Comedy collective Black Iowa Streams is bringing 'the culture' to Teehee's in Des Moines
"Bernard, you look like somebody took a thug and a piece of charcoal in a shirt from Baby Gap and made a person!"
Lake Mills comic Day Peace said his piece into a microphone as the roast of Bernard Bell, a fellow Iowa-based comedian from Ames, was well underway. Audience laughs echoed to the back of Teehee's Comedy Club as each comic took to the stage in downtown Des Moines.
Five men sat on black folding chairs as the crowd clapped, cheered and ate chicken wings out of white Styrofoam to-go boxes while they watched Comedy Kickback, a monthly residency show hosted by the nonprofit Black Iowa Streams.
The collective of five Black comics — Bell, Peace, Perry Thompson III, Clifton Antoine, and Des Moines native Darius Daye, who replaced original member Dante Powell for the nighttime performance in May — waited for their chance to throw shade at one another in the belly laugh-bonded act of brotherhood.
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Iowa can be a lonely place for a Black comedian, often scheduled individually as the sole racially diverse act among a lineup of white comics. The five men first bonded in friendship and camaraderie. Then, in the wake of George Floyd's 2020 death, they made their relationship more formal, creating Black Iowa Streams, or "B.I.A.S.," to provide a stream of income and opportunities for Black comedians in Iowa.
At Teehee's, Bell was years and some change — five children, "three baby mamas" and 340 miles — from Chicago's South Side, where he was raised. While growing up at 74th and Peoria Streets, he grappled with neighborhood violence combined with family values guided by his maternal grandmother, Mary Bell.
"When I was growing up, my grandmother used to always say, 'We got a family full of unpaid comedians,' and I used to always say, 'I'm going to be the first one (paid),' and I was," said Bell, now 43 and a school custodian.
That day, May 27, marked the painful anniversary of Mary's death, a reminder of the 25 years he had spent without the family matriarch. But it was also Black Iowa Streams' monthly show date, putting him on stage with a family he's found through comedy.
How Black Iowa Streams started kicking it and created kickbacks
In 2014, Powell, a semi-truck driver who originally hailed from Louisiana, traded cross-country trips for life in Iowa on the Des Moines stand-up comedy circuit.
Eventually, the dad of twin daughters met Antoine, from Texas, who started hosting open mics as a student at Central College and later became a stand-up comedian in central Iowa.
"Me and him would be the only Black dudes at mics, and even then, we were never booked on shows together," said Powell, 35.
Later, the duo met Thompson III, a 39-year-old Washington, D.C., native who was raised by a single mother. The dad of two daughters, whose day job is in the finance industry, started doing stand-up comedy in March 2015.
“Everyone has that uncle who is hilarious, but they’ve never gotten on stage and put together a five-minute set,” Thompson III said. "… In Black families, people are really funny because life is stressful, and you need to find joy in it."
By 2016, the trio had started working on a podcast together.
"I was like, 'Hey, Perry, you want to do a podcast?' and then by the third episode, we were like, 'Let's get Dante on the podcast,' and Dante was like, 'Can I come back next week?'" said Antoine, 31.
"I came back every week after that!" Powell added.
Black Iowa Streams becomes a nonprofit in wake of George Floyd's death
Then, Peace and Bell, who met at comedy shows in northern Iowa, touched base with the metro-based trio to create a platform for Black comedians around the state.
"We just started working a lot more together and through conversations on like who's out here doing shows," Peace said. "'Have you worked with Perry? Have you worked with Dante?' and we realized we hadn't really worked with everybody out here. And Dante was like, 'Let's just do this!' And that was the first kickback, and I thought that was amazing to see us come together. Not only to support one another, but for a cause."
Thompson III hosted his first Juneteenth Comedy Jam in 2017, before Juneteenth was recognized as a national holiday, at Lefty's Live Music near Drake University with Antoine, Peace and Bell, who performed alongside Mohamed Yual and Malcolm Hatchett.
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The five men performed their first "Comedy Kickback" in July 2019, in the Highland Park neighborhood.
“Eventually, we got together and were like, “Hey, why don’t we build our own thing here in Iowa,’ because waiting on the other comedians, we’re just going to be waiting forever,” Powell said.
“We wanted to say, ‘Hey, if you're not getting on at these places, come to our show, because we're at a club and we want you to network with us and we want to provide you the opportunities that we didn't have,’” Peace said.
Teehee's, which sits kitty-corner to Exile Brewing Co., opened in October 2019, and the quintet shifted there with "The Return of the Kickback" in July 2020.
They made Black Iowa Streams an official nonprofit in March 2021.
"The racial reconciliation, the summer of (2020) protesting following the murder of George Floyd, and our desire to be a valid entity in comedic and business spaces were all huge factors in doing that," Powell said of the nonprofit's creation.
Different backgrounds, perspectives serve up nuances of Black culture
During their first year at Teehee's Comedy Club, the group performed to mostly sold-out crowds with comedy that detailed their personal experiences, such as Thompson's and Bell's issues with "baby mamas."
“My comedy is based on real life, like being a single father, the stuff that I experienced, dealing with three different baby mamas and dealing with life and the job and just everything that I go through,” Bell said.
Thompson echoes that view.
“I would definitely say that it’s been an outlet for frustrations because .... talking about personal struggles and things like that is an outlet,” Thompson said.
Each member of Black Iowa Streams offers a unique perspective in a world where the Black American experience is commonly portrayed as monolithic. Peace lives in Lake Mills, a rural city of 2,100 people in northern Iowa, while the other comedians reside in Ames and Des Moines. Antoine is the sole member who is not a father. Their hometowns span from urban hubs (Chicago, Detroit and the District of Columbia) to Bernice, Louisiana, and Baytown, Texas. Antoine and Thompson are college graduates; the others aren't.
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“If you come to a Black Iowa Stream show, even Juneteenth this year, you're going to see so many different Black perspectives, and I think that there's beauty in that because you get to see the nuances of Black culture," Antoine said.
Their unique perspectives include sharing pain.
Antoine has been open on stage about his struggles with mental health, and BIAS members have encouraged him to drop out of shows to care for his mental health. Antoine uses lyrics from Atlanta rapper Future's 2017 rap song "Mask Off" to detail his mental health journey.
"I definitely deal with depression and anxiety. I say it all the time like, 'Future has Percocet, Molly, Percocet.' I have alcohol, weed and Lexapro," Antoine said about the joke.
Laughs and love, jokes and jabs tether them together.
"Sometimes we don't agree, and we are very much like real brothers. I have a real brother. He's in prison," Peace said. "My relationship with my brother or my relationship with Black men is something I have learned about myself in recent years ... that void or that vacancy has been filled with BIAS and this brotherhood."
Brotherhood and bonds come first for Black Iowa Streams
At each Comedy Kickback, Teehee's is packed with Black joy as laughter, shouts from the crowd and the occasional "oop" fill the air. During the roast of Bell, each comedian took cheap, liquored shots at one another.
"I've been working with all of the guys that are on this show tonight for a long time," Antoine said to the audience. "What we've done with Black Iowa Streams is really cool. I'm happy we did it. I'm happy we can do things like this. It's the second time we've roasted Bernard. That's why he's so Black — he's well done."
The roast continued with Daye, Bell's mentee, who grew up in the city's Oakridge neighborhood.
"Perry is just a great guy. I've seen him do so many things. He taught me how to budget. The man can find a whole outfit at Marshall's from head to toe," Daye said about Thompson III.
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"It's all right," an audience member shouted back to Daye.
Then, Thompson III jumped out of a folding chair to hold the mic.
"He's the only guy I know that has just a few more kids less than Robert De Niro," he said about Bell mid-set. "Oh no, I'm sorry, he's got a few less Black kids than Robert De Niro. He's in the same Facebook group with Nick Cannon. They've got a support group for n----- that send their baby mamas' Mother's Day cards to the wrong baby mama."
Then, Peace took his turn.
"You're a beautiful man. I'm surprised you don't have a larger gay following," Peace, 38, said to Antoine during his set. "It's really just four Asian dudes that are obsessed with Yu-Gi-Oh and Bernard Bell here."
'If we didn't laugh ... we'd be crazy': How humor can hurt and heal
Dr. Venise Berry, chair of the African American Studies department at the University of Iowa, said that finding comedy in everyday life fits a long history within the Black community of using comedy as a vessel to ease the stress and pain of living in a racialized society.
However, Berry, who has conducted in-depth research about race and its intersection with modern media, said Black comedy and Black comedians' portrayal of Black culture in their stand-up sets can both heal and hurt.
“We know comedians deal with stereotypes, and when you have comedians using stereotypes consistently, those stereotypes become normalized,” Berry said. “I think the positive is Black people had to laugh with the experience of slaves, slavery, Jim Crow and desegregation and even today’s microaggressions and macroaggressions."
Black comedy has allowed people in the Black community to look at issues facing their lives from a different perspective, she said, and can help prevent feelings of dehumanization.
“The comedians use everyday ideas that help them to create a kind of meaning that helps African Americans to see how their circumstances can be funny," Berry said.
However, she acknowledged "a problematic element" as well.
"The more that there are stereotypes and historical myths and bias framing and even traditional racism, the more it is perpetuated in comedy and media in general,” Berry said. "It has a double-edged sword because it normalizes these myths in comedy, but the idea of laughter is necessary.”
From the streets of Chicago to finding family on a Des Moines stage
The roast wrapped on the same night that Bell's pain began 25 years after he lost his grandmother Mary. He sat on a folding chair and looked up at the ceiling near the end of the show.
“I did everything on my own, and I didn't realize what I was doing until my son graduated high school. That’s when I was able to look back like, damn, like here I am, here from the South Side of Chicago," Bell said. "I hung out with gang members. I did what everybody else did. I became a product of my environment, but that was all self-inflicted."
"I wanted to run and play in the streets," Bell continued.
A brotherhood was forged on stage, not the streets, with other Black men from Detroit to the deep South.
"Can we get five shots?" Antoine asked as each comic took a shot of tequila.
Their bond is for life. Brothers who pick up a mic, pick on each other, and then, pour one up.
Jay Stahl is an entertainment reporter at The Des Moines Register. Follow him on Instagram or reach out at jstahl@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Black Iowa Streams is bringing Black culture to Des Moines comedy club
