WATCH: ‘Insecure’ star Yvonne Orji makes her momma – and Nigeria – proud in HBO comedy special

New HBO comedy special Momma, I Made It! could not have come at a better time for Insecure star Yvonne Orji, who plays Molly on the show.

Molly is perhaps the show’s most polarising character, and the most recent season of the show left viewers unsure about how to feel about her – and unsure about how to feel about Orji by extension.

This may be due to the fact that not many of the show’s viewers know Orji as anything other than a serious actress despite the former med-student getting her start in comedy, having opened for Chris Rock during his 2018 Tamborine tour.

A journey that she hilariously chronicles in the part-documentary, part-comedy special that alternates between scenes of her keeping the crowd at the Howard Theatre in stitches with her performance, and scenes filmed during a visit to her parents’ home in Nigeria.

“Both celebrating and poking fun at her strict formative Nigerian-American upbringing, Orji shares her unique journey from pre-med to comedy, talks about parental pressures to get married, and takes us along to Lagos to meet her family and friends,” said ShowMax in a statement.

Orji’s path to comedy was a textbook case of destiny calling. From birth, she explains, it was understood that she would become a doctor, and she did, in fact, complete her bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s in public health. But she believes God had other plans for her. While studying for her master’s, Orji entered the Miss Nigeria in America pageant, not realising she would need a talent for the contest.

“When you’re a child of immigrants,” she says in HBO’s Backstories, “you’re not allowed to have talents. Your only talent is just to get straight A’s. So, I was like, ‘God, I need a lifeline,’ and, loud as day, I heard the voice of God say, ‘Do comedy’.”

“And I was like, ‘No.’ ‘Cause what? Am I funny? Then I heard the Holy Spirit say, ‘What else do you have?’ I said, ‘I got nothing.’ So He said, ‘Well, one day you’re going to trust me, or you’re not.’”

In 2015 she moved to New York to pursue comedy and acting, and started doing stand-up the following year. When the role of Molly came along, she landed the part without an agent or any real acting experience.

She has since appeared in the box office hit Night School, starring alongside Kevin Hart and Tiffany Haddish; guest-starred on A Black Lady Sketch Show (co-executive produced by Orji’s Insecure co-star Issa Rae); co-hosted the critically acclaimed podcast Jesus and Jollof alongside New York Times bestseller Luvvie Ajayi; and penned the upcoming book Bamboozled by Jesus: How God Tricked Me into the Life of My Dreams.

Momma, I Made It! was recorded before a live audience in Washington, DC, during her Lagos to Laurel tour, and gives the audience an intimate, hilarious look at what being Nigerian-American means to Orji – from her international haggling addiction to having her phone tapped by her parents as a kid, to the fine line, as she puts it, between cursing people out and putting curses on them.

Taking to the streets of Lagos and Ihiala, Orji gives us a behind-the-scenes tour of the people, places, and culture that built her sense of humour. Along the way, she introduces us to her proud, loving, highly opinionated parents, her brothers and uncles, comedian Chioma “Chigul” Omeruah, DJ Obi, and social enterprise and tech exec Tosin Durotoye.

“I wanted to include Nigeria in the show because there’s no way I could tell my story without showing you where I came from,” she told The New York Times.

“People try to compare Lagos to New York City, and I’m like, Lagos is New York multiplied by 25, bruh. It’s like Times Square, filled with brown people hustling — entrepreneurs, movers and shakers, traffic. Plus 20 million more people.”

“I think it’s important to normalize access to African countries where everything isn’t charactered or fictionalized,” added Orji.

“It’s not Wakanda; it’s not x, y, and z. It’s like this. You know, we have beautiful homes, and we have dirt roads. We have super successful people and poor people. It wasn’t to show a perfect version of what Nigeria is, it was to show a real version of it and to normalize what the people look like and sound like. Because I think that’s how we actually make progress.”

And perhaps that is why the best part of the entire comedy special is her effortless switch between pidgin English, a Nigerian English accent and her American accent.

Watch the trailer for Momma, I Made It! below:

Click here to watch Momma I Made it on ShowMax.

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