Beefs are all the rage in comedy – as Mike Epps knows, they’re nothing new
Mike Epps may be the only stand-up comic alive who’s upset that Katt Williams didn’t insult him.
In a now notorious, wildly viral threehour interview with Shannon Sharpe (59 million views and counting) last month, comic Katt Williams fired salvos at a festival’s worth of comics including Kevin Hart, Steve Harvey and Cedric the Entertainer. Then came the response videos, the counterattacks, the commentary. Epps, unmentioned by Williams, said he was jealous.
“Say something bad about me,” he pleaded in a video. “I need the press.”
Of all the gifted stand-ups to emerge from the Def Comedy Jam scene of the 1990s, Epps is the one most likely to find humour in failure, minor humiliation, missing the boat. He understands that comedy is more about losing than winning.
“I know you guys see me in the movies, but the money’s gone,” he tells an Arizona crowd in his new Netflix special Ready To Sell Out, now streaming. Then he jokes: “Why else would he be in Phoenix?”
Pacing the stage in a brown leather jacket and new sneakers, Epps is unquestionably a star, with credits in film ( Next Friday) and television ( The
Upshaws), not to mention three previous specials on Netflix. But part of his persona is that he makes poor decisions.
“I tried to be Muslim but got caught with a ham sandwich three days in,” he once joked.
Hailing from Indianapolis, Epps is quick to tell you that he dropped out of high school and spent time in jail. He explains to the crowd in his new hour that he made all his movies on cocaine, and while he is not boasting, the way he relates his drug stories make a mockery of righteousness about addiction.
“When I be doing coke,” he says, then slightly stammers and starts again: “When I used to do coke.” Then his eyebrows dance.
Onstage, Epps convincingly plays that rascal who has charmed his way out of trouble. Sometimes, his charisma is a crutch. His writing can coast, especially early in this hour when he seems to be at his most generic, doing pandering or familiar jokes about prison rape, fat girls and code-switching.
His most surprising moments are not punchlines, but when he says something that could in different hands come off as serious, like when he mentions he’s been pretending to dislike white people for 40 years. There’s also a moodier side to him that you get peeks of in his stand-up but that probably deserves fuller expression.
His personal material is where this is most evident, especially in his commitment to digging into his own flaws, to celebrating the screw-ups in life. He pulls this off with an unexpected, even religious conviction. How is this for a comically counterintuitive defence of doing the wrong thing: “Give God a chance to keep working with you.”
Like Dave Chappelle, Epps makes a habit of scampering across the stage after a punchline and hitting the microphone. But there’s something sweetly innocent about his version, often accompanied by a wide smile. Where he takes on more weight is in his actouts of other characters. Deft at setting scenes, he’s a fantastic mimic.
Epps has long been compared to his fellow Midwesterner Richard Pryor, who imbued his finest work with a startlingly human vulnerability. The swagger there was only a setup to the joke, something that many of his successors missed. But not Epps. You can hear the influence most overtly in a joke about how cocaine affects your sex life, when he gives his penis a voice.
Epps beat out several other comics, including Marlon Wayans, for the title role in a much-anticipated biopic about Pryor. It was supposed to be the role that pushed Epps to the next level of fame. But the director, Lee Daniels, dropped out in 2016, and the film never moved beyond the development stage.
Its nonexistence itself became famous, the subject of talk show appearances. We might have gotten a peek into why the film fell apart after Epps did play Pryor in a short but impressive cameo on the HBO series
Winning Time, where the character gives advice to basketball great Magic Johnson on the perils of fame. Pryor’s widow tweeted out her disapproval.
At 53, Epps is part of the last generation that believes in a stigma against selling out, as the special’s title suggests. In the closing joke, he refers to his past resentment of comics like Hart. There’s unspoken context here. In 2018, Epps said that Hart was not funny. That earned a sharp response from Hart, kicking off a feud that simmered for years. Comedy feuds are all the rage now, pushed along by social media and, in a twist, sports podcasters like Sharpe. (Epps picked a fight with Sharpe recently, and both seemed eager to engage in an attempt to recapture some of that Williams-style drama.)
But beefs between comics are nothing new. In the 1980s, Eddie Murphy recounted being chastised by Bill Cosby for cursing, and then Pryor getting involved, telling Murphy to tell the older comic to “have a Coke and a smile” and shut up. That story caused a stir then, giving audiences a look at the trash talk of A-list comics. Pryor’s line was a reference to Cosby’s TV ads for Coke. It could be seen as a jab at the most successful comic (now disgraced) for the sin of selling out. Epps had been knocking Hart for years before Williams captured the attention of the internet doing the same thing.
And now, right after, Epps is releasing a special that ends on a note of reconciliation, not discord; on maturity, not battle. You could see why he would be frustrated by the timing. Selling out is not as easy as it looks.