Comedian Nicole Byer, of 'Nailed It!' fame, recounts racist experience in Appleton

Editor's note: This story was updated Friday night with a response from Adam Norwest of Bark Entertainment.

Comedian Nicole Byer recently joined the “Dinner’s on Me” podcast hosted by Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and spoke about an experience she had with racism while performing in Appleton.

While Byer did not say at which venue the experience took place, or when, she described the interaction during an episode posted Tuesday. She said her opening act, also known as a featurer, was subjected to a racist remark, shouted by an audience member.

"During my show, I had a white host, a Black featurer, and the crowds were so unruly,” she said, as she recounted the story. She said that at one point, her featurer was onstage and a member of the audience made a racist remark directed at the color of the featurer's skin. Stunned by what just happened, she explained to Ferguson that she looked at an employee for acknowledgement of the situation.

“I walked out on the floor and looked at a server and I was like, ‘You’re not gonna say anything?’” Byer continued, adding that nothing was done.

Byer explained that she "will never go back to Appleton."

This isn't the first time Byer's referenced an experience in Appleton, either. In her 2021 Netflix special "Nicole Byer: BBW (Big Beautiful Weirdo)," she also described visiting the city.

"I also got to go to Appleton, Wisconsin," she said in the Emmy-nominated special. "Oh boy, what a cute name for a town – Appleton, Wisconsin. And then you get there and they’re like, ‘We tricked you. We’re trash.’" She further clarified that she wasn't suggesting everyone at her shows was bad, but that a lot of people were on their "worst" behavior.

Byer sold out five shows in Appleton over Memorial Day weekend in May 2019 at Skyline Comedy Club, according to Adam Norwest, of Bark Entertainment. Norwest says he was not there during her shows, and none of the staff he's spoken to since the news broke remember the interaction Byer describes, though Norwest says staff do remember people in the crowd shouting "Nailed It!" in reference to the TV show Byer hosted.

"She even took a silly picture with the staff on stage after the last show," he wrote to The Appleton Post-Crescent Friday afternoon. The photo was posted to the club's Instagram.

"I think it is very sad and unfortunate that Nicole was made to feel uncomfortable in Appleton," Norwest wrote. "Racism is not welcome at Skyline, and I hope that if we have an incident in the future it is handled immediately."

The Post-Crescent on Thursday and Friday reached out a representative of Byer, but did not receive a reply by the end of the day Friday. It is not clear if she visited the city on other occasions, or performed elsewhere.

On the podcast, Byer also said she learned after-the-fact that Appleton was a "sundown town" — a place where nonwhite people were excluded from remaining in town after sunset. According to research by now-deceased historian and author James Loewen, Appleton was likely one of these towns, alongside Janesville and Mequon.

According to census data he and his team collected, Appleton had fewer than 20 Black residents in the 1870 through 1910 censuses, and fewer than five in 1920, 1930 (when it had zero Black residents), 1940, 1950 and 1960. In 2020's census, people who identified themselves as Black, alone, accounted for less than 3% of the city's total population.

Contact Abra Richardson at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: Comedian Nicole Byer recounts racist experience she had in Appleton