Meghan Markle (or Meghan Sussex, if you ask her nowadays) has been open about the racism she’s faced as a royal. While she’s been heavily criticized ever since she married Prince Harry (and even more so since they did their bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey), Whoopi Goldberg still got a British audience to laugh at jokes about the public’s poor reaction to Markle’s mixed race.
On this morning’s episode of The View, the co-hosts discussed a comedy club in London that banned audience members with cosmetic fillers after comedians complained that their frozen faces made it difficult to tell if they were laughing.
“You can have a frozen face and still laugh. You can hear people laughing. Perhaps it isn’t the audience,” Goldberg said, hinting that the lack of laughter could simply be because the comedians aren’t that funny.
Joy Behar, who has spent decades in stand-up comedy, added that different audiences sometimes have different reactions.
“Audiences come in with one personality sometimes, as if they had commiserated with each other before they got there,” she said. “Some of them will laugh, some of them won’t laugh.”
“I remember doing a set in England, in London, when Ronald Reagan was president. And I did a joke about the Queen — radio silence,” Behar continued. “Then I did a joke about Reagan and they laughed. They didn’t have fillers, they were just annoyed with me.”
Goldberg said she had “the same experience” around the time Prince Harry married Markle.
“They kept saying, ‘She’s a Black woman,'” Goldberg recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, y’all are just worried that you’re gonna wake up and the kid’s gonna be Black.'”
After a momentary gasp from the audience, Goldberg said they quickly began laughing “because it hadn’t occurred to them.”
This, however, had occurred to someone in the royal family. During their 2021 sit-down with Winfrey, Markle claimed there were “concerns and conversations about how dark [their son Archie’s] skin might be when he was born,” though she refused to reveal who the concerns came from as it would be too “damaging.”
The View airs on weekdays at 11/10c on ABC.