Elon James White

Political comedian and commentator Elon James White of This Week in Blackness: He has a growing following both at TWiB and at Huffington Post. Elon James White is the perfect comedian for the Obama era, talking race while exploding racial stereotypes. - Politico.com

More than just a funny comedian, Elon James White is becoming a notable force for his efforts to introduce new audiences to the sometimes overlooked diversity of talent within the world of black comedians. In other words, there’s more to black comedy than you might think by watching Def Comedy Jam. By creating The Black Comedy Project with comedian Baron Vaughn, White has helped cultivate an expanding community of artists who might be classified as Black-Alt comedians, for lack of a better term. At the end of the month, White will gather some of most innovative performers in New York for the first ever Black Comedy Experiment festival, which runs from February 28th to March 1st. The three day marathon (it’s a leap year) features an intriguing lineup of stand up, sketch comedy and solo shows, all gathered under one roof at the The Tank (Collective: Unconscious) in Tribeca. - Gothamist

Consider this weekend’s Black Comedy Experiment, a three-day showcase of diverse and eccentric humorists at the Tank in Tribeca, an antidote to a decade and a half of DCJ conditioning. In addition to Souled Out, a collective of clean-language NYC stand-up vets who initially bonded over their outcast status during the original DCJ era, performers include Onion editor and political satirist Baratunde Thurston, and Desiree Burch, an alt-comedy diva best known locally as the host of Galapagos’s dirty-lit reading series, Smut. Queer comics Keith Price and Robin Cloud bring provocative solo shows entitled Ebony Chunky Love Part 2: Heartaches and Hard-Ons and Bag of Bitches, respectively. “The diversity within the black community got glossed over [during the DCJ era] because everything was supposed to be all hard and urban,” says Souled Out’s Leighann Lord. “Richard Pryor was great, but there’s also Bill Cosby and Flip Wilson.”

Created and programmed by Bed-Stuy’s Elon James White, the Black Comedy Experiment is an outgrowth of the Black Comedy Project, a web forum White and fellow comic Baron Vaughn established last year. “I used to catch flak from people saying, ‘Oh you’re just kinda black,’ and I didn’t understand it, [but] then I’d talk to other comics like Baron and he’d say, ‘I get the same thing,’?” says White, who also founded Shades of Black, a traveling, Brooklyn-based showcase with a similar mission. “People [talked] about it after a show, but no one was putting it out there. So we decided to create something that would start a discussion among comics nationwide, and then see what’s the next step.”

Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/comedy/26818/a-deeper-shade#ixzz0Ut8qwedL
- Time Out New York

...and Elon James White, whose pontifications on race amused the crowd without straying into uncomfortable territory. - Blast Magazine