The Nigerian-American actress and comedian talks about her first comedy special, “Momma, I Made It!,” debuting Saturday on HBO.
Most people know Yvonne Orji as Molly Carter, the driven but self-sabotaging sidekick to Issa Rae’s protagonist on “Insecure,” HBO’s breakout show about black millennial friends in Los Angeles.
But as that series nears the end of another season of hookups, breakups and growing pains (the Season 4 finale is on June 14), HBO viewers will get the chance to know Orji as herself, or at least the version she plays on the stand-up stage.
“Momma, I Made It!,” debuting Saturday, is the 36-year-old comedian’s first televised special. Taped at the Howard Theater in Washington, D. C., the hourlong performance finds Orji riffing on life, love and finances through the prism of her Nigerian background and is interspersed with clips of Orji during a return trip to Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city.
While “Insecure” has become her calling card, it was comedy, not acting, that served as Orji’s entry into show business. Her path, however, was hardly conventional. Born in Port Harcourt in southeastern Nigeria, Orji arrived with her family to the United States in 1989, eventually settling in Laurel, Md. She went on to earn multiple degrees at the George Washington University before giving standup a shot as a contestant in the Miss Nigeria in America pageant in 2006. She went on to perform in clubs in New York and Los Angeles and to open for the likes of Chris Rock.
“You don’t get to be Nigerian and tell your parents you want to do comedy without getting a couple of degrees under your belt first,” Orji said recently.
In a phone interview last month, she discussed the special, growing up Nigerian-American, the influence her faith has on her life and receiving career advice from Rock. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
You got a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s in public health. That’s not the usual route to standup comedy.
You’ve got to give your parents what they want, then you go and do the things you want to do. Those are the rules. After I got my master’s degree, I knew I didn’t want to go to med school, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do, either. Really, it was God who told me to do comedy, and I was like, “OK, I hear you.”
You cover a lot of topics in your stand-up — dating, finances, how your life has changed since “Insecure” — but your parents seem to be the theme you keep going back to. We even get to meet them in the special. Why are they so central to your act?
Growing up as a child of immigrants, you’re raised to be community focused; you never forget home. It’s a never-ending quest to make your family proud.
