“I was insulted that they thought that after everything I’d been through in my life, I was just gonna throw in the towel and let cancer have its way.” “I didn’t think I was gonna die in a year,” Jones explained to me over Zoom just two months ago. But then something improbable happened: Jones kept on living. It should have been Jones’s swan song - a good, if understandably imperfect, hour balancing topical jokes about Jones’s condition with a series of observational riffs tackling everything from the injustice of police brutality to the incompetence of Subway. On June 2 of that year, Jones’s 32nd birthday, HBO aired his special, Burning the Light, to a smattering of fanfare and positive reviews. “You’re lying!” Jones bellowed at Ellen DeGeneres in disbelief, overjoyed at the reveal. The campaign went viral on social media, capturing the attention of Ellen producers, who invited Jones on the show twice: on March 15, 2016, to raise awareness of his Kickstarter, gift him $10,000, and call on networks to air his special, and on March 21 to surprise him with the news that HBO had signed on to do so. They set a goal to raise $5,000 so Jones could film a comedy special and immortalize his life’s work. In 2016, Jones’s friends Nicole and Mickey Blaine launched a Kickstarter campaign to change this. How unfair, it seemed, that he had put himself through this grueling exercise only to die before he had anything to show for it. In 2015, when Seattle-born comedian Quincy Jones, born Quami Wallen, was diagnosed with stage IV peritoneal mesothelioma and told by doctors he had one year to live, he was best known for his peculiar choice of stage name (he shares no relation with the famous music producer) and for performing 1,000 shows in a single year to strengthen his chops as a comedian. Quincy Jones in his 2016 HBO comedy special, Burning the Light.
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