“Ziwe” Is Trapped in an Interminable Dance with Whiteness

It would not be in Oprah’s nature to pick an heir. But this is of no matter to Ziwe, the mononymous twenty-nine-year-old Nigerian-American performer who is in the midst of becoming our national inquirer’s unauthorized spawn. Everything that the pleasantness of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” made invisible—the theatrical artifice of the interview structure; the host’s interest in a gendered performance art; the flirtatious conflation of journalism and narcissism; the over-all raging camp of the daytime enterprise—is easy to see when watching the media that Ziwe produces.

I cannot say that “Baited with Ziwe,” an interview series that débuted on YouTube, in 2017, is enjoyable to watch, and that’s the point. On “Baited,” Ziwe subjects non-Black people to interviews about race that quickly become inquisitions. It is a fantasy comedy of entrapment in which the Black woman tosses white naïveté down the hatch while playfully hoarding the lock and key. There is no right answer, say, to Ziwe’s demand of a white woman guest, a famous cook, to “name five Black people off the top of your head,” because Ziwe is not asking a question. And yet the guest works hard to answer in good faith, to look racially hip in the face of the ludicrous, because she believes, whether she will admit it or not, that her reputation is hinged on a kind of obeisance.

Last year, “Baited” moved to Instagram Live. Its new home, where politics are all about appearance, seemed appropriate; Ziwe questioned the legitimacy of the white ally’s existential crisis during our summer of quote-unquote racial reckoning. What is it that possesses white people to agree to speak to Ziwe? Wanting to look good? The fear of becoming irrelevant? The desire to participate in a phenomenon that they understand to be culturally Black, even at the promise of humiliation? Last year’s guests were often public figures who had said or done something offensive, something that threatened their social capital. And Ziwe, instead of giving them the stern but loving reprimand that decades of “Oprah” taught them was their due, used them for her personal project. The asymmetry was there even in the split-screen presentation of the show: the sombre interviewee, hair often pulled back, respectfully distanced from the iPhone camera; Ziwe looking like a glammed-up madam, with pastel eyeliner or full-length gloves, nosing up to the camera so that we are staring down the caverns of her nostrils, her brandished gums.

The Instagram series has been expanded into “Ziwe,” a carnivalesque variety-style talk show, produced by A24 and airing on Showtime. Vanguard talent such as Cole Escola, Bowen Yang, Patti Harrison, Sydnee Washington, Julio Torres, and Jeremy O. Harris drop in, letting us know that we’re in the hottest company. Ziwe, dressed in gorgeous high-femme outfits that verge on the parodic, is our demented girl boss, our anchor, which means we are always a bit seasick. The aesthetic is aesthetic—most of the set is shaded in pink or its derivatives, including potted plants on the stage. There are framed photographs of Michelle Obama and Oprah on the walls, and gigantic storybooks on the floor—a wink at the spirit of faux intellectualism. Formally, “Ziwe” descends from the news-satire model of “The Colbert Report”—Ziwe, an accomplished television writer, once interned for Colbert—but her show aspires to more than being a vaunted “challenge” to white-male-dominated late-night TV. The début season—six episodes, full of absurd games, musical skits, and more of those uncomfortable interviews—ends up amounting to a creeping self-portrait of its namesake, rendered through flashy critiques of race and the media. The soul of the Ziwe persona was not really accessible via “Baited,” or through her heavily layered Internet character—possibly because she is still sorting out the particulars for herself. In the finale of the Showtime series, a repeated visual motif is of Ziwe, baring her teeth, as she grabs at the edges of an old-fashioned television set. Despite all the fun and games, “Ziwe” is a one-woman show, a baby-pink ouroboros, an endless loop out of which Ziwe the person is trying to escape.

“Ziwe” often relies heavily on the prefab obsessions of the liberal intelligentsia. The first episode of the show is called “55%,” a reference to both the estimated percentage of white women who voted for Trump and the discourse that has exploded around that fact. The most viral segment of the pilot was Ziwe’s sitdown with the humorist Fran Lebowitz. There was the sexy juxtaposition, generational and racial, and the clash of egos. Early on, Lebowitz, legs crossed, warns Ziwe that she doesn’t play games, a caution that the host summarily ignores. Lebowitz, to prove her progressive bona fides, begins to critique Barack Obama, and a chyron reads “White Woman Has Opinion on Obama.” (The editors of “Ziwe” are as much responsible for the queasiness of the interviews as Ziwe is herself.) As Lebowitz speaks, her words are bleeped out. The chyron: “We will not be airing this because we want to go to the Roc Nation Brunch.”

Here is the profoundly inventive element of “Ziwe”: the sendup of the Black grifter, the personality who exploits a desire for reconciliation, and ingeniously twists the fetish of Black female moral authority, for her own gain. Anytime a guest dares to question Ziwe—at one point, Bowen Yang, in on the joke, meekly asks the host about her wealth—she contorts her beautiful face, as if accusing the guest of disrespect. No one gets to come for the mad queen. Curiously, the show, not ready to skewer its host head on, opts to do so through other bits, as in a fake commercial for an “Imperial Wives” doll named Tina, who “uses social-justice language for profit.”

“Ziwe” is trapped in an interminable dance with whiteness, its muse. In a skit called “Karens,” from the first episode, Ziwe ensnares a focus group of white women in a number of racial faux pas. But because the participants are aware of their own shortcomings, the joke cannot land. The segment also feels dated, strangled by the unimaginative neologism of the fraught summer that preceded it.

We know what Ziwe wants to dismantle. But what does this self-described “agent of chaos” want to create? In interviews, Ziwe, a maven of self-promotion, claims that she sees her form of caustic satire as the conduit to a confrontational education. And yet “Ziwe” the show is pessimistic about the American belief in the power of anti-racist enlightenment. It’s possible that “Ziwe” has a gloriously retributive bent, that it is satire that does not serve a higher purpose, that it simply delights in letting the jab sit and sting. The point is to watch people squirm, not to hear them speak. Although the six episodes cover different topics—immigration, beauty standards, wealth inequality—“Ziwe” returns repeatedly to the hypocrisies of liberal saints and stooges. In one segment, Ziwe visits a plastic-surgery office, and gets an affable white surgeon to suggest that her nose could be more refined. She gets Andrew Yang to embarrass himself more than he already has. She makes Gloria Steinem listen to her recite the lyrics to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “W.A.P.” It’s like a kink.

I found myself most interested in “Ziwe” when the host was in the presence of other Black women—in other words, when the Ziwe persona was put to the test. In a recurring segment called “Behind the Writers Studio,” Ziwe baits her own writers, deriding them for their participation in the sketches that she herself commissioned. In the finale, she brings out Michelle Davis, who has written, and performed in, a faux-mercial in which Harriet Tubman hawks sports bras. Ziwe tells Davis, “I think the lesson here is that you can be Black and anti-Black.” This is the show’s tricky apotheosis. Davis turns the tables on the host, insisting that she isn’t anti-Black, and launches into a rendition of the Black national anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” Ziwe, one-upped at the game of one-upping, can do nothing but giggle and sing along. ♦

An earlier version of this article misidentified a Stephen Colbert show.