When Was Ike Born? and Other FAQs
In doing research for this piece, I scoured the internet for basic biographical information about Ikechukwu Ufomadu – when was he born? where did he grow up? – and found nothing.
We generally associate standup comedy with a confessional performance style, in which the comedian divulges personal details to foster a connection with their audience. Ike, by contrast, reveals nothing about himself in his set. Instead, he woos his audience with a more timeless presence. Suit-clad, impenetrably smooth, and reminiscent of a 1950s American late-night talk show host, he has one sole desire: to entertain you, the audience.
Ike begins Amusements with a confounding introduction: “I’m not a comedian, but I play one on stage.” He “plays” this comedian not only on stage – in his previous live shows at the Bushwick Starr and Joe’s Pub – but also on screen, in his murder mystery film Inspector Ike, and his Emmy-nominated recurring segment “Words With Ike” on the television series Cake.
It would be easy to view this persona as a character that Ike “plays” – indeed, as an actor, he has played a wide array of characters, including a 13-year-old boy in Clare Barron’s Dance Nation at Playwrights Horizons in 2018 – but that isn’t quite right. "People meet me after the show,” Ike told me, “and they're like, ‘Oh, so you're really like that in real life?’ And I think to myself, ‘Well, in real life, I don’t exclusively speak into a microphone to large assemblies of people.’ Though it can be subtle, performing does seem to shift something in you.”
Ike didn’t grow up watching late-night TV, but as a senior at NYU, about to graduate with a BFA in Acting, he came across an episode of David Letterman’s Late Show. He was fascinated by the tension between Letterman’s formal appearance and environment – in his suit, behind his desk, he looked like someone who worked in finance – and his propensity toward silliness. He found himself wondering, “What kind of person wants to have fun and make jokes and goof around, but can only allow themselves to do so if wearing a suit at a desk?” It’s a juxtaposition that most of us take for granted, but that Ike’s performances highlight.
And he pushes that juxtaposition to its logical extreme. In Amusements, he makes a special point of informing the audience that his sole intention is to serve them through entertainment. As he told The Creative Independent earlier this year, his “idea of the [...] old-school talk show host, is that you’re almost doing a public service in a way. Your job is to show up and to deliver humor somehow to the group of people who have assembled at this event or in front of the screen. Like, say I’m a milkman and I’ve got to deliver the milk. [...] With the comedic entertainment, you’re always trying to find the milk.”
But at the same time, Ike’s humor challenges its listener. There can be periods of prolonged confusion before they “get” each joke. He resists delivering punchlines in an expected or easily digestible way, favoring delayed punchlines, or none at all. Despite his stated intent to serve, Ike’s humor is markedly withholding.
Another way that he subverts our expectations is through wordplay. One critic observed in a 2022 Vulture article that Ike “loves comedy because he loves language,” but this love is rooted in reverence not for language’s efficacy or beauty, but for its paradoxical capacity to be meaningless. There’s an Ionesco-esque comic absurdity to how he uses puns, homophones, and repetition to abstract words from their meaning, or to reveal their lack thereof. He begins each episode of “Words with Ike” by reading the dictionary definition of a word, then proceeds on a seemingly meaningless digression that arrives back at that meaning from an unexpected angle.
Similarly, in Amusements, Ike uses common platitudes or figures of speech to prime our expectations as he sets up a bit, then takes it in a completely different direction. He also puts on several voices throughout the play – a British Shakespearean, a mid-century U.S. president – not because they necessarily relate to what he’s saying, but because that manner of delivery helps him land a specific joke. All of his impressions are of orators: the way they speak is calculated to elicit certain emotions in their listeners, and the substance of their words is secondary.
Ike continually sets his audience up with certain expectations, then thwarts them in surprising and delightful ways. It makes sense, then, that he challenges our assumptions about the genre of standup comedy, and how comedians relate to their audiences. Ike’s work complicates our notions of authenticity and artifice in performance. But make no mistake: even though his persona contains multiple layers of self-contradiction, nothing about it is fictional. As Ike explains in the aforementioned interview with The Creative Independent, “There’s a form of honesty that’s maybe, ‘Does what you just said line up with what I’ve read on Wikipedia about you? [...]’ Then there’s also achieving a level of playfulness or release or fun – I think one can be honest in their pursuit of those qualities.”
Ike’s persona isn’t a facade that he puts on to obscure his true self. On the contrary, stepping into this persona allows him to tap into a deeper sense of play that might be the most honest version of who he is.