Spotlight on Black Comedians
Get Ms. Pat in Your Life
Simultaneously silly and significant
Ms. Pat talks about being sexually abused as a twelve-year-old on stage. And it’s hilarious.
If that sounds like inappropriate subject matter, I get it. Still, I implore you: before dismissing Ms. Pat’s material as crass or inconsiderate, you should watch her perform.
I try not to rank humor: if a joke makes me laugh, it doesn’t matter if it’s clean or dirty, salty or sweet, sick or slapstick. But every so often a comedian makes me laugh in a place I’ve never laughed before. They take a taboo subject — homophobia, sexism, street violence — and embellish it until the scary, uncomfortable thoughts we might not have admitted to having become absurd, and ultimately, laughable.
That is something special. That is Ms. Pat.
“I want them to like me with the Lane Bryant material, stuff about my kids, living in Plainfield. Then when I take them to the hood, that’s more dark, but by that time they like me; they’re in it with me. They say, ‘OK, Ms. Pat, we’re going to let you put us on the back of this bus and take us through a shootout. We’re going to do this drive-by with you Ms. Pat; we like you.’”
- Ms. Pat, from an interview with Nuvo Cultural Foundation, 2015
Patricia Williams was born and raised in Atlanta in the 1970s. She had two children before she was fifteen years old by a man seven years her senior who was married to another woman. She’s been hit by a dump truck, spent a year in prison for selling drugs outside her child’s elementary school, and been shot twice: once in the back of the head, and once in the nipple.
In 2002, at the age of thirty, Ms. Pat decided to try stand up comedy, after her social worker couldn’t help but crack up at her stories. She worked open-mics in Atlanta, slowly finding her voice, figuring out how to tell her story on stage. Ms. Pat’s first big break came when she was invited to open for Katt Williams, where she suddenly found herself going from an audience of 200 at a local nightclub, to crowds of 20 000 packed into sporting arenas.
Now she has a Netflix special (Y’all Wanna Hear Something Crazy?), a host of acclaimed appearances on the most popular comedy podcasts in the world (Bertcast, Your Mom’s House, The Joe Rogan Experience, The Church of What’s Happening Now) and her own podcast called The Patdown. The icing on the cake? BET just picked up her sitcom The Ms. Pat Show for a second season.
This was the first joke I ever heard Ms. Pat tell:
It’s just so exceptionally silly. I literally walked around my apartment saying ‘You want to come to America and get some P***y?’ to myself for days. It was only much later that a little piece of Ms. Pat’s point of view had crept inside me, and from then on, I saw the world a smidgen different.
Jokes are deaf, blind, and indifferent. You don’t get to decide which ones you laugh at. You don’t laugh because the person who tells a joke happens to be black. You laugh because she made you fucking laugh. Everything else: skin color, class, age, and anatomy? That’s all a distant second.
Or as Ms. Pat once said to a heckler: “The only difference between me and you white woman, is my titties is bigger than yours.”
This woman will make you laugh. Do yourself a favor, and get Ms. Pat in your life.
Thanks to Toni the Talker for the prompt.
Here’s another little thing I wrote on Everything Fun:
Didn’t laugh? Neither did Srini:
