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Remember Reginald D Hunter? The edgy American comedian became mired in scandal during the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe after a joke he made about Israel landed badly with a British-Israeli couple in the audience. The pair were then heckled by others in the crowd and became the butt of some of Hunter’s comments. The Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish, a Fringe veteran, was in the room and described it as the “most unpleasant comedy gig” he had ever attended.
Ever since, and despite Police Scotland saying that no crime took place at the show, Hunter has been in what he describes as “comedy jail”. Some of his subsequent dates were cancelled and he was on the receiving end of an unsuccessful private prosecution brought by the Campaign Against Antisemitism over his social-media posts. He has, by and large, kept a low profile.
This year, however, he is returning to the Scottish capital for the first time since 2024 and on Monday night he ran through his new material at a club in Walthamstow, east London. He said at this event that the fallout from the controversy had affected his relationship with his daughter, whom he had only met for the first time in 2016, when she was already a teenager.
“I have moments when I think to myself, I messed up real bad by making that joke because it’s affected all the people who depended on me. I’m estranged from my family. My daughter hasn’t spoken to me for two years, and I have all kinds of tax problems,” Hunter, 57, told the crowd before delivering a characteristically bold punchline. “But then I think, but at least I don’t f--- kids.”
In an hour of material, he spent a small amount of time on the scandal itself, but there were related themes to which Hunter kept returning.
“I got cancelled 22 months ago at the Edinburgh Festival because I did this joke about Israel, and before I knew it, I was playing off-the-grid places like this, talking to motherf-----s like you,” he told the several dozen people who had paid £16 (plus a £1.60 booking fee) to be at Walthamstow Trades Hall. “Take it from me, Jews cancel way better than feminists.” This line was told, and received by the audience, in a good-humoured spirit – not in the aggressive way it could be interpreted if only read on a page or screen.
Hunter has always been a freethinker and determined to push boundaries for comic effect in an age that grows ever more censorious. And his talent is undeniable: early bits on grooming gangs, Jimmy Savile, Donald Trump trying to help the American football team at the World Cup and the crimes of Nicola Sturgeon’s husband were received with loud laughter in the room.
The Georgia native also has a profound attachment to the UK, where he has lived since 1997. One thing he admires about Britain, he said, is the quality of its documentary output. At which point he reprised the gag that prompted the furore in Edinburgh two years ago: he had watched a Channel 5 documentary about a man who was being systematically abused by his wife, but the abusive wife had accused him of being the abusive one. It was “like being married to Israel”, Hunter said. “That joke right there is the reason why you’re looking at me right now for such reasonable prices.”
He would go on to make a gag about how he was “not mad” at his treatment in the aftermath of the scandal because it was not like Mossad had made his phone explode – a reference to the incident where the Israelis planted exploding walkie talkies with members of Hezbollah.
And later came this: “I know that this is the first year I’ve been going to the Edinburgh Festival knowing that none of my reviews are going to be good in any of the national press, and it’s simply because the national press… we all know this. Our national press is really controlled by Hamas. Everybody knows that, OK? Just like they control Hollywood and Washington DC. It’s Hamas.”
About 15 minutes later, he came to close the show with a bit that, by his own admission, had “no punchline… yet”. This was a work-in-progress show, after all, but things took a bit of a turn.
Hunter related the story of what happened when Sammy Davis Jr, at the time a major entertainment star, started a relationship with Kim Novak, the actress, in the 1950s – a period when interracial relationships were taboo in America. It was, Hunter said, something that had been on his mind for a decade or more.
“Sammy realised this: all the talent in the world doesn’t mean anything in the Western culture if you are unaffiliated. You have to have your own gang to help you get to the top. You have to have your own gang to make problems go away. Sammy was unaffiliated,” he said. So he related how Davis apparently sought refuge with black people, Irish Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam and Satanism.
Nothing worked for Davis Jr, who needed “something stronger than Satan”, in Hunter’s telling. “Six months later, Sammy announced to the world that he was becoming a Jew. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it’s got to mean something, ladies and gentlemen.”
Unlike the rest of Hunter’s show, this line was received much more coolly. He soon wrapped up the show and thanked everybody who came, but the cheers and applause were markedly more muted than it had been earlier in the set. One wonders whether that bit will make it to the final Edinburgh show.
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