Kountry Wayne: A Woman’s Prayer 2023 Movie Review
DeWayne Colley broke out first on social media in 2014 posting funny situational bits on Facebook and YouTube. By 2021, going by Kountry Wayne, he’d earned himself a slot on Variety’s “10 Comics To Watch” list based off of performances on MTV’s Wild ‘N Out with Nick Cannon and a starring role in the 2021 BET film, Holiday Heartbreak. Since then, he has co-hosted a clip show with Kym Whitley on BET+, I Love Us, and starred in a movie, Strange Love. And he has been touring theaters performing stand-up and releasing his first book (both titled “Help Is On The Way”). He’s got 3.5 million Instagram followers, too. In all, he said in a new Barstool Sports podcast that he brings in between $600,000-$700,000 per month!
For his debut comedy special on Netflix, directed by Jeff Tomsic (Tag, plus the most recent specials from Bert Kreischer and Norm Macdonald), Wayne jokes about having 10 kids by age 35, dealing with the multiple mothers of his kids, and what it’s like for him to be single now. The title, A Woman’s Prayer, comes from a routine in which he claims men cannot cheat on women because they have direct communication with God, among other reasons.
He gets right to work addressing his domestic situation as a 35-year-old father of 10. His excuse? “I couldn’t pull out,” later adding: “My last little baby came out with a Plan B pill in her hand.” Wayne tags this baby-making bit with a quick aside about claims of an 11th baby from a former high-school fling, notable to him not for whether or not he’s the father, but for the fact that the now-14-year-old’s mother has transitioned from a she to a he, leading Wayne to wonder who’s going to pay child support? Before you can get worked up one way or another about that, though, he has segued to talking about his kids and yours, and not misleading kids into thinking they’re all going to be superstars. When anyone wants to praise Wayne for having so many children, he demurs, saying he paid one woman $500 to get an abortion, but she had the baby. Which lets Wayne look at that son sometimes and think:“Boy, you don’t even know. I had a hit out on you.” And pressed with a self-imposed hypothetical where he’d have to choose being raped or having his son killed, he admits he wouldn’t do anything for the sake of his children.
As a single guy with 10 kids from multiple women, Wayne’s also got some opinions to share about cheating. Namely: Don’t cheat! Why not? Because God listens to “a woman’s prayer,” and because she’ll find you out. How? Wayne nimbly acts out trying to hide his infidelity during a hotel room FaceTime call, then later by catching himself on another woman’s iPhone during sex and not knowing well enough to stop, and then by faking having a stroke to try to change the subject once he’s caught.
Wayne enjoys using his face, his whole body, the microphone and the cord, and the floor to get physical in bringing his jokes to life. That’s true whether the topic is his preference for natural breasts instead of implants on women, trying to avoid the warning lights and noises on your car, or the expressions of a car dealer trying to deal with you when you have horrible credit.
The most engaging story, however, comes near the end, where Wayne talks about how he made a living after high school but before making it in comedy. “I can you the truth now. I was selling drugs the whole time,” he said. “Me and my daddy sold drugs from 2010 to 2016.” How he got tangled up in dealing weed, and the moment he knew he needed out of that game, are both revelatory and at once also telling about the personal predicaments Wayne found himself in before finding a funnier way out of them.
Precisely halfway through his debut hour, Kountry Wayne asks his audience if they believe in Jesus. Many applaud. But even if they’re not on board already, he jokes he’s not concerned because he already has their money.
But he’s no savior, and he jokes he knows he’s no Jesus Christ, claiming he would’ve done the opposite of what Jesus did during his crucifixion. And his comedy isn’t exactly in tune with Christ’s teachings. Whereas Christ kept strangers from stoning an adulteress by asking them if they were without sin, Kountry Wayne suggests not calling women whores or bitches because the winds of karma will come back and give those traits to your daughters. His belief that men cannot out-cheat women because “coochie run the game” isn’t exactly novel, though it’s also not exactly in the Bible, either.
He notes that his grandmother worried that his comedy pursuits might get him cancelled. Although he doesn’t define what cancelling might mean, he does note that his material making fun of his Uncle Richard for having AIDS and cooking the Thanksgiving meal, or later for giving out communion, certainly won’t make his grandmother proud. He’s a bit less worried about upsetting the community by speaking about Pastor Williams, just because he’s “got the stankest breath in America!”
In a sign of how confident he is for someone making his global streaming debut as a headlining stand-up comedian, Wayne casually acknowledges that he pays $15,000 a month to both the mother of his child, as well as to his ex-wife. And Pastor Williams knows enough to already have tried to peer pressure the comedian into giving $100,000 to the church.
At one point, he stops to ask the crowd: “How many of y’all been following me since day one, when I first started on Facebook?” Now that he’s living in a different tax bracket and swimming in the big pool of Netflix, he’s about to have a lot more followers.
