(audience applauding and cheering)
- If you want more people to stand for the anthem,
change the song.
(audience laughing)
That's half the problem right there.
It's just the lyrics to the anthem.
We could stand to any song.
Patriotism is a feeling.
Let's not forget that.
Patriotism ain't no one song.
For as long as we stand and agree that people died
for us to kick it, we can do that to any song.
You can do that to Bruno Mars.
What's more American than Bruno Mars?
They say America is a melting pot.
Well, dammit, I wanna stand to Bruno Mars.
He literally looks like every race at the same time.
(audience applauding and laughing)
What's better than that?
What's more American than us standing
with the Hawaiian-Mexican-White-lesbian-h man?
(audience laughing)
I feel like I've done well enough for myself
that if I died tomorrow, my kid would probably be okay
and could go to college.
I don't consider that making it.
The irony is that when I started, I was always struggling
to find a safe place to sleep, now I have no time to sleep.
This script needs to be in, these jokes need to be together
because there are 10,000 more people right now as we speak
sleeping in their car waiting to replace me
and they can't have it.
So I gotta work a million times harder than I did,
than 1998 to stay here.
(upbeat music)
- I didn't wanna do comedy
and that's the honest to God truth.
I was in theater ever since I was a kid
and I wanted to be an actress.
And then my mother got into standup and she got me into it.
It's not easy.
I've lost teeth, look.
I had teeth when I got in the game on both sides.
You're gonna be poor.
I was homeless.
I didn't take calls from my family for almost a year
'cause I didn't want them to know I was homeless.
- I used to be a stripper.
Oh, thank you, that feels good.
People always want me to be embarrassed about it.
Yeah, well, I am.
It's just that I'm embarrassed for a different reason.
I'm embarrassed 'cause I was a broke stripper.
Yeah, 'cause I don't have tits and ass
and they don't like that in the black clubs,
but I insisted anyway.
But if God tells you that your demographic
is 35-year-old Russians, believe him.
And I was making no money.
One time, I was crying on the floor of the locker room
and one of the big titty moneymaking bitches came up to me
and she was like, "Oh, don't cry.
"Next time, use your personality."
(audience laughing)
Which was insulting enough, but my dumb self didn't realize
that "personality" is industry speak for blowjob.
So I was in this strip club being myself.
(audience laughing)
Hey, don't be yourself in the strip club.
They don't want yourself in the strip club.
I'm at the bar talking to customers.
I'm like, well, this tattoo is from a book
of James Baldwin essays.
(audience laughing)
Okay, I started standup because I was a junior in college,
I was extremely depressed, I'd gone through so many things
that year and I lost all my friends.
I alienated so many people
and I thought I should do something that makes me happy.
And I couldn't think of anything that made me happy,
except for standup.
I just went online randomly bought a joke writing workshop.
I did a couple mics and I've been doing standup since.
- The new generation came up in the bringer era.
They would have bookers say,
yeah, you could perform at this club,
just bring 10 to 12 people, you do five minutes
and we tape it.
And then we would have this notion,
like, word, yeah, I'm gonna be at the club.
I'm gonna get past here.
At a bringer show after awhile, you start to learn
what's the difference between fans and fucking family.
It's two different things.
Fans pay tickets to see you.
Family just came out to support you.
And that's how it was.
I would feel like I was king.
I was killing it, like, hell yeah, man, I killed Caroline's.
I could go do the Cellar now, what's up?
And I think I did the Cellar open mic, bombed.
And it's good to get broken down by bombing
'cause that helps you figure out this is real, man.
No, you're not the next thing.
You need to be an artist.
- You're performing with acts
that all at different trajectories in their career.
Some guys are on the way up, some guys are on the way down.
One week, you're performing and opening for Tommy Davidson
and next week, you're opening for somebody
who should've been Tommy Davidson.
So I grew up in comedy with constant reminders
of what the pros and cons are of the choices
that I would make from women to drugs
to how you treat the staff, all of that stuff.
- Let me tell you how bad I wanted to do comedy.
We drove from Kansas City,
all they were gonna pay us is $50, Kansas City to Oklahoma.
Shit, that's a drive.
We talking two, 2 1/2, it's a drive.
So you know, we got the music blasting,
talking shit in the car.
That's back when I smoked cigarettes, smoking cigarettes.
So we get to the club, it is a hick.
They got chicken wire over the stage.
Huey B. went on first, they booed his ass off,
they throwing fucking bottles at the chicken wire.
So I'm backstage, I need this $50 though, so shit.
I come out.
(Eddie grumbling)
You get n-word, all that shit.
I said, oh really, you motherfuckers!
I said, I ain't scared of you redneck sons of bitches.
And I started doing this character, Red Neck.
I said, last name Neck, first name Red.
My name is Red Neck, goddamn right, boy.
Oh, them motherfuckers started howling then.
But they wasn't catching
that I was clowning they motherfucking asses.
So anyway when I got done hicking with the hicks,
I remember they was bringing the money in.
Now, I'm out in the back.
I said, Huey, get the car.
I had a motherfucker start it.
I'm gonna get the motherfucking $100
and we getting the fuck up out this bitch.
And we got that $100
and we was seeing some rocks coming off the back tires.
- Michelle Obama got a book out, she on tour, yeah.
I tried to get a ticket to the Michelle Obama shit,
it's like $210.
$210, I love Michelle Obama, but for $210
she better eat me out at that fucking concert,
you know what I mean?
(audience laughing)
You better make America great again
and start with me, bitch.
(audience laughing)
You know, I was the last I think the last of the Mohicans
from that whole '80s revival of comedy
and when people worked to get on stage and you worked
to be at a club, finally now, I ready to present this set,
have somebody see it.
Now people are like, five seconds in the game,
I don't know why I ain't made it yet.
Well, nigger, you just started.
But I get it because it's so many TV outlets now.
Like when I was a kid,
how many channels they had, two, three?
Now you can pop in, you can watch all the time.
And so there's so many outlets for comics
that people are like, well, I see this comic
and this is their trajectory on how they move
and I should be moving the same thing.
People are now are like watching a lot of formats
and templates of how people are making it
and trying to do the same thing
and then expecting the same results.
That's why I hate when people try to shortcut themselves.
The only way you're gonna be able to get comfortable
in front of an audience is to be
in front of a bunch of audiences.
- Writing is one of the main things I focused on
the past four years 'cause you really wanna have something
to say and just keep pushing the art forward,
instead of just having observational humor
'cause observational humor is dead.
Social media killed that.
Memes, YouTube, like when your side chick calls your phone,
what do you do?
I mean, that's observational shit
to where you have a Kevin Hart who will tell you
about living with his wife and his kids.
Or you'll have a Chris Rock about growing up in the schools,
being the only black kid.
You have Dave Chappelle telling you about his experience
in DC with the crack baby.
Stories, fucking stories!
And then I would tell a story about me living
with my sister then who transitioned to my brother.
I love my brother.
My brother is transgender, transitioned from a woman
to a man years ago,
love him very much.
Oh, thank you, all right.
(audience applauding and cheering)
Cool, cool, I'll tell him you care.
(audience laughing)
I love him, I love that he loves his body
and I'm happy that he loves his body.
He loves his body so much, he loves to brag to me now.
He'll come up to me like,
"Look, man, I got more facial hair than you."
(audience laughing)
"I got more armpit hair than you."
I didn't know he transitioned into an asshole.
(audience laughing)
I get it, but you ain't gotta flex on me.
(audience laughing)
Damn, you know what it felt like?
It felt like I was at the end of The Little Mermaid
and the mermaid is like, what's up, Ariel?
And she's like, oh, y'all bitches still got flippers.
(audience laughing)
I would tell that story, not his story but my perspective
of living with a transgender brother.
And that resonated with people
'cause they never heard that before.
And I feel like that's what standups have.
That's what standups will always have.
Have fun with the observational humor
but have a fucking story, have a voice
where people are like, yo, that's the nigger
with the fucking sisbro.
They don't even know your name.
They just know you by the bit.
And that's even an honor.
- I live with a millennial, pray for me.
(audience laughing)
My brother is 15 years younger than me.
He moved in with me.
Every day, I wish I'd dropped him.
(audience laughing)
Every day, he makes me feel like I'm a bad person.
He's always checking me about things
that I didn't know were now out of vogue.
And the other day, he walks into the living room.
He has on a peach t-shirt.
He goes, "Chloe, what do you think about this shirt?
"Is it too feminine?"
I'm like, no, it's a regular peach t-shirt.
He goes, "Trick question, gender's fluid."
Get out of my house!
(audience laughing)
Social media is the automobile
when everybody was still riding carriages.
It's a thing that you don't wanna need,
but then it becomes so crucial to your survival
that you have to adapt.
- It's frustrating, it's frustrating because as a comic,
you're out every night,
literally, out every night busting your ass,
humping through these cities.
I've done so many shit gigs at bars in fucking West Virginia
and you're truly busting your ass trying to develop a skill
so that you can be called a comic, all right.
And you finally earn that title
where it's like you consider yourself a comedian,
your peers see you, they consider you a comedian.
And then you have these people who create funny sketches
about, oh, here's this nigger's dick print in sweatpants.
It's sweatpants season or some shit like that,
which is it's cute.
So it really watered down the craft,
but they wanna be called comedians as well
and it's just like, well, who am I
to knock somebody else's hustle?
- For me now, there's two things
about the millennials and the new Instagram.
355,000 Instagram likes by people
who will never pay a ticket to come and see you
do not a comedian make, I don't feel.
The millennials that's coming through now,
they got entourages of 10 or 15 people, they wanna get paid,
they don't put no respect on your name.
They treat us like you're washed the fuck up,
I'm the new shit.
What we know that they don't know is that 30 years from now,
you ain't gonna be able to sell out no motherfucking room
30 years from now.
And 30 years from now, we'd still be able to do it.
- To me, it feels like it stems from bitterness
where they just see a young kid with 500k followers
and they would get mad at what the IG comics did.
I never did because they are hustling.
They doing what they do.
God bless them, man.
If you just being true to yourself and it's genuine,
people will gravitate towards you.
- Of course, I'm gonna big up my crew.
I roll with a really funny crew of comedians.
I think we're all very talented.
That would be Monroe Martin,
Hadiyah Robinson, Yamaneika Saunders.
We're taking a page out
of the Adam Sandler handbook or Spike Lee.
We're going to do projects and work together
and promote each other and share each other's content,
and really do what we need to do,
which is have a strong core of us,
so that if one person blows up,
you're gonna already have people
that you can move into the project.
- You know, it's like family.
You wish the best for them sometimes.
There are some times you feel like people are hacking,
sometimes you feel like people are joke thieves.
It's very collaborative and then at the same time,
it's very lonely, too.
It's really about how you go about it, you know.
- You know, you look at Keenan Ivory Wayans,
Robert Townsend, those guys, Eddie, those guys,
they did create a lot of stuff.
They sat down with each other in trailers
and different places working on scripts.
And I think the collaboratory effort went away too
because everybody wanted to be a rock star.
They all wanted to be Martin,
have their own show like Martin.
It's my show, you have your show.
You wasn't collabbing, people wasn't collabbing together.
I remember Issa said something dope, Issa Rae.
She said, "People will always try to network up
"instead of networking with the people
"that's right next to them."
Or working with the people that's right next to them.
And you get more done that way, instead of trying to chase
this person that's looked at as this oh, this is the person
that can change my life 'cause they did all this other stuff
instead of just so what if can we become those people?
- The improvement comes in drips.
And at any given time, even today,
there's only two or three comics making crazy money.
Now Kevin Hart's the man.
They used to, they always find one
and that one gets all the work.
They always find one, (Earthquake laughing)
'cause they won't let it be two or three.
Look how many white actors get to work, but with us--
- [Sacha] But there might have been a time
when you were that number one.
- I wasn't, Hollywood never put me in that group.
I busted, everything I found,
we worked, we worked, we worked.
When I did The Sinbad Show, 1994,
our first TV shows were naive.
We think comedy writers are like comedians.
We think they're fun people.
Comedy writers sit in a room like this.
So I'll come in, I didn't realize
they didn't want me in the room.
And I finally had a cat got me hip.
He said, "Dude, you know they're mad at you
"'cause they don't want you in the room."
I said, well, why wouldn't they want me in the room?
And he said, "They don't want your opinion.
"They just want you to be a performing monkey.
"Just get on the set and perform."
I said, well, that ain't never gonna be me.
You know I wasn't trying to do a sitcom.
I had gotten a deal with Disney and Joe Walsh said,
"Now, they're gonna tell you they wanna do a show with you.
"Whatever you do, don't you pitch a good show.
"We gonna make movies."
I said, yeah, Joe.
So I didn't know how not to pitch.
I was just making up stuff.
I'm gonna be a single man and I adopt two kids,
I'm a video game developer and I'm on the internet.
And they were looking at me.
I said, good, we out.
He goes, "Yeah!"
I said, they bought this?
I told my brother, I messed up, they bought it.
I said, Joe, he goes, "What'd you do?"
I said, they bought it.
But then they got man
because it was about a black man adopting kids.
It's about black kids in foster care.
The whole show was about to show how this man had
to quit being selfish and he wants to be the playboy
and raise some kids.
I already had the 10-year plan in my head.
The girl that was in the show with me that played the woman
that worked with me was Salma Hayek.
I said, we do this right, by the third year,
we'll get married and that was the first latin
and black family on TV.
We could've mixed all that
'cause that's how they live in New York.
And I had this plan.
And they were like this, that ain't gonna happen.
I didn't realize it was a fight.
They didn't want intelligent.
- I think when Chappelle Show came up with a sketch,
America and the world was waiting
for what would be the next big thing.
And Chappelle Show came at that time.
The writing process with Chappelle was if you had a premise
for an idea, for a sketch or something,
you would pitch the premise
and then if Neil and Dave liked it, they would write on it.
- [Sacha] How did Ashy Larry come together?
- On paper, he was just Larry.
He was just a dude that was struggling to pay his rent
and would do anything for it.
I knew that whatever I did, I had to be funny
when you first saw me.
And when I was younger, I used to shoot dice a lot
and my mom would bust me.
She'd be like, "Were you shooting dice?"
I'm like, no, she was like, "Yes, you were.
"Look at how ashy your legs are and your knees are."
So I put the ash into Larry.
I didn't tell anybody that I was gonna be that ashy.
When we came to set that day, I went to makeup.
I was like, I need baby powder.
I had a handful of baby powder.
I didn't wanna tell them when I was gonna do it
'cause I didn't wanna take a chance of them saying,
it's too sloppy, it won't work.
So I was just like, I'm just gonna roll the dice.
So I shook my hand, I had the powder in my hand
and I blew it out in front of the camera.
They caught it and Neil Brennan looked at me,
he was like, that was it.
And that's when Ashy Larry was born.
We were friends, we had fun and out of all the projects
I've done in my career, can't remember a project
where we would work 16, 17-hour days
and it never ever felt like work.
It felt like a group of guys getting together
and just making the world laugh.
(light music)
(upbeat music)