Standup comedian Katt Williams has never been one to pull punches, and on Wednesday’s episode of Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay, which already has upwards of 14 million views, the king of underground comedy spent two hours taking shots at many of the most prominent working comedians and actors in Hollywood, several of whom have already issued public responses to his relentless zingers.
Periodically sipping from a tumbler of brown liquor, Williams accused Cedric the Entertainer of stealing one of his set-closing jokes, claimed “real African” Michael Blackson was using “a fake African accent” and alleged that Steve Harvey had stolen the premise for his eponymous WB sitcom from Mark Curry, another comedian; and that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Williams roasted Harvey’s acting skills. “You couldn’t be a movie star,” the Emmy Award-winner said. “There are 30,000 new scripts in Hollywood every year. Not one of them asked for a country bumpkin Black dude that can’t talk good… and look like Mr. Potato Head. There ain’t none. You have to have range.”
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The Friday After Next actor theorized that rapper and actor Ludacris got his role in the hugely successful Fast and Furious franchise by cutting a deal with the Illuminati.
Williams was particularly brutal to Mark Twain Prize recipient Kevin Hart, essentially labeling him an industry plant and comparing him to Jussie Smollett, the actor found guilty on five courts of disorderly conduct for concocting a fake hate crime and reporting it to Chicago police in 2019.
“No one in Hollywood has a memory of going to a sold out Kevin Hart show,” Williams said. “There being a line for him ever getting a standing ovation at any comedy club. He already had his deals when he got here.”
“He just did his documentary with Chris Rock where he shows you that his whole upbringing in comedy was on the East Coast,” Williams continued. “So how simultaneously was he here in Los Angeles doing the same thing? It didn’t happen.”
Hart, characteristically cheerful, dropped a tweet on Thursday morning seemingly in reference to Williams’ comments: “Gotta get that anger up outcha champ….It’s honestly sad.”
Cedric and Blackson made their own attempts to clap back on social media that fell equally flat. To issue a worthy rebuttal to a Katt Williams diss is a tall order, given that the comic has been perfecting the art of dressing down his contemporaries for decades.
Williams has a particular fondness for sharpening his knife on Kevin Hart’s career. In 2016, while performing in Atlanta during his Conspiracy Theory tour, Williams called Hart “a puppet, but it’s not his fault. If you want to be mad at Kermit The Frog, don’t be mad at Kermit The Frog, be mad at Jim Henson. Don’t say, ‘F**k Donald Duck’ when you really mean, ‘F**k Walt Disney.’”
Within 24 hours of dragging Hart onstage, Williams was handcuffed for punching a pool store employee in Georgia who, Williams alleged, called him the n-word.
Also in 2017, five women accused Williams and 15 members of his entourage of stealing their cellphones; the comedian said the women had been filming him without his consent. Later that year, Williams was caught on camera inexplicably sucker-punching a 7th grader at a pickup soccer game.
Darker still: Williams was sued by actress Jamila Majesty for emotional distress, battery and false imprisonment. Majesty claimed that in 2014, Williams beat and tortured her for using the bathroom at his property without permission.
All told, Williams’ run-ins with the law also include charges of theft, battery and assault with a deadly weapon; his volatility has kept him resolutely in the tabloids and resolutely out of the upper echelons of fame and fortune.
But given his lower-tier perch, Williams has the freedom to lob merciless digs at comics who’ve managed to climb a few rungs higher on the Hollywood ladder.
Another one of his longstanding targets is Girls Trip star Tiffany Haddish. In 2018, on V-103’s Frank and Wanda In The Morning Show, Williams said she hadn’t properly earned her stripes in the comedy community and wasn’t deserving of her success, which Williams instead attributed to Haddish saying she wants “to sleep with a white man.”
“You can’t tell me your favorite Tiffany Haddish joke,” Williams insisted. “Why? Because she ain’t done a tour yet. She ain’t done a special. She has not proven the ability to tell jokes back-to-back for an hour to nobody.”
Williams apologized, but on Sharpe’s show, he doubled back: “Tiffany [Haddish] was only seen at the Laugh Factory.”
Haddish, like Cedric the Entertainer, Kevin Hart and Ludacris, attempted to retaliate; given the amount of derision she’s receiving online, it’s clear people feel that her effort was the lamest of the bunch.
“I am not mad I just wish he would get his facts right about me,” she wrote on Instagram this week. “Dang I guess I will send him a reminder text.”
This week’s comedian melee proves how Williams became unbeatable at feuding: he understands that there are no rules, and one must strike first and viciously to reveal an opponent’s weakness.
They might be richer and more famous, but when it came down to brass tacks, Haddish and Hart came up short against Williams in a verbal battle of wits. Given how frequently he’s found himself behind bars, it’s also safe to say that Williams truly doesn’t care much about violating typical codes of conduct.
Another particularly egregious example? In 2012, while performing standup in LA, Williams burned all bridges with Jamie Foxx: “Who’s gay? Jamie Foxx. I can even tell you the name of the dude he fucked.”
It’s safe to say that Williams won’t be invited to any Oscar parties anytime soon.
