Katt Williams has taken aim at his fellow comedians during interviews before. But none were as charged as his interview this week on “Club Shay Shay.”
Like a tightly written stand-up routine, during his 35-minute sit-down with former NFL star Shannon Sharpe, the Emmy-winning comedian and actor fired off candid revelations about a long list of high-profile figures, including Steve Harvey, Kevin Hart, Chris Tucker and Diddy, addressing recent sexual assault allegations against the rap mogul.
Yet his allegation that Cedric the Entertainer had stolen his “best joke” more than two decades ago has drawn the most attention. Williams first made the allegation on a radio show in 2021. When Cedric was a guest on “Shay Shay” in November 2021, the accusation came up, with Cedric dismissing it as “ridiculous.”
Williams acknowledged that Cedric’s interview was among the reasons he agreed to appear on “Shay Shay.”
“He thought that I was just a no-name comedian and that he could take this joke and nobody would know,” Williams told Sharpe.
The joke in question came from Williams’ 1998 stand-up set on the BET show “Comic View,” when he was still performing as Katt ‘N Da Hatt. It was one of Williams’ first big breaks. For the bit, which fellow comedian Mark Curry helped him write, Williams reenacted someone driving a convertible while playing their music aggressively loud. Williams claimed Cedric took the joke in 2000 for Spike Lee’s stand-up film “The Original Kings of Comedy,” which also included sets from Harvey, Bernie Mac and D.L. Hughley.
“This is not just a random joke — this is my very best joke,” Williams told Sharpe, explaining that he used the joke as his closing bit. He said he had done it twice on the BET show, prompting the network to use the joke as a part of its commercials.
“I’m doing this joke, it’s on ‘Comic View,’ Cedric comes to the Comedy Store,” Williams continued in his recollection. “[Cedric] watches me in the audience, he comes backstage, he tells me what a great job I did and how much he loves the joke — two years later he’s doing that as his last joke on the ‘Kings of Comedy,’ and he’s doing it verbatim, he just changed my car into a spaceship.”
Williams first leveled the allegation against Cedric in 2021 while a guest on “The Morning Hustle” radio show. He accused Cedric of stealing the joke, which he said had “crushed” him at the time, because Cedric “was already bigger and more famous than me.”
“The reason it hit so bad was that I was in the theater,” he said in 2021, referring to when “The Original Kings of Comedy” was filmed at the Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte, N.C. “I paid my money to go see ‘Kings of Comedy,’ and to see my joke being there and not me was about as disrespectful as it gets in our craft, and I took it really personally with Cedric the Entertainer at that time.”
Cedric’s joke was seen widely as “Kings” went on to achieve box office and critical success. The movie is available to rent on YouTube, AppleTV and Prime. Yet there is little record of Williams’ original joke.
After Williams’ interview, online observers and sleuths managed to unearth a grainy recording of the 1998 “Comic View” joke. When Philip Lewis, a senior editor with Huffington Post, set the original bit alongside Cedric’s now-popular joke in a tweet Wednesday afternoon, the post garnered more than 2 million views and further fanned the flames between the two.
Cedric dismissed Williams’ claim as “Revisionist History” in a comment beneath an Instagram post by “Club Shay Shay” highlighting the viral podcast moment.
“Regardless of whatever Katts opinion My career can’t be reduced to One Joke Katt Williams claims as his,” Cedric the Entertainer wrote. “I been over 40 movies, my specials and brand speaks volumes for I am.”
In 2021, when Williams first made the allegations, Cedric dismissed the claim in an Instagram video, saying, “I don’t know what that brother is talking about — that joke is over 30 years old,” adding that he had done the joke six or seven years before Williams’ 1998 special.
In this week’s interview, Williams also took shots at Cedric’s supposed lack of success in Hollywood and made a joke about Cedric’s weight. He also said that Cedric and even Harvey had apologized to Williams for allegedly using the joke, countering Cedric’s earlier assertion that Williams never personally brought it up to him.
“Why did I give you a pass if you were just going to lie?” Williams said.
Representatives for Cedric the Entertainer and Williams did not immediately respond to The Times’ requests for comment.
