A stand-up first and an actor when someone asks: the high, fast, permanently outraged voice carries whole arenas, but on screen it needs a director who knows what to do with it. Donald Glover did; Brian Robbins did not.
Fi1m perspective
The first thing we notice is the voice. It sits higher than we expect, it moves fast, and it is nearly always in a state of outrage that he does not mean. Then the body catches up: a man in loud clothes, pointing, pacing, wounded on his own behalf. This is Money Mike in Friday After Next (2002), and it is the act he had been refining on stage for years before anyone put a camera on it.
The stand-up came first and still comes first. He was working clubs as a teenager, was established on the circuit by 1999, and did not act until NYPD Blue in 2002, the same year Money Mike arrived. The Pimp Chronicles Pt. 1 (2006) was his first big special, and specials and tours have been the main work ever since, with the films fitted around them. The pimp persona went into animation too, as A Pimp Named Slickback in The Boondocks. What he does on stage does not rest on tightly built jokes. It rests on the cadence and the physical energy, and he can keep both going for the length of a long set.
That is also the trouble with him in films. A persona this fixed needs a director who knows what to do with it, and Brian Robbins in Norbit (2007) did not. Williams plays a man called Lord Have Mercy, which is the level of the writing, and he is one of several confident comedians the film lines up and then ignores in favour of the same handful of jokes about bodies. Nothing of him survives it.
Atlanta (2018) is the other case. Donald Glover cast him as Uncle Willy, and for once the eccentricity is attached to a person rather than a costume. We expected a comic turn and got something stranger: the intensity that fuels the ranting on stage is pointed inward here, and it unsettled us more than anything he has done in a film. The series is exactly cast, and he is part of the reason. He has said of getting the part, "The first two times I auditioned, I wasn't good enough and other people were better. I just kept at it, and then I interned at an alligator farm for three-and-a-half weeks." It shows.
The later specials are a harder sell. World War III (2022) is still an arena performance, all delivery, but by Woke Foke (2024) the complaint that he is running on persona and observation rather than jokes had become hard to argue with. Seek out the Glover episode, skip Norbit, and take the stand-up one special at a time.
Biography
Katt Williams is an American stand-up comedian and actor. He began performing comedy in the 1990s and gained prominence with his role as Money Mike in the 2002 film Friday After Next.
Williams is known for film roles including Lord Have Mercy in Norbit (2007), Harry Beaver (voice) in Epic Movie (2007) and Blaine in Scary Movie 5 (2013). His television work includes appearances in My Wife and Kids, a recurring role in Atlanta and voice work as A Pimp Named Slickback in The Boondocks. He has also provided voices for animated films such as Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (2010).
