Knowing comedy means respecting Katt Williams’ greatness and understanding that all his umbrage boils down to one irritant: laziness. For more than three decades Williams has been grinding it out on the road and filling arenas, holding nothing back verbally and physically regardless of audience size.
He attacks his jokes with his whole body, lending conviction to nearly everything he says. That made his appearance on the Jan. 3 episode of ESPN correspondent Shannon Sharpe’s podcast "Club Shay Shay" the first not-to-be-missed internet drop of 2024.
Over nearly three hours Williams fired enough shots at other major names to make folks sit up and take notice, punching up each statement by theatrically grinning at the camera or taking measured sips of cognac between thoughts and “there, I said it” declarations.
His main targets are familiar to most TV viewers. Cedric the Entertainer stole one of “his very best jokes,” Williams alleges. Steve Harvey supposedly swiped bits from him too and lied about why he stopped doing stand-up. He quit, Williams claims, “because he got in a comedy battle called The Championship of Stand-up Comedy with one Katt Williams in Detroit in front of 10,000 people and lost.”
Kevin Hart, he said, is an industry plant who never paid his dues in Hollywood and built his career on Williams’ sloppy seconds, roles Williams says he passed on.
Other spilled tea is even more defiant, including his allegation that Hollywood “canceled me for talking about Harvey Weinstein before the thing came out. But he offered to suck my penis in front of all my people at my agency.”
“This is the reckoning,” he bellows at one point, gleefully before raising his glass. “2024!” Sweetest Taboo was indeed in rare form.
A week after Williams’ conversation with Sharpe the episode is still racking up clicks; as of Thursday night it was closing in on 44 million views. A brief YouTube clip would consider that audience to be a whopping success. This tête-à-tête's runtime approaches “Killers of the Flower Moon” territory.
Williams’ braggadocio is glorious, and enough of his claims are questionable to let a person know he’s best considered as a master of telling tall tales in games of he said-he said. Woven throughout the bluster, however, are several accurate observations hinting at why so many of the top stand-up specials served on streaming platforms feel stale.
Part of what Williams says we already know, which is that fame in the stand-up world is related less to the material than who the gatekeepers want to push to the fore. Netflix, Amazon and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns Max, are the comedy world kingmakers, awarding some performers millions and others a relative pittance, as Mo’Nique revealed years ago.
Still, exposure is exposure. Netflix is a boon to performers like Taylor Tomlinson, whose introduction to its massive subscriber base contributed to her becoming the first woman to host a late-night talk show on CBS. (Tomlinson’s “After Midnight” debuts Tuesday, Jan. 16 at 12:37 a.m. ET/PT.) But the company has boosted fewer Black comedians who aren’t Hart, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle or their friends.
Granted, there are other reasons Williams hasn’t crossed over into film and TV as easily as those other names. He doesn’t play the industry game like they do, compromising his image or integrity to expand his filmography. (In developing Money Mike, his character in “Friday After Next,” he demanded the studio remove a prison rape scene insisting, “Rape is never funny.”) Williams also has a double-digit arrest record, which he mentions several times throughout the episode and factors into his reasons that Hollywood has rejected him.
But what he says about Harvey and Cedric the Entertainer, both of whom have regular TV gigs, and Hart, who has a growing library of stand-up specials and movies on Netflix, is also true of the streaming service gatekeepers redefining what is funny and what isn’t by surfacing a select group of names time and again.
“It’s a consortium. They rock with who they rock with and they don’t with who they don’t,” Williams said.
This is not exactly breaking news. However, it explains why, for example, five-time Golden Globes host Ricky Gervais received the inaugural Globe for best stand-up last week for a special, “Armageddon,” which is basically a quilt of recycled bits and years-old throwbacks.
This type of mediocrity has become standard in part because the demand is high for fresh streaming content, and huge names are attention magnets.
But if the quality seems to be plummeting, Williams offers a theory in his story about his work ethic.
“When I got into the craft, I thought it was my obligation to make sure that I kept writing new material so much that it forced these comedians to stop doing the set they've been doing for 10 years and keep writing some new stuff,” he said.
“And I knew that if I could get that to take on, that most of these bums will have to just quit comedy because they can't keep up. They're not gonna keep writing an hour’s worth of material. I've written an hour’s worth of material 19 times. They're not gonna do it. Why? Because they're not creative writers.”
Well, they’re still here. They’re just not working as hard. Gervais' “Armageddon,” a collection of “woke culture” buzzwords copied from X and pasted into a flaccid rant, proves it.
Offensive material is disagreeable to the affronted party, but even a wounded critic might concede when such jokes are successful and exciting. And let me establish something straightaway – I am not easily offended. Inspiringly constructed crude jokes are as much my jam as clean comedy that’s equally or more creative. Gervais offers neither in “Armageddon,” only a rehash of quips about trans people, the disabled, little people and CRT. Then there’s this:
In Africa, a baby can be born in a mud hut, there's a lion outside, it’s covered in blood because they can't wash it — they've got no water — oh, and it's already got AIDS. Now, by the time that joke goes on Netflix, it'll be nuanced. There’ll be an underlying satirical point, I’ll claim. Until then, all I've got is, "Baby's got AIDS!" I know that it's funny. I just have to work out why. Leave it with me, leave me it with me.
Again, the anti-Black ignorance in this passage is so old hat that reacting with anger would be a waste. The more dominant emotion is bafflement. Gervais attempts to land the gag with something along the lines of, If you're offended, you're an idiot because the characters in this joke don’t exist. Which still doesn’t make it qualify as funny. Or a joke.
Williams’ greatest claim to fame may be his legendarily inspired 2006 rant about Michael Jackson. Even some of the pop star's biggest devotees can't deny that it killed. In “Armageddon” Gervais mentions Jackson because his name is an easy giggle trigger – and, though he may not know or acknowledge it, because Katt set and slew the best joke nearly 18 years ago, and comics have been grasping to claim shards of that energy since.
My bias is showing here, I'll grant you. Many find Gervais to be a brilliant, writer, pointing to "The Office.” But that was a long time ago; stand-up is a different beast from series TV, as Williams and other greats prove time and again by honing a joke to perfection, delivering it and sharpening the next great joke after that. Williams tells Sharpe that he spends time exploring each major city where he performs, making each performance comedically bespoke in some way. (The opener of 2018's "Great America" exemplifies this.) Gervais in a 2019 New York Times piece discusses at length the amount of time he spends online collecting material and ideas, which is telling.
In the spirit of Williams’ opening 2024 with bracingly unfiltered admissions, I hope this “reckoning” of his wakes up those who have been coasting on brainless cruelty without placing much effort into innovation.
If people are laughing, why bother? Here’s a reason. A week after Williams' "Club Shay Shay" episode debuted, a comedy AI called Dudesy dropped an hour-long set impersonating the late George Carlin, who died 15 years ago, called “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead.”
Listening to the set, it’s a fairly accurate approximation of Carlin’s style, humor, cadence and even his voice, delivering his takes on the absurdities of religion, mass shootings and social media and eventually turning its digital knives on itself by skewering the concept of artificial intelligence. It isn’t terrible. But despite Dudesy listening to all of George Carlin’s material and doing his best “to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude,” it isn’t vintage Carlin by a longshot.
The quality that stands out most, though, is that it’s passable to the average person who’s become accustomed to the lowered creativity passed off as excellence.
“There’s one line of work that is most threatened by AI — one job that is most likely to be completely erased because of artificial intelligence: stand-up comedy,” joked the digital Carlin impersonator. “I know what all the stand-up comics across the globe are saying right now: ‘I’m an artist, and my art form is too creative, too nuanced, too subtle to be replicated by a machine. No computer program can tell a fart joke as good as me.'” Then it proceeds to generate a fart joke one doubts Gervais could manage.
One popular Netflix stand-up special shows the faintest signs its creator may yet wean himself off cheap cruelty, and I’m as surprised as anyone to make this observation given his recent track record. But Chappelle’s “The Dreamer,” refrains from being as wholly antagonistic and downward punching as previous sets, although he can’t resist entirely regressing to exhausted trans jokes, shots at the disabled and a light ha-ha referencing sexual assault. Much of his material is also self-involved, processing his spectator experience of Chris Rock being slapped by Will Smith at the Oscars and Chappelle's own attack at The Hollywood Bowl.
Incredibly, though, when Chappelle retells the part about trying to recover from his Hollywood Bowl set by lightening the mood with a transphobic punchline, he frames it as a lazy response, admitting he was booed for it. (His closing bit pays an affectionate tribute to Lil Nas X, demonstrates thoughtful writing and is quite funny.)
Williams admits to Sharpe that he’s been booed, too. “I don't think any comedian has ever been booed unnecessarily, either . . . That's supposed to be used as a learning experience. Most comedians don't get booed enough.” Audiences, take that to heart. Be freer with your boos if you want better comedy, and give Williams the applause he’s due for setting the record straight.
