Ken Corsbie, the doyen of Guyanese comedy, was back after ‘umpteen’ years abroad and ready to do battle again, ‘He-One’, two Saturdays ago onstage at the Umana Yana after a successful premiere just the night before across at Le Meridien Pegasus Hotel.

And, true to his word, that night’s repertoire would be a potpourri of all his works, from personal experiences to local and Caribbean folk, with a bit of stand-up comedy thrown in for good measure, part of his opening gambit was an hilarious account of how he came by his letters.

“Ah get meh PhD an’ meh BA right heah,” he said.

“Ah bin away; an’ ah is a Pot-hole Dodger.”

Which is why he is still to get used to driving in America, he said. He’s so accustomed being on the lookout for pot-holes, he sometimes forgets where he is, and would drive past important turnpikes.

So, ‘before long story’, he doesn’t drive at all.
Which reminded him of the first time he set foot in the United States, some 30-odd years ago, on a three-month cultural exchange; downloaded, like the ‘full-blooded West Indian Stereotype’ that he was.

Those days, he said, it wasn’t ‘JFK’ but Idlewilde Airport.

He’d just cleared his baggage, all 120 pounds of it, through customs, he said, when a ‘Red Cap’ (airline porters to those not familiar with the term) approached him offering to carry them for him.

Knowing what ‘Red Caps’ were like back home in Guyana, he politely declined the offer.

“I know ‘bout ‘Red Cap’ at Timehri Airport in Guyana,” he said. “A ‘Red Cap’ grab yuh bags in one taxi; yuh get shove in a next taxi, an’ yuh neva see yuh bags again.”

But fetching them proved more difficult than he anticipated.

“Ah under stress

Meh shoulder rippin’ off, but ah walking cool man

Tekkin’ it easy.”

If only he could reach the exit, he reasoned, he could always lean against the door with his shoulder so he could get outside where he was told he could get a taxi to take him wherever he wanted in New York

But this was not to be.

“Ah aimin’ fuh de door; leanin’ hard, when, jus’ six inches away, it open by i’self.”

It was his first encounter with an automatic door!

As he lay spread-eagled on the ground, his bags scattered every-which-way, he heard a chuckle, and looking up, saw this huge, John-Wayne-type fellow with a look on his face that said: “You’re not the first to come tumbling through these doors.”

It was the last straw!

“I quickly looked under my shoe-sole, and, muttering loudly, said: ‘Dese Yankees an’ they damn chewing gum’!”

This other one, which he swore was true and was so fresh, the ‘papers’ hadn’t gotten wind of it yet, had to do with a little boy who was so afraid of his parents, he begged the Police to put him in the custody of the West Indies Cricket team.

Perplexed, the policeman on duty asked him why.

“Dem don’ beat nobody,” he replied.

Then there were the three West Indians who tried to ‘pope’ the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. The ‘Trini’ turned up with a discus and was allowed in. So was the Bajan, who scavenged around and found a javelin.

Poor Guyanese; what could he take?

Just then, he noticed a roll of barbed wire, and, wrapping a few lengths around his hand, he turned up at the stadium.

“Fencing,” he told the security.

By this time, naked tears were openly coursing down the faces of many in the near packed to capacity audience.

He’s always had trouble with his name, Corsbie said. Most called him ‘Cr-a-a-s-bie’. Then, back when he hosted the Thursday night programme, ‘Nite-Ride’, on the then GBS (Guyana Broadcasting Service), some smart alec decided that ‘Cross-breed’ sounded better, so that stuck.

“And, they were right,” he said. “I am a cross-breed.”

As he says in his bio-data: “My father is half Chinese; half Venezuelan Amerindian; half Welsh; half African; half Trinidadian; and half Guyanese,” while his mother, who hails from Tobago, “is half Scottish; half Tobagonian; and half Guyanese.”

As for his grandchildren, “they toss in Portuguese, East Indian, Barbadian and Brazilian, ” which gives him every right “to tick off all the boxes in the US census form,” and which contradiction of logic he refers to as ‘Modern Mathematics’.

He is also quoted as saying at another forum that while his sister is Trinidadian, he has a brother who is Jamaican and yet another who holds a ‘Green-Card’, meaning that he is an American citizen.

“As for me,” he said, “I was born in Guyana; hold a Trinidad passport; and lived in Barbados for many years before coming to live in the United States.”

In a brief interview with the Sunday Chronicle after the show, which was a monumental success, about why he left Guyana at the height of his career in 1979, Corsbie said: “There comes a time in everybody’s situation, where you move on to something else, or you move on to what you feel is a broader, or a more intense, situation.”

In fact, Marc Matthews, with whom he had teamed up to become ‘Dem-Two’, had left, and so had “Henry Mootoo and the ‘All-Ah-We’ people,” meaning Mootoo, John Agard and pannist, Ras ‘Camo’ Williams, “so I needed to move on to something bigger.”

That something bigger was the founding of ‘The Theatre Information Exchange’, essentially an Association of Caribbean Drama Activists, in Barbados, with financing from the International American Foundation, a US funding Agency.

Why Barbados?
“I felt that if I wanted to be the coordinator of anything in the Caribbean, it was better to go to Barbados where it was more central and easier to get in and out.” Also, the University of the West Indies (UWI) had agreed to be his host, as was the arrangement with the Foundation that the funds should be administered by an agency of that caliber.

“And it worked,” he said, adding, “what it did was introduce the dramatists to one another. That’s the important thing in the Caribbean, because I see myself, notwithstanding being Guyanese, as a Caribbean person.”

At the end of his tenure, which lasted two years, he would eventually stay on another 15, finding work as a free-lance theatre consultant and performer, which afforded him the opportunity to travel the length and breadth of the Caribbean doing either one-man shows, directing some play or the other, or holding theatre workshops among a host of other theatre-related activities.

Then, in 1996, wanderlust again struck, and this time he would head for ‘the Big Apple’.

“I had to move on. Quite apart from getting married (for the second time), going up to America,” he said, “was another opening for me; another widening of the market of the type of things I could do, or needed to do. The Caribbean being what it is, a small place, there comes a time when you run out of the market, and the market runs out of you.”

These days, he does pretty much the same things he’s been doing all the years.

As he had said during a break in the show, “Storytelling is now a big thing. I am now known far and wide in America as a ‘Story-teller’.”

“The thing is,” he told Sunday Chronicle, “America is a very huge place; it has literally thousands of storytellers doing the type of things that I do in some ways.

“I’m unique simply because I have a niche market. Because I’m Caribbean; because I do Caribbean poetry; storytelling, both folk and personal, I can get jobs as I do, with places like say, the Caribbean Students’ Association,” which has a presence at such institutions like the University of Connecticut and NYU (New York University).

He also has a contract of sorts with a children’s library in Long Island, where he now resides, and would from time to time accept invitations to stand up comedy festivals, which are becoming quite popular these days.

Just last week, he said, there was one in Grenada, which he attended, and another is slated shortly for Los Angeles, in California, and yet another for next month in Winnipeg, Canada.

Asked whether what he makes is enough to live on comfortably, he said: “Well, almost.”

On second thoughts, he said: “Quite frankly, I don’t know at this point, even after seven years of marketing myself…. I could make a complete living here, were it not for my wife, who has a reasonably good job.”

To tell the truth, he said, had it not been for her, he would not have been able to go to ‘the States’ at all. “I would have had to stay in the Caribbean,” in Barbados perhaps, where, in his own words: “I was just barely making it.”

In ‘the States’, he said, “I get a lot more work than I ever got in the Caribbean,” and this is because of the four different audiences he is able to play to (adult, schools, universities and stand-up festivals).

Again, he said, “the Diaspora is huge.” So huge, “it’s bigger than any island and more available that all the islands put together. And that’s one of the problems of the Caribbean: They still have not solved their insularity.”

An athlete of note, Corsbie was not only recognised as the hurdles champion in both the West Indies and his native then British Guyana in 1959, but was also responsible for the founding of the Guyana Basketball Association, of which he was coach, manager and secretary for many years.

A trained BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Radio and Television Director, and British Council scholar, he is also credited with being Theatre Guild’s first Director.

This is in addition to being producer/director at the GBS and Director of Drama for many years with the Department of Culture.

Among his more noted works is a popular 13-part television series, ‘Caribbean Eye’, which explores cultural and social themes across the Caribbean.