A young man with tousled black hair, green eyes and a hooded sweat shirt took the stage at Peninsula Campus. Jeff Dye grabbed the microphone, swiped away at his longish hair and then revealed himself before an audience of more than 100 female gazes and a few good men: An arrested adolescent provocateur disguised as a comedian.
“I lived at home with my family and grandfather. Geez, he was racist.” Clenching his fist and swiping the air in a feigned disgust and anger, he pretended to shadow punch the relative. “Say one more lousy ugly thing and …!” Dye let the threat hang in the air.
“Well noooooo, we couldn’t hit Grandpa now, could we? No, we just took him to a Tupac Shakur Concert and watched him die of ...natural selection.” The crowd loved him; it took only minutes to see how Dye could turn a phrase, move a step sideways and send his audience sprawling past his sarcastic wit, tumbling down off their doubt and filled with unrestrained laughter.
In the great tradition of social American criticism born of Mark Twain and western humorist Will Rogers, Dye carried a torch of social criticism that was set ablaze by Lenny Bruce and then fashioned into a small Molotov cocktail by the likes of George Carlin and Lewis Black.
After building his persona of warm, gentle amusement at a world gone mad, angry, racist and misogynist, Dye explained how fighting back is his least natural instinct. Someone pushes him to the ground, he’s more likely to turn the other cheek and smack them with a compliment. “Hey, nice puuuush!” But turn the dial a moment later and Dye gives dewy-eyed women who embrace “All Creatures, Great & Small” a dose of irony gone sad. My "girlfriend of the moment” would say how cute, how adorable some creature is, then spying a small black spider scuttle across the forest floor, crack its back under the heel of her boot.
“Wait! Wait! That’s a little creature, too; I’m pretty sure!” Dye would protest. Then slowly a smile crept across his face to let his audience know how his painful recognition of discrimination might just come to roost for him.
“And this is like his home, h-i-s h-o-m-e, not ours!” Again and again, Dye drove him his insightful points on American racism, American cars, American dreams and delusions somehow gone sadly awry. Yet, the Kent-born Seattle native clearly was a member of the loyal opposition. He is too in love with the beauty of America, the promise of America to let it pass without kicking the tires and making sure it's worth its weight in gold.
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