An event called the All-Star Deportation Jamboree might conjure visions of gleeful white nationalists in MAGA hats, or the shot of our president flanked in the Oval Office by Sarah Palin, Ted Nugent, and Kid Rock.
“That was an incredibly frightening picture,” Aasif Mandvi said from the living room of his Chelsea apartment the day after the photo first circled on the Internet. “I wonder if Ted Nugent turned in his firearms before he entered the White House.”
Mandvi—the former Daily Show correspondent, activist, and actor—is the Jamboree’s host and one of its coordinators. The event is—exhale—a night of music and comedy that functions as a fundraiser for the A.C.L.U. and the International Rescue Committee. “I was worried that people would think it was a celebration of deportation,” he admits, because of the name. “You want to find two words that shouldn’t be together, so that was the idea.”
Mandvi, born in Mumbai and raised in England, conceived of the Jamboree with his fiancée, Uplift C.E.O. Shaifali Puri, after weeks of grappling with the now-familiar list of immigration-related horrors from Trump’s first 100 days. “We always operate from the fact that the person who is the commander in chief has a certain contract with the American people on some level—‘I’m not going to be a complete asshole and throw the baby out with the bathwater,’ ” Mandi says. “It’s a new era where there’s a shadow of totalitarianism that seems to be waiting in the wings.”
Held at Manhattan’s City Winery on Wednesday night, the Jamboree featured performances from Lewis Black, Wanda Sykes, Questlove, Roy Wood Jr., and Riz Ahmed’s rap group Swet Shop Boys, who opened the night with their racial profiling protest anthem “T5.” Mandvi then took the stage, wearing a Zosia Mamet-designed T-shirt featuring the Statue of Liberty in lotus pose. “Hello, rich people!” he beams, imploring the crowd—and those watching via a Facebook Live feed—to open their wallets.
The audience members who shelled out up to $250 to see the show live at City Winery may have had money, but they were also largely old enough and white enough that references at the top of the show to F.U.B.U. (by Saturday Night Live’s Sasheer Zamata) and Varsity Blues (by _The Tonight Show’_s warm-up comic Seth Herzog) didn’t quite land. Mandvi’s joke about the audience not understanding how live-stream video works, however, killed.
Sykes and Black received the most applause; both were at their surly best, saving some of their sharpest jabs for the tertiary cast of Trumpworld characters.
“His whole family annoys me,” Sykes said, before retelling a story about moviegoers who were asked to clear out a section of seats to make room for Tiffany Trump and her security team. “Why does Tiffany Trump need the Secret Service? Nobody gives a shit about Tiffany. Trump don’t even give a shit about her ass. She should have a mall cop.”
Black later described Kellyanne Conway as “the person you hire to get rid of your daughter’s cheerleading rival.” He added that he wishes someone had told him about Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News years ago. “Being Jewish, I would have liked to read it to find out what the fuck we’ve been up to,” he shouted. “We were getting into some shit I’d like to be a part of.”
The evening wasn’t all about bashing Trump and the POTUS-adjacent. Wood talked about his admiration for white tour guides at black history museums. Questlove told a story, already famous on the Internet, about rollerskating with Prince and Eddie Murphy on Valentine’s Day. Comedian Aparna Nancherla was the third of four performers who, timeliness be damned, roasted Bill Cosby.
And then: “Hey, y’all,” said Connie Britton. “I’m going to be doing Shakespeare.” She then read a passage from The Book of Sir Thomas More. (“This is the strangers’ case; and this is your mountainish inhumanity.”) Swet Shop Boys returned for another song, and a solo piece by Ahmed closed out the night. “In these sour times, let me vouch for mine,” he recites.
Mandvi estimates the Deportation Jamboree raised $100,000—a definitive win. “You want to march in the streets, march in the streets,” Mandvi said before the event. “But ultimately for us, it’s about getting dollars and cents to these organizations that are fighting on behalf of people who don’t have anybody fighting for them.”
