But whereas there are many comics who can write a tight joke, there’s only one Katt Williams. Most comics would have at least used a transition to tie them together and build momentum. The remarkable part is that they are completely unconnected. The first 10 minutes of his new hour have maybe two good punch lines, and both are about chicken wings. The tepidness of his material here seems almost like a challenge, as if he’s saying: Watch how I can make even these jokes work. Williams has said he stopped performing in clubs and instead develops jokes in front of thousands of people. He pokes fun at Anthony Fauci and makes some half-baked jokes about Adam and Eve being incestuous. In his new special, which is not one of his better ones, his take on Joe Biden is that he’s old and the world war of the title is a vague battle between truth and lies that never entirely coheres into a complete thought.
His act is not about carefully honed jokes. Along with his live-wire physicality, this is what makes him the finest arena comic of the moment. His delivery has a rhythm, a quickening beat that, once you clue into it, can make anything funny. In a landscape filled with stand-ups straining to go against the grain, carving out brands as renegades, Williams is a genuine eccentric.īut his distinctiveness starts with his cadence, a swaggering high-pitched voice that evokes the flow of Easy-E more than it does any comic. In a recent interview with Arsenio Hall, Williams, a prolific performer, said his legacy would be not as the greatest comic, but as the most original.
It’s the kind of showmanship (not to mention punning) you can expect from Katt Williams. After a shot of the audience, a clever piece of misdirection by the 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. His previous specials have been just as cinematic, with Williams strutting in wearing a massive fur coat and flanked by beautiful women or walking through the crowd in a cape while a voice-over tells you his thoughts.īut his most spectacular introduction had to be from “Priceless” in 2014 when the curtain dropped to reveal a smoky stage with two women dancing on either side of a cage containing a lion. In “World War III,” his new hour of stand-up on Netflix, you first see him racing across the stage like Tom Cruise hustling to save the world. Katt Williams understands the importance of an entrance.
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