To us, he’s Mr Mariah Carey. But across the Pond, Nick Cannon has been holding his own as a comedian for years.
And what’s more, he hones it every week joking with Piers Morgan as the host of America’s Got Talent.
Cannon has gone back to his standup roots this summer, with a US-wide tour, which he kicked off at the Playboy Comedy Club at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas last week.
The supercool hotel - which is the resort of choice for countless celebs on their trips to Vegas - is where he and Mariah held their one year anniversary bash last year. So it was only appropriate that most of his set revolves around married life.
Even before the gig, he announced: “I’ve been holding my tongue for a while, and I just celebrated my two year anniversary, so it’s time to go out there and start talking.”
And talk he does. He tells us that even he wouldn’t have believed that he’d married Mariah Carey. That they sit in bed together eating popcorn, watching America’s Got Talent. That he cleans the house using her album covers as dustpans.
He even lets slip that, like Katie Holmes dreaming of marrying Tom Cruise as a child, his number one teenage crush was Mariah.
And her perfectly coiffed image takes a battering as he describes her smearing her face with nightcream before she goes to bed.
The set seems more rehearsed than improvised, but Cannon knows where the laughs are, and he gets every one.
His weekly rounds of banter with Piers Morgan on America’s Got Talent have obviously kept him on his toes.
The women in the audience adore his every mention of his wife, and the men enjoy his impression of a henpecked husband.
It’s not all light - he ends the set with a terrifying account of a gig he played in Tennessee, which ended in racial abuse.
But even in the darkest subject matter, he gets the laughs.
By the end of the show, Cannon has achieved the impossible - leaving the audience with the impression that Mariah Carey is a normal woman.
You have to wonder: does she know what he’s saying about her every night across America?
If she does, underneath the fearsome reputation, she must have a pretty good sense of humour.
Because on this tour, the jokes are on her.
Source: The News of The World