The stand-up comic has a long resume featuring numerous forms of (largely pimp-based) humor — film and TV highlights include “First Sunday,” “Wild ‘n Out” and “The Boondocks” — but despite his onstage persona, Williams struck a decidedly thoughtful, low-key tone during his recent conversation with Express, making exactly one joke. So, we talked about books.
» EXPRESS: Where does your fascination with pimping come from?
» WILLIAMS: I like the fact that it’s remained consistent all the way through, as the oldest profession — the mindset required on both ends of it — the teamwork involved and the benefit at the end. I’ve studied the story from a lot of different angles. It keeps changing for me. It keeps getting on a different level.
» EXPRESS: You’ve adopted enough kids to start a basketball team — with subs. How did that come about?
» WILLIAMS: It’s kinda redemption: If you do bad in your life, you try and do some good things. You try to do the best that you can. I started that prior to getting famous. It was something I needed to do. And it turned out to be a good situation for the kids and for me. It changed me.
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» EXPRESS: You have any little-known facts about “The Boondocks” you’d like to share with our readers?
» WILLIAMS: [Creator] Aaron Magruder‘s one of the most underrated black men in entertainment. He’s a very clever guy. To be able to do the type of show that he does, on the level that he does it and to be able to breach so many hard-hitting topics — and still make it funny and bring in so many different voices, it’s just a credit to his skill. In most scenarios, you have an entire group of people that labor to try and get a quarter as funny as what this guy does by himself. I don’t think that’s known widely.
» EXPRESS: Like how “The Simpsons” are done by a whole team of people.
» WILLIAMS: Yeah, most scenarios that you go into that are of the quality of his show, it’s due to a whole operation. This guy is the real deal.
» EXPRESS: With the never-ending controversy over the “n-word,” and some venues trying to ban it, how do you foresee that affecting your act?
» WILLIAMS: Well, I don’t. I don’t think words are something that you can erase. There’s lots of bad words. Some of the opinions I have are not the opinions other people have. That doesn’t mean one side is right and one side is wrong.
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» EXPRESS: You like go-go music?
» WILLIAMS: Yeah. My first introduction to it was actually there. It really caught me off-guard. I wasn’t expecting it. I never could understand why it hadn’t caught on. I just remember that being the first time I’d ever seen it in the club. I was just shell-shocked. And everybody was with it and everybody knew everything. I felt like I was outside of the country [laughs]. ‘Cause you don’t see instruments and stuff, you know, just pop up.
» EXPRESS: So you’d never heard of it until you happened to see it at a club?
» WILLIAMS: Yeah, I wasn’t familiar with it at all. I was completely caught off-guard. And I couldn’t say nothing, ’cause you’re not gonna publicize the fact that everybody knew about something you didn’t know about.
» EXPRESS: What are some of your favorite books?
» WILLIAMS: That changes, at least for me. It changes. I’d have to put the Bible, “The Art of War,” “Catcher in the Rye,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” all in there, but I enjoy so many books at such a rate that my favorites may change from week to week. Those are the ones that have always been in there, though.
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» EXPRESS: You read the Bible regularly?
» WILLIAMS: No, I knew it front and backward for a long while. Then I started moving into other religious subject matter, just trying to find out about other people’s beliefs. I’ve exhausted all that, so now I’m back at the Bible.
» EXPRESS: You read it with your kids?
» WILLIAMS: The kids and I go to church. It’s really a learning experience for us. It’s really refreshing. I think sometimes, if you’ve been in church your whole life, if you took a break and came back, I think you could get so much more out of it. But on a daily basis, homework takes so much precedence. We do good sayin’ our prayers at night.
» EXPRESS: What’s your craziest pot story?
» WILLIAMS: Oh, that was a beautiful segue. I’m going to stop doing interviews for that reason. “So, do you read the Bible with your children? Great. So, what’s your craziest pot story?” I don’t know, probably [using] the vaporizer. That was the last thing that was amazing to me.
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» EXPRESS: What do you see as the biggest accomplishments of your career?
» WILLIAMS: I guess the biggest accomplishment is being able to be on both sides of the coin: Having went all across the country — broke — to being able to come by and sell out all these venues and seeing all these people that are coming to laugh, because things are getting more difficult in the world. So, to be able to reach out and individually touch all of those people, all the way across the country in four months — it’s an amazing experience for me and I really feel an obligation and a great sense of pride in being able to deliver laughs to people.
» EXPRESS: You’ve said that a comedian is the lowest form of a journalist. Can you expound on that?
» WILLIAMS: Some things are generally written and some things are said and I admire what it takes for somebody to be a journalist — to make the words do what they do on paper. And underneath that is an ability to take that story and to break that down and to make it visual and fun and factual. So, there’s always been the writers and the storytellers throughout history, so I understand the plight and it sometimes takes that intermediary between what the actual fact is and being able to break it down to where we can talk about it and laugh about it. I respect that position.
» D.A.R. Constitution Hall, 1776 D St. NW; Thu. & Fri.., 7:30 & 11 p.m., $48.50-$58.50; 202-397-7328.
» Click here to see a video clip of Katt Williams’ stand-up act. Warning: NSFW, racy language ahead!
Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
Photo by Vince Bucci/Getty Images
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