Bridging the Racial Divide, One Joke at a Time

Like black comics he grew up idolizing, including Dave Chappelle and Richard Pryor, Mr. Davis, 33, said he believes comedy is a useful tool to address issues of racial inequity and division. “It’s a fun game to trick people into the conversation,” he said. “Instead of bringing it hard core to their door, you subtly reel them in through the clever comedy piece.”

When his show debuts on Wednesday, June 28, Mr. Davis will inherit a complicated perch: Not only will he have a much larger platform on which to stake his claim as his generation’s leading black comedian who draws attention to racial issues, but he’ll also be doing it on a network that comes with its own pressures. Fair or not, since the abrupt end of Mr. Chappelle’s sketch-based “Chappelle’s Show” in 2006, Comedy Central programs anchored by black comedians like “Key & Peele,” “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore” and “Why? With Hannibal Buress” are often held up to its groundbreaking standard.

As the show’s title suggests, Mr. Davis was raised close to the “hood” — Mr. Davis’s word for a neighborhood prone to violence and heavy gang activity — at the border of the Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park neighborhoods, part of a majority African-American area of the city known as South Central.

While his friends who lived a few blocks south of him, in communities like Inglewood and Park Mesa Heights, were being recruited into gangs by the age of 12, Mr. Davis was drawing still-life nude portraits and playing beach volleyball for physical education at Crossroads School, a college preparatory school in Santa Monica made up almost entirely of white students.

“I was always hopping between those two worlds,” Mr. Davis said, and four years ago, while perfecting his point of view as an emerging stand-up comic, he coined a term for this distinct upbringing: “hood adjacent.”

Sitting in the back seat of a chauffeured Cadillac Escalade one afternoon last month, as it moved through the neighborhoods where his mother, a former city attorney, raised him, he stopped often to point out landmarks of particular importance. There was the Chester Washington Golf Course, where he spent many summer days perfecting his swing and mingling with “rich old white men.” And the IHOP restaurant, steps away from his one-story childhood home on Stocker Street, where he’d get “pigs in a blanket” every year for his birthday.

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Mr. Davis said he sees “Hood Adjacent” as a comedy show but also as a meeting of minds. “As a black man in America, the more you become aware, the more you become troubled and shocked and enlightened, the more you want to talk to people about it,” he said. “We can laugh about stuff, but let’s also have a productive conversation.”

Mr. Davis had never thought about making stand-up a career. He had gone to Pomona College, in California, to study English. But in 2006, after dropping out and struggling to land auditions as an actor, he saw a Craigslist ad for an open-mike night at the Comedy Store, in West Hollywood.

“I saw a lot of potential,” said the comedian DeRay Davis (no relation), who pulled the neophyte aside at an early gig, and later took him out on the road. “Usually guys like that, you don’t think they’re going to listen to you because they already seem like they’re on track. But James had discipline.”

Mr. Davis had his breakout moment in 2010, when he appeared as a gun-toting President Obama in the parody video “Baracka Flacka Flames,” a spoof of the rapper Waka Flocka Flame’s “Hard in da Paint” music video. It went viral, and Mr. Davis parlayed that into work with the comedy website Funny or Die and acting roles on “The Real Husbands of Hollywood” and MTV’s “Wild n’ Out.” In 2015, he spent seven months writing for “The Late Late Show With James Corden.”

His Snapchat series for Comedy Central, “Swag-A-Saurus With James Davis,” on which he translated the latest in urban slang, was based on his monthly stand-up act, Urban Dictionary. It was the network’s most-watched show, and executives quickly greenlighted his new gig on the main network.

Mr. Davis said he understands comparisons between his show and Mr. Chappelle’s are inevitable, given that they share the same network, traffic in race-centric comedy and use a monologue-and-clip format.

“You know it’s going to happen,” he said. “I don’t want to be put in a position where I’m being forced to make a show that other people think is my rendition of ‘Chappelle’s Show.’”

Comedy Central executives assured him that was not their intent. “We don’t go into it like, is this our next ‘Chappelle’ or ‘Key and Peele?’” said Kent Alterman, president of Comedy Central. “We’re thinking, here is a comic talent who has a point of view that resonates for us. Now let’s figure out what’s the best expression of that is.”

For Mr. Davis, it was embracing his diverse upbringing. More specifically, how it lets him exhibit knowledge, compassion and wit on issues across the racial spectrum — from gang life to golf life.

Jelani Cobb, who wrote “The Devil and Dave Chappelle,” a collection of essays, said Mr. Chappelle also strived to speak to and unify an equal-parts black and white audience. “One of the most amazing things about Dave Chappelle is that at heart he’s a middle-class kid from Ohio whose mom is a professor,” Mr. Cobb said. “Most of his black audience couldn’t relate to that. And yet he was able to pull both those audiences together.”

Late that afternoon last month, over fried oysters and a glass of riesling at a seafood restaurant in Santa Monica, Mr. Davis described “Hood Adjacent” as “a calling” and “a mission.” In an ideal world, he said, he’d like to think of himself as “the people’s comedian” — someone able to appeal to audiences of all races and backgrounds.

“We have enough reminders of what divides us,” he said. “There’s no one else aggressively trying to bring people together.”

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