she needs to go out of the country to perform. I don’t think anyone is looking for Kathy Griffin’s special. “Where’s Kathy Griffin’s special?” he says. He cites Colin Kaepernick and Kathy Griffin as examples. We don’t need that.”Īs we’ve seen recently, when someone speaks out, they tend to be watched rather than followed. So maybe if it seemed like I could have said meaner things about him - come on man. This is not something we can fix - this is something we gotta deal with. Vilifying the guy is not going to get us anywhere. “If he says he wants to make America great again, what period of time was he thinking was great again? 1950. “This is a 70-year-old white guy,” he says. So if Williams doesn’t go totally Eminem on Trump, there’s a good reason. At one point in the special, Williams says, “Trump don’t give a fuck” and “We saw what it was like to have a reasonable leader in office - now it’s time to see what it’s like to have a motherfucking bully in charge.” His instincts tell him it’s time to be cautious. One of those lines has been drawn with hot Cheeto, and he’s made a conscious decision not to cross it. While he admits his love for comedy has no color lines, his new special, like previous ones, reaffirms that America has drawn lots of lines. I thought that everybody was delivering the same aim at the end of it.” So I was as well-versed on white comedians as I was on Black comedians. And because I’m from Ohio, I enjoyed all comedy. I loved to laugh and I loved that’s what it made people do. “I had so much respect for comedy before I learned it was a vocation,” he explains. Part of the reason his standup hustle is so successful is that his love for the work has never separated comics into categories. If you read that list of comics and thought, “Hey, all those guys are white,” you are correct. I thought I had to keep up with those guys.” I didn’t know that everybody wasn’t those guys. “I was put immediately in circumstances with Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, Richard Jeni, Bobby Slayton, and all of these giants who were doing standup. “When I was in the open-mic process, I wasn’t put around up-and-coming comics,” he says. Because of his God-given charisma, he was always working alongside the headliners. Luckily for Williams, he didn’t start off like most comedians frequenting open mics on the weeknights. “I struggled in standup, I never lost the love, because there were so many great comedians that I learned from,” he adds. Williams says he has a lot of people to thank for that. After two decades of touring and releasing several hard-to-forget specials, it’s clear he knows how to work his magic with the audience. I just keep going out each time with a brand-new set and a brand-new determination to be a better comic. It’s predictably self-effacing, yet there is something earnest happening when a widely loved comic tells you it needs to be better. Last year Norm Macdonald told us he didn’t like his Netflix special much. Not being your own biggest fan is a trend with comedians. I’m never going to be my biggest fan,” he says. And if you understand that about me you understand a lot about me. Having just wrapped his parts in Two Minutes of Fame and the Meet the Blacks sequel, Williams has been busy. “I think Chappelle put out 26 specials this year, so it’s really nice to be able to slide some mediocre comedy in,” he tells the Daily Dot. Recorded in front of a sold-out theater in Jacksonville, Florida, in late 2017, after a successful national tour under the same name, Great America is Williams’ state of the union. As a 20-year veteran of standup, his routines have become synonymous with a brutally honest Black perspective. In Katt Williams’ new Netflix special, Great America, “it’s fucked up” is his mantra and it also describes America’s state of affairs.īut this is nothing new to Williams.
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