Katt Williams Was Sure He’d Be Dead by Now

Katt Williams, who long ago sold flowers to help make ends meet, is tonight sending bouquets of appreciation to his comedic rivals.

It’s after 10 p.m. in October on a steamy South Florida night, and the comedian has had a long day, recording the audio version of his upcoming memoir and preparing to launch an original Netflix podcast. Now, in between drags of Newports and the blunt he smokes in the backyard of a rented luxury estate, he is being asked to reflect on his past opponents.

And mostly, the comedian known for his savage takedowns and viral beefs is keeping his cool.

Rickey Smiley, who Williams once said “can’t act” after the radio host claimed the part of Money Mike was stolen from him in the 2002 film Friday After Next, is now “funny.” And Kevin Hart, whom Williams called an “industry plant” and a “Hollywood puppet” while questioning the credibility of the actor’s rise to stardom, is tonight a “nice guy.”

But when asked about Steve Harvey — the radio personality and Family Feud host Williams accused of stealing jokes and previously described as “a country bumpkin Black dude that can’t talk good” — Williams struggles.

“Well, this took a turn,” he says, taking a drag from his fourth cigarette. “I did so well with Rickey Smiley, too.”

This is the point when you’re expecting Williams to bury Harvey like the latter did him (and seemingly half of Hollywood) in a 2024 episode of Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast that’s been viewed more than 94 million times. But on this night, the 5-foot-5 giant of comedy lays down his verbal shovel and decides not to toss more dirt on Harvey.

“The statistics will show nine out of 10 times, no matter who it is, I’m going to find something wonderful to say. Because if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all,” Williams says in a quiet pitch, almost as if he’s about to tell you a secret. “But in this case …”

After two minutes, the nicest, or most respectful, thing he can say about Harvey is that “he’s a cautionary tale.”

This is what you get when you’re around Katt Williams: You’re never quite sure what he’ll say, who is going to be the target of his ire or what devastation he might leave in his wake, but he speaks with absolute conviction in pursuit of the truth.

“More now than ever, truth is really at a premium,” he says.

For nearly a quarter century, Williams has been one of comedy’s most combative, persistent and unexpected raconteurs — stealing scenes in films like First Sunday, emerging as an improv force on MTV’s Wild ‘n Out, winning an Emmy in 2018 for his guest appearance in FX’s Atlanta and cranking out 14 stand-up specials.

At 55, parts of his life could be mistaken for the kinds of myths in one of those rags-to-riches books you read in school: an emancipated and homeless teenager who fled from Cincinnati to Miami and supported himself by cleaning at an upscale restaurant and stealing car radios; a door-to-door magazine salesman who simultaneously learned how to take rejection and make money by talking; an aspiring comedian fueled by gas-station burritos as he scribbled jokes on the back of his eviction notice. He has faced a fraught history of unflattering headlines about him being volatile and erratic, criticism that his claims of being blackballed by Hollywood are overblown and a litany of legal issues that include 39 arrests — by his own count. (He maintains that he has no felony convictions on his record.)

Now, though, Williams has found some stability in his life. A father of 10 and a grandfather of five, his last known legal entanglement was almost a decade ago. He regularly sells out arenas. He claims to make about $100,000 for each show on tour and roughly $10 million for each of his four comedy specials on Netflix — the platform will also launch his podcast later this year. Williams reflects on how he got here in his new memoir, Nine Lives, No Wives, and 69 Concubines, out Oct. 20.

“There’s never been anyone like him, and I doubt that there’ll be anybody like him in the future,” says Luenell, the comedian, actress and longtime friend who performed in many of the same California clubs as Williams nearly 30 years ago. “Individuality is key because there are so many cookie-cutter, play-by-the-rules people out here, and I just love me a renegade. That’s what Katt is.”

Mo’Nique, the Oscar-winning actress and comedian who has been friends with Williams for more than two decades, says, “I am attracted to the underdog, and when you see this little guy onstage and he’s so fearless and so full of confidence, you cheer for that.

“Now, I don’t know if he considered himself an underdog,” she concludes, cackling.

So, what exactly is Williams chasing now that he has unlocked more mainstream respect as one of his generation’s foremost virtuoso ranters? It’s to live out a life as, in his words, “a motherfucking truth-teller with a microphone,” that he believed would ultimately be cut short.

“I never assumed that I was going to make it further than Tupac and Kurt Cobain,” he says of the music legends who died in their 20s — a feeling that’s never fully left him. “I had been led to believe that the good die young, and I had seen enough examples.

“I just assumed that was going to be my lot in life, which meant I needed to be more.”

The first time that Micah Sierra Williams stepped to the microphone of a hole-in-the-wall comedy club in Florida that he remembers reeking of cigarettes and “broken dreams,” he was trying not to get thrown out.

The 16-year-old was underage and wasn’t supposed to be there, and he had no material planned when he sneaked into the joint with his friends in the late ’90s. His intent was to get into a bar and have a good time, not make people laugh. But there was an open mic and he took it.

The then-teen wondered what the hell he was going to talk about for three minutes. He hadn’t lived a long life to that point, but he wasn’t short on material either, not after he had knocked on strangers’ doors as a Jehovah’s Witness at 7, gotten advice on women from Prince (yes, that Prince, who, at 18, was dating Williams’ cousin), escaped his parents’ basement beatings at 13, and was rejected from the U.S. Marine Corps because he was too young. His childhood was so insular in his strict Jehovah’s Witness home that he thought that Richard Pryor, who later lauded him for knowing “exactly who the fuck you are,” was a regular guy caught on tape being hilarious.

In a crowd he remembered as being “whiter than a Canadian blizzard except for one sister in the back,” the only joke he knew was a reliable one: “Being the only chocolate drop in a town of vanilla wafers.” Years later, Williams realized the steady laughter meant he killed, even if it wasn’t immediately apparent to him.

“I was having a conversation without racism, and I get why it was funny to them. I haven’t heard anybody talk like that,” recalls Williams, who was also selling flowers in the community to make some money. “I didn’t rush to do it again for what seemed like forever because I wasn’t really sure how well I had done. I just chalked it up to, ‘He’s the only Black guy there, we might as well let him win.’”

After he finally gave comedy a real shot in Oklahoma — where he played clubs with the likes of Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy (while also acting in a “pimp adjacent” role to a group of “intimate entertainment specialists” for a couple of months) — he moved to California in 2000 to see if his act would play in Hollywood. “He wasn’t chuckle funny. He was spill-your-drink funny,” Luenell says of her first impression of him. Yet, he was a single father struggling to break through in film and television who had received a cease-and-desist letter from Dr. Seuss over his use of “Katt in the Hat,” his stage name at the time. Williams knew time was short.

“I knew that I only had five years to become a star in L.A., or I’m fucked,” he says of that period. “That’s just how it works.”

By the time he broke through in the Ice Cube-led Friday After Next in 2002 as Money Mike, a pimp who felt authentic thanks to Williams’ own time as a “pimp adjacent,” he was “right on schedule, and not a moment too soon,” he says. Known for his meticulous delivery based on a calibrated tone of mock outrage, lavish fashion sense and a signature straightened perm hairstyle, Williams became a consistent comedic presence in film and TV over the next two decades — a mainstay on TV in The Boondocks and scene-stealer in films like Norbit and The Perfect Holiday.

Williams had found fame and legal trouble. Between 2006 and 2018, he faced charges that included gun possession, assault, battery and theft. A stolen gun was found in his briefcase at LAX in 2006, and he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor. When he was accused of acting in a threatening and violent manner at a Seattle bar before resisting arrest, he announced he was retiring from comedy in 2012. That lasted all of three days.

While he admits he has messed up plenty in his life, joking that his rap sheet is so long that it rivals the Bible, Williams says that he blames his parents and former members of his team for pushing a narrative that he was abusive and unhinged. In his memoir, Williams details how he spent a day at Rikers Island on gun charges before performing at Carnegie Hall in November of 2008. (The charges were dropped.) After the performance, he was involuntarily committed to a mental institution in South Carolina for about a week, he writes in the book. Williams claims in his memoir that his family and members of his inner circle wrote letters “saying I had exhibited violent behavior, I’d threatened them, and they feared for my safety.” Years later, Williams denies much of what’s been said about him and shifts blame to the group of people he refers to as “the Betrayal All-Stars.” He doesn’t deny that he owns guns or has a long history with weed — he is, after all, smoking in front of me for nearly two hours — but he rejects that he was abusive or ever lost his mind due to drugs.

“In none of the situations was I in a mental position where I didn’t know what was going on or what was happening. I wasn’t,” he says. “As a comedian, I’m not coming to your town to do any harm whatsoever. I’m not selling any drugs. I’m not buying any drugs. I’m not supplying any guns. I’m not committing any offenses.”

Among those betrayers were his parents, who are still alive but remain distant.

“I know it’s going to seem weird, but I’m grateful for them. I’m thankful that I had parents,” he admits, chuckling. “I didn’t get this far by holding on to turmoil and traumas. I’ve already flipped it for my benefit. If you’re turning the negatives into positives, then you can’t really dwell on the negative.”

The challenge from Mo’Nique in February of 2025 was one Williams couldn’t resist.

I bet I can beat you in a race, Katt.

“Mo,” Williams replied, “you don’t want none of this.” After all, his Emmy win for Atlanta featured him displaying near-perfect sprinting technique in the role of Alligator Man, who is shown running away after he illegally kept both his girlfriend and alligator locked up.

“No,” Mo’Nique replied. “You don’t want none of this!”

Mo’Nique, who was still getting her hair and makeup ready before she went onstage in Houston as part of Williams’ Heaven on Earth tour, had a head start as she sprinted toward the makeshift finish line backstage at NRG Arena. So, when Williams, who had bragged that he could run a 40-yard dash in less than five seconds, streaked by her in his electric blue sweatsuit in back-to-back races, Mo’Nique found out that he was “competitive as shit.”

“His ass was coming so fast that it scared me!” she says.

As Mo’Nique listened to Williams’ interview on Sharpe’s podcast the previous year — the one in which Williams accused Cedric the Entertainer of stealing his closing joke, suggested he turned down $50 million so he didn’t have to party with Sean “Diddy” Combs and claimed that Ludacris was part of the Illuminati — she thought to herself that she had found her long-lost, fraternal, truth-telling twin. Mo’Nique identified with Williams’ claim that he had been blackballed in Hollywood after she said she experienced similar treatment for not wanting to campaign for Precious, the 2009 film that won her the Academy Award for best supporting actress.

“No one has ever come out and said, ‘Katt Williams is lying,’” Mo’Nique says. “I believe Katt Williams will go down as one of the greats. The truth-tellers never, never die because the truth never dies.”

There are many books that have shaped and saved Williams’ life, including The Swiss Family Robinson and Robin Hood. He gets lost talking about these stories: “All of the stories had the same line: Where somebody is a regular person, just like me or you, and they are dealing with some extraordinary circumstances, which seem like are going to be too big for them. And we get a chance to see them get beat up. Then, simply because they persevere and keep going at whatever it is they’re doing, they get to the other side of that, and we find out what they truly were the entire time.”

He believes the person he really was the whole time was revealed on that episode of Sharpe’s podcast. When the topic of the Sharpe interview comes up, Williams relights his blunt to talk about another book he’s turned to in moments featuring chaotic or adversarial elements: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. For all the specials he’s had and movies and TV shows that he’s appeared in, the Sharpe interview remains unarguably the biggest cultural touchstone of this point of his career. The comedian is cool with that.

“If I got up there and lied 17 times, then I should expect some retribution,” he says. “But not if I go up there and tell some uncomfortable truths.” He adds of the cultural fallout from the interview, “There was little for me to gain if it wasn’t done correctly.”

As Williams aims to carve out a space in the oversaturated podcast field, he’s wondering what his audience wants him to do next. On his website in 2007, he wrote that his goal was to “build a comedy empire and help restore dignity to our profession.” He grins at the reminder of the goal.

So … did he do it? As the silence of the dark South Florida night is filled only by the chirping of crickets and the gentle humming of the air conditioning, Williams exhales smoke from his last Newport and, like he’s done since he was 16 and that first time onstage, he delivers his truth into the mic.

“I don’t think I could be a fair judge of if I did that. I think that was my intention,” he tells me. “Hopefully, I didn’t hurt the cause.”