With the groundbreaking interview aired in January 2024 – Katt Williams Unleashed | CLUB SHAY SHAY – a viewership of 63 million plus another 40 million in clips – Kat Williams must be the most interesting man on the planet.
Not even interviews of Beyonce of Obama have hit such heights in such a short space of time. After the SHAY Shay interview aired, Katt Williams was trending everywhere for 3 weeks straight.
Here we discover more about the man from an interview he did in 2018, which was reprinted again recently.
The 9 Lives of Katt Williams
Brash and bold and a wee bit berserk, Katt Williams–the indomitable king of club comedy–has, for years, proved he can’t be stopped. Or fully understood. Devin Friedman gets in the head of the most mysterious funnyman in America.
By Devin Friedman
[[[ Image Photography by Robert Maxwell
June 6, 2018
Image may contain Suit Coat Clothing Overcoat Apparel Tuxedo Katt Williams Human Person Sunglasses and Accessories
Suit by Dolce & Gabbana / Shirt by Valentino / Sunglasses by Gucci / Jewelry, his own ]]]
GQ MET THE MAN.
I began by asking a simple question. And yet a question Katt Williams couldn’t answer: How old are you?
It’s not that he wouldn’t answer, he told me, but that he couldn’t. Because he doesn’t have an actual age. We’d already been together for the better part of two days, and by now I knew he meant this literally.
Evening was coming on in Miami, and we were, the two of us, shut in his assistant’s bedroom in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne. Williams was pacing, orbiting the room like a shark. He was wearing a baseball hat. He was wearing pool slides. He was holding a Newport that maybe he’d smoke soon.
But the Internet, I told him, says you’re 46.
“Please don’t get any of your information from Wikipedia, sir,” he replied crisply.
I can understand it if Katt Williams feels like he can’t trust the Internet. It’s part of a whole sociocultural-legal infrastructure that he feels isn’t interested in understanding the truth, or him. Katt Williams, you should know, is a comic icon. Have you seen Pimp Chronicles Part 1? Or Part 2? Or his new Netflix special? Have you been to one of his thousands of shows in the past decade or so? If you have, you know that Katt became a legend without broadening or diluting himself to become more “mainstream,” which is unusual. But if you look for Katt Williams on the Internet, what you’ll mostly find are stories of weird and purportedly criminal shit he’s done, as well as a lot of people searching “Is Katt Williams still alive?”
As for his age, he told me he grew up in a religion that does not celebrate birthdays, so he didn’t keep track. When I asked what that religion is, he told me that’s not the point.
So what was the point?
“The brain,” he said, “is more like a computer than we now understand.”
He tried to explain it to me: When you tell your brain what age you are, it makes your body be that age. Ah, okay, I said, so it’s like: Age ain’t nothing but a number? Katt Williams stopped pacing and gave me a look. A look that said: You, who cling desperately to the very instruments designed for your imprisonment, are just a limited, blinkered piece of sentient meat.
“I am the ageless one,” he said.
And do you know what? I believed him. And it was clear that he believed him, too.
“That’s why I can still run a 4.1 40-yard dash right now, no stretching, in street clothes, and yet maybe [smoking] like a chimney at the same time.”
He looked at me.
“I lead,” he said, “an experimental existence.” And by now I no longer questioned whether that was true.
Image may contain Clothing Apparel Hat Human Person Face and Katt Williams
Suit by Etro / Shirt by Maison Margiela / Hat (his own) by Anthony Peto
That day had started out pretty normal. Katt drove us all—me and three of the comedians he brings on tour with him, men named Red, Jay, and Zoo—to a golf course in his Bentley truck, which smelled of fine leather and Egyptian jasmine (his fragrance). It was like arriving by Fabergé egg. It was early, barely 9 A.M., but Miami was already a steamed dome of sidewalks and overgrown underbrush. Beneath his big white sun hat, Katt was already beginning to sweat.
If someone were to ask about the vibe Katt Williams gives in person, I’d say: Rumpelstiltskin. And not just because he’s short and often wears kind of a Vandyke, but more because there’s a twinkle of mischief in this motherfucker’s eye. He’s possessed of naturally occurring magic, and like all magic foraged in the wild, it isn’t strictly a tame kind of magic.
But like I said, the day started out very, well, comedians golfing. Katt didn’t even ask me anything weird like “Why didn’t Jesus get married?” until after the turn at the ninth hole.1 The morning was all about being “pin high.” It was all about how consistent and legit Katt Williams’s short game is. It was all about Katt hopping out of the cart at the seventh hole, throwing his blunt on the grass so he could hold his putter, and sinking a 27-footer while singing a Pearl Jam song. Then picking up the blunt and ashing lightly. (“I generally sing some Pearl Jam when I need to come to an even, still place before I hit. Pearl Jam or Jeff Buckley.”)
1 The reason he gave for Jesus not getting married was: “Because did you fuck at your family reunion?” Which made perfect sense at the time, but I can’t remember what it means now.
Last night he’d performed for a sold-out crowd in Miami. It was the 26th date of his 100-night tour. Katt has been in movies (including Friday After Next and last year’s Father Figures) and on TV shows (including a recurring part on The Boondocks and a turn in the first episode of the new season of Atlanta, which I’ll get into). But this is mostly what Katt Williams does: a hundred nights a year—every year—for the past 15 years, give or take.
It’s a grueling, unforgiving, masochistic schedule that he keeps—each evening propelled forward by Katt’s manic force of will. Onstage, he runs around in a fur coat playing this “Katt Williams” character, telling the sort of truths that only the truly deranged can tell, applying a kind of dirty-ass, furious logic to life’s absurdities. Like during the show I saw the night previous, he shared the subtext of a conversation he’d had through mental telepathy with a police dog outside the arena where he was performing.
On the course, the weather is doing something weird. It’s still hot, but clouds are gathering. And I think maybe it puts Katt in a philosophical mood. Standing in the bunker on 14, Katt says to me: “Evolution.”
I can only see the top of his hat as his ball flies out of the sand and onto the green.
(I’m telling you, that short game.)
“You know why it’s a 500-year theory? Because they can’t prove it. All they need is one fossil that’s in transition. And they can’t find one?”
What he’s trying to tell me is that we’ve been lied to. And it goes deeper than I may care to hear.
I’d been told by his friend Kathy Griffin that Katt is kind of a scholar. A nerd. A History Channel buff. He’s an autodidact—he says he officially “emancipated” himself from his parents as a teenager. He’s not formally schooled, but I can report that he’s a man of fierce and unruly and rebellious intelligence.
“I had already read a hundred books by the time I was 4 years old,” he tells me. “I was homeless as a teenager—I didn’t graduate from high school. I found out my IQ, and then I was done.”
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When he begins talking to me about the giants, that’s when the first wave of rain comes. But we elect to wait it out under the eaves of a maintenance building.
“There were giants on the earth,” Katt tells me while he smokes a Newport in the rain. “There are over 800 skeletons of giants. Forty of them just in Ohio.”
I tell him that I’d never heard about the 40 Ohio giant skeletons—or any of the others.
“Zoo,” he says, “Devin don’t know about the giants.”
Zoo laughs. Hahaha. “They were nine feet tall,” Katt says. “They found actual bones.”
The point of all of this, he says, is that we’re being controlled. The truth is being controlled. Like where our technology even comes from: “Everyone, all societies, talked about gods,” he tells me. “But it was their word for visitors. The people who came here and gave us these technologies. There was never reverence or worship in that word. It was their word for visitors.”
And then he tells me: “Now they know that the true purpose of the pyramids was to provide electricity for the fertile Nile River Delta. Nikola Tesla knew that. That’s why they shut his ass down.”
The thing about Katt Williams as a cultural figure is that his fame is binary. Either you’re the kind of person who looks at the accompanying photographs for this story and says, Well now, he looks like an interesting fellow; I wonder what his deal is; or you’re the type of person who says, Oh, there’s Katt Williams, the legendary comedian known for being completely fucking out of his mind both onstage and off. And if you’re that second kind of person, you know that as famous as he is for telling jokes, Katt Williams is almost as well-known for getting arrested, sued, or caught on video in moments of bad conduct.
It’s part of his act. The bit about how, because you get a flu shot each time you go to jail, he’s not permitted “to get the flu until 2026.” Or how he had to leave three states he wasn’t allowed to leave to get here tonight.
Katt seems to have condensed periods of trouble. The most intense, and most recent, happened about two years ago. To wit:
February 29, 2016: Katt is reportedly arrested at a Gainesville, Georgia, pool-supply store for punching the pool-supply guy and throwing a pair of goggles at him.
March 6: Katt is spotted at a Beanie Sigel concert in Philadelphia doing a bunch of push-ups onstage and then elbowing some guy in the head.
March 8: According to TMZ, Katt was discovered at his home by police “naked and covered in chocolate.”
Late March: Katt is caught on video sucker punching a 17-year-old. And then getting his ass kicked by the teenager.2
2 Some kind of Internet martial-arts experts have done a close examination of the tape, and the evidence apparently suggests that the move used by the young man was a “rear naked choke.” I’m not saying he was a really short grown-up who’d been planted in the crowd. But I’m not saying he wasn’t. (He wasn’t.)
April 27: Katt is arrested after throwing a salt shaker at a host in a restaurant. He reportedly flees the scene. But only to go to Waffle House.
On July 24, 2016, Katt is arrested for allegedly assaulting his former assistant at a hotel. The victim later reportedly accuses him of false imprisonment.
If people had to name the signature Katt transgression, I bet most of them would say the teenager incident. But I’d argue that the most Katt Williams allegation is actually the story of Jamila Majesty and the possible coven of witches. It was July 2014, and Ms. Majesty, according to the suit she would later file, was a guest at Katt Williams’s Malibu mansion. Upon entering, Ms. Majesty discovered “a thronelike chair” with a gun on it, a fireplace where strange things were supposedly being burned, and what looked like a book of Wiccan sorcery. Katt Williams was there, accompanied by a bevy of women. A gaggle of women, really. A coven? According to Ms. Majesty’s suit (which was dismissed and settled, allegedly for over $10,000), some were in headpieces; one, who was just 18 years old, baked cookies.
Well, as you might imagine, things took a turn for Jamila Majesty at some point during the night. Jamila committed the crime of using Katt’s personal bathroom. According to the lawsuit, she was then set upon by the women, and held against her will. For his part, Katt, Jamila claims, had a very serious question for her: “Are you a Michael Jackson fan?”
While Katt won’t cop to an age, he does say that his life can be divided up into “life experiences that last between two and six years.” And that his most recent life-experience segment ended just after this time of troubles. When I ask him what that period was called, he said:
“It was the wilderness.”
The skies open up again, but truly, on the way back to the hotel. When we return to the Ritz, the lobby is swarmed because of the rain. White people are everywhere—that special kind of older, pinked-up, pastel-shorted, shriveled white people who are endemic to the upper socio-economic reaches of the American South. Pickled golfers trotting down the hall in bare feet to fill ice buckets. Little white babies face-fucking their iPads as they trail their parents down the hall.
Up in Katt’s room there are trays of fresh piña coladas and chorizo burgers.
We take some of those and shut ourselves in his assistant’s room.
“I am part of a secret society,” he eventually tells me, “called the Illuminati Killers.”
I ask what that entails.
“Our job is that we search out the information that the Illuminati possesses, and then we advertise the information that they have hidden.”
He tells me that he’s a collector of “gems, gemstones, and crystals, all those natural phenomenon.” He tells me that we’ve been fooled about the true meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics. He tells me how they’ve halted the progress of the microwave. That the Ark of the Covenant was a container filled with radioactive material.
Suit by Gucci / Shirt by Sies Marjan / Hat (his own) by Anthony Peto / Jewelry, his own
Suit by Dolce & Gabbana / Shirt by Valentino / Sunglasses by Gucci / Jewelry, his own
Donald Glover cast Katt Williams to play a pivotal role in the first episode of the new season of his show, Atlanta (a remarkable episode of a remarkable show). I asked Donald if Katt had shared his views with him. For instance, did Katt tell you about how evolution was fake but giants are real and they built the technological marvels of antiquity?
“Hahaha,” Donald Glover said. “No.” He paused for a minute. “I feel him, though. I feel him. It’s just like, we get lied to so much, and he knows that. And I think part of his chip is like: ‘I don’t have to believe any of this.’ You know? Which I kind of respect.”
Then I told Donald that during our time together, part of me wanted to say: Stop saying stuff people are going to think is completely unhinged! Because only a fraction of the people who “read” this story will actually read this story, and everyone else will just see quotes on Twitter about how Katt Williams believes things like Earth is the only planet that has gravity. I have to search my soul, I told him, and decide whether I’m going to publish this stuff and have a bunch of people misinterpret my point and think Katt is a lunatic, which, even if you don’t agree with his views on physics, he isn’t.
“People are going to think what they’re going to think,” Donald said. “You can’t control that. I mean, like, you can, but then you’re living your full life for another person.”
Then he adds, “And he’s not afraid—I’m kind of envious of some of the ways that he’s not afraid.”
That episode of Atlanta is called “Alligator Man.” And the whole thing really hinges on Katt Williams. Both Katt the actor and Katt the man with all the baggage. It hinges on the essential, unsolvable human problem that is Katt Williams.
Katt plays Donald Glover’s uncle, who is called Alligator Man because he has an alligator that lives in his house. Glover’s character comes over to try to persuade Alligator Man to let this lady he has locked in a bedroom go. The police arrive. And suddenly it’s clear: Alligator Man must confront the alligator (metaphorical and literal) that lives within him, surrender to the police, and begin to live in the society in which we’re meant to live.
Katt’s character knows all this and says as much. He tells Glover’s character: “If you don’t want to end up like me, get rid of that chip-on-your-shoulder shit. It is not worth the time.”
So there’s nothing for him to do except surrender to the police. Except he doesn’t surrender. He exits out the back and runs away.
That’s Katt Williams. The man for whom surrender is a kind of violation. The man who knows he needs to stop with the chip on his shoulder but cannot stop.
This is the thing I most want to ask him about. That chip on his shoulder. Is Alligator Man you? Oh, that role, it was all acting, he tells me. If you watched that show and saw Katt Williams, then he failed as a performer. He knows what I mean. But he cannot acquiesce. He’s not going to be dictated to, not by the police, not by the doctrines of Judeo-Christian society, not by the Gainesville pool-supply guy, and not by a reporter.
The thing about Alligator Man, I say to Katt, is that he’s smart. He knows himself, he knows what the consequences of his actions will be. Surrendering would be easy. But not surrendering is just too important to him.
“That,” Katt says finally, “is my essence.”
But don’t go away thinking that Katt Williams is doomed by his essence. Don’t go away thinking that this is some Amy Winehouse shit, some kind of snapshot of self-destructiveness. Because that it most certainly is not.
The Alligator Man’s last scene in the episode ends with this beautiful shot. The camera stays behind as Katt Williams sprints down the street, his bathrobe flapping behind him—away from the police, away from the chance to come to terms with his alligator and his life. But Katt Williams isn’t exactly running away. It’s 2018, and Katt Williams is, in human years (I’m saying it!) 46. And he’s still Katt Williams. He’s worked harder and more consistently in the past decade than almost any comedian alive. He’s out there right now, plowing the interstates in his Bentley. He’s probably done with his anger-management classes (that shit lasts 54 weeks) but still on like a million probations. He won’t allow himself to get into any kind of trouble that would stop him, though. He’s here. He’s surviving his own success.
And also a rear naked choke.
Devin Friedman is a GQ contributing editor.
This story originally appeared in the June 2018 GQ issue with the title “The Nine Lives of Katt Williams.”
