Katt Williams understands the importance of an entrance.
In ‘World War III’, his new hour of stand-up on Netflix, you see him racing across the stage for the first time as Tom Cruise in a hurry to save the world. His earlier specials were just as cinematic, with Williams parading in a huge fur coat and flanked by beautiful women or walking through the crowd in a cape while a voiceover tells you his thoughts.
But his most spectacular introduction had to be from “Priceless” in 2014, when the curtain fell to reveal a smoky stage with two dancing women on either side of a cage containing a lion. Not a sleepy one. This beast was jumpy. After an audience shot, a clever feat of deception by director Spike Lee, the focus returned to the stage where one of the women opened a cage door slowly enough to let your mind wander to worst-case scenarios. Then another Katt stepped forward.
It’s the kind of showmanship (not to mention puns) you’d expect from Katt Williams. In a recent interview with Arsenio Hall, Williams, a prolific artist, said his legacy would not be the best comic, but the most original. He has a case. In a landscape of stand-ups who struggle to go against the grain, carving out brands like renegades, Williams is a true eccentric.
What other superstar would open his first special on Netflix, a famous global platform, featuring 10 minutes of local footage about Jacksonville, Florida, the city he performed in? Or say with such conviction that a culture of cancellation does not exist. (“I’m on my fifth second chance,” he once joked.) Or he’s arguing so much with lovable peers. He called out Cedric the Entertainer and Tiffany Haddish, but his worst feud is with Kevin Hart. The content of their conflict is hard to figure out, but style-wise, Williams always comes across with more flair: He once used a video any boxing promoter would appreciate to challenge Hart to a comedic fight for $5 million.
But its distinctiveness begins with its cadence, a boastful high-pitched voice that evokes the flow of Easy-E more than any comic. His delivery has a rhythm, an accelerating beat that, once you get the hang of it, can make anything funny. Together with his live-wire physicality, this is what makes him the best arena comic of the moment. His act isn’t about carefully crafted jokes. In his new special, which isn’t one of his better, his take on Joe Biden is that he’s old and that the world war of the title is a vague battle between truth and lies that never quite blend into a complete thought. He makes fun of Anthony Fauci and makes some half-baked jokes about Adam and Eve being incestuous. Williams has said he stopped performing in clubs and instead jokes in front of thousands of people. You can tell.
The lukewarmness of his material almost seems like a challenge here, as if saying, look how I can make even these jokes work.
The first 10 minutes of his new hour may have two good punches, and both are about chicken wings. The remarkable thing is that they are completely separate from each other. Most comics would have used at least a transition to tie them together and build momentum. But while there are many comics that can write a tight joke, only one is Katt Williams. He throws ideas out there and then, through the power of charisma and performance chops, makes them amusing in a way no one else could.
In the first chicken wing joke, the lineup leans into his preacher voice, taking on a tone of religious solemnity to explain that the world is in serious trouble, convincing you that he’s about to go deep before turning to a punch line. who breaks the news with apocalyptic exasperation: “Taco Bell sells chicken wings.”
In the other chicken wing bit, the arrangement and punch line are almost secondary to what comes in between, which he likes to stretch: he repeats lines like incantations, asks the audience to imagine a chicken, imitates a chicken, and throws disclaimers (“Look, I’m not a farmer”) and common ground. Part of what makes this so much fun is the sense of improvisation he creates, the way he responds to the audience reaction, but it’s also how quickly Williams goes from silly to serious. As wonderfully wacky as his chicken impression may be, what’s really unusual about Williams is his gravity. Even in his funniest moments, he has an intensity that makes comedy dramatic. Donald Glover saw this clearly when he cast Williams in a dramatic role in “Atlanta”, for which he won an Emmy.
In a typical special, the comic spends time warming up the crowd, digs into racing and racism, pokes fun at the president occupying the Oval Office, and tells some elaborate sex jokes. Williams, who perspires as much as any comic book has ever given birth, attacks sex jokes with his whole body. In one of my favorite bits from “It’s Pimpin’ Pimpin'” (2008), he describes his signature sexual move as an attempt-everything maneuver, a kind of one-man Rube Goldberg device.
Last year, attending my first arena show since the pandemic, I saw Williams at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, doing much of the same material as in his new special. Live it hit harder. That may be because no comedian is better suited to remind you of the joys of laughing together.
Like few other comics alive, Williams knows how to turn a huge crowd into a family affair. He feasted on us, then pressed buttons, gushing about having successfully put on a show of this magnitude during a pandemic: “They said it couldn’t happen in New York,” Williams said. Of course nobody said that, but it felt good to hear and we all cheered.
Katt Williams may seem uncomfortable with the collegiate talk about show business, appear shy in interviews and seem a little uncomfortable hosting a roast Flavor Flav. (In a later special, he did a really funny and investigative bit about feeling involved in the racism of some of the jokes written for him.) But onstage alone, talking to a crowd, he’s as smooth as but can. A seductive presence, he has that ineffable quality of stardom: a supernatural ability to connect.
