the award.
I gave a little speech and we let each of them know how we appreciated their work and why and then gave the award to Ahmed Ahmed...his work fit the criteria the best...and was the funniest...
There had been a little debate about the ETHNIC part-a comic,Reginald Hall, who was nominated for the big PERRIER Award, managed to garner a lot of press knocking use of the word and also RIchard-he even went so far as to put it in his act....and by the way, he didn't win the Perrier...although he was favored-i think the judges saw through his bullshit...the way he was trying to diss RP to ingratiate himself with the Perrier peeps---
I addressed the topic like this:
"If anyone questions RIchard's support of diversity, just count how many ex-white wives he has"---
and I reminded everyone of the statistic-only 16 were elligable..and how in this country...we used to have something called "Affirmative Action"-so that is how this should be viewed in order that the playing field may be made more equal...and we will delete the word when it's no longer neccessary...
we are also adding another category next year-to expand the competition...
and by the way, it was great fun and everything is very expensive over there now, so I didn't bring back any cashmere scarves...they are cheaper here!