Live with The Breakfast Club https://t.co/NMRtvBE1vT
— Mo'Nique Worldwide (@moworldwide) February 22, 2018
As Mo’Nique continues to make the rounds to explain her call for a Netflix boycott, she stopped by “The Breakfast Club” Thursday, Feb. 22 to confront Charlamagne Tha God over him giving her “Donkey of the Day.”
Back in January, Charlamagne poked holes in Mo’Nique’s comparison to Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock, who were offered multi-million dollar Netflix comedy special deals compared to her $500,000 offer. The radio host said Rock, Chappelle and Amy Schumer have been active recently with tours and movies. Plus, he also listed other comics who best Mo’Nique in her declaration that she is “the most decorated comedian alive.”
After she and husband-manager Sydney Hicks (via phone) recapped the numbers and reasoning behind her call to action, Mo’Nique, who only referred to Charlamagne by his given name of Lenard McKelvey, emphasized women’s equality.
“What happens is, when you’re basing off of what you’re assuming,” she says at the 9:05 mark, “And then you give me a title of Donkey of the Day … Is your mother still alive? … And you’re from what city in South Carolina? … Moncks Corner, South Carolina. And if I was to call your mother or your grandmother would they tell me stories of inequality that they had to deal with? … So would your mother be a donkey? Would your grandmother be a donkey?”
Charlamange answered all the questions in the affirmative and Mo’Nique said she needed him to explain how she got the Donkey of the Day title because “you’re going off of what I assume.”
“We must then explain it to our community because we know how poisonous it can be when we put things out but we can’t back it up, we just say it.”
Charlamange agreed that Black women are “underappreciated and undervalued,” but noted the Netflix issue is more individualized.
Still, Hicks and Mo’Nique questioned why there hasn’t been a Black female comedian who has scored a multimillion-dollar deal like Schumer, Rock or Chappelle. The comic went on to name the Queens of Comedy, the Black comedians who “were the only female group — Black, white, Asian, Latin — to sell out consecutively around this country.”
She later struck down the idea that her crusade was an individual issue by remarking about Viola Davis’ recent comment that she be paid equally to her peers, like Meryl Streep.
“What that says is that you don’t know the history of the business that you’re in,” Mo’Nique continues. “And you sit behind this microphone and you try to be the guru of Black culture. I’m gonna need you to know the history of us before you begin to label us. And once you know the history, you know I’m not saying anything unique, brother.”
