Tommy Davidson will forever be known as one of the key members of the venerable Fox sketch show “In Living Color” in the early 1990s, offering hilarious impressions of M.C. Hammer and Michael Jackson.
Three decades later, he remains a busy stand-up comic who dabbles in films and TV. He visits Atlanta at least twice a year for shows because it’s a reliable home for his loose yet thoughtful style of comedy. He’ll be at Atlanta Comedy Theater in Norcross for five shows this weekend with tickets starting at $35.
“We’ve been friends for 29 years,” said Gary Abdo, owner of Atlanta Comedy Theater who once owned Uptown Comedy Corner in Buckhead in the 1990s. “He’s legendary. He has the ability to make a thousand different decisions in a split second on stage under pressure in front of an audience and level them with laughter. He’s got such a good energy and spirit about him. He’s very positive, not degrading. His shows are just good fun.”
Davidson considers himself “comedextrous.”
“I worked long and hard to get to this level,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week. “I can do impressions. I do story telling. I do political and non-political. I sing.”
Davidson said he supports the month-long SAG-AFTRA actors strike and hopes it can be resolved as soon as possible. But traditional acting is not his primary income generator nowadays.
“I could say that this year and the last couple of years I have been primarily doing animation and live shows,” Davidson said. “I’ve done a couple of movies. It’s been back and forth.” (Voice-over work for most TV and streaming animated productions are allowed during the strike.)
Sketch comedy, which helped Davidson make his name, is not a common job even in the best of times. He doesn’t think an “In Living Color” reunion will happen in the near future given how successful the original cast members have been pursuing their own careers the past three decades.
“We’re all prolific in our lives,” he said. “We have children out of high school and college now. We’re out there in our real fruitful years of our lives. To get together and stop and do [a reunion] is tough. It has to work on everybody’s schedule and who’s going to actually do it.”
At age 59, he still enjoys what he does, citing a 1977 book by Wayne Dyer “Your Erroneous Zones” he read as a teenager. “Make your vacation your vocation,” Davidson said. “Get what you do for a living to the point where you love it so much it’s not work anymore.”
And he doesn’t rest on his laurels. He reads constantly, much of it history, whether it’s on the War of 1812 or herding in Africa. He can incorporate those ideas into his comedy, he said.
“It gives my comedy a social vertebrae,” Davidson said. “It gives me a sense of societal root. I don’t have to lean on contemporary stereotypes.”
At the same time, “there’s not much I can say that’s going to be considered cancellable,” he said. “How can you do a culture cancel with someone who is the culture? I can do a joke about dogs and how Blacks have a different relationship with them than white people. When whites see a dog running around by itself, they call it a stray. Black people call it loose. That’s really a play on slavery. You get an instinctual guttural laugh from Black folks. We know we were tied down like dogs. If we were loose, that was an alarm.”
IF YOU GO
Tommy Davidson
7 and 11 p.m. Friday, Aug. 11, and Saturday, Aug. 12; 7 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 13. $35-$45. Atlanta Comedy Theater, 4650 Jimmy Carter Blvd., #114b, Norcross. showclix.com.
