Katt Williams says he’s still the ‘king’ of comedy

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The past few years haven’t been a smooth ride for Katt Williams, needless to say, but this month he’s back with new jokes, a new film, and a new attitude that the drama must be gone.

Since he stepped into the limelight over a decade ago, the 39-year-old star of Scary Movie 5 has countered a sudden rise to fame with a catastrophic plunge to notoriety, identified now more for his assault charges than his street-sassy one-liners.

The end of 2012 proved particularly aggravating for the comic, who was arrested multiple times on charges arising from a police chase, bar fight and stolen firearms, among others. He then declared his stand-up career dead in the water only to “unretire” four days later.

Two sides of a coin

But as they say, that was then, this is now, and according to Williams, there can’t be comedy without tragedy. It’s a pitfall of brilliance.

“It’s impossible to separate those two things,” Williams tells theGrio. “Those two things are on opposite sides of a coin, and so is genius and crazy. So if they ever in life call you one, they are in essence handing you a coin that has a flip side on it. I ignored it as long as I could.”

Williams’ broke out in the 2002 film Friday After Next, but truly began to take off in 2006 with the success of his stand-up show The Pimp Chronicles Pt. 1, and his work on Nick Cannon’s Wild n’ Out.

He channeled that success into movie deals, appearing in 2007’s Norbit with Eddie Murphy and the parody film Epic Movie.

Trouble first struck shortly after when he was scheduled to host the 2008 BET Awards, but bailed the week of the show after reportedly verbally assaulting the producers.

From the top to the bottom, Williams’ career hit a sharp decline over the next few years due to a handful of arrests for burglary, criminal trespass, assault, and child endangerment.

No explanation was given specifically for these incidents, but the comedian says he’s acknowledged his defeats, and plans to move forward.

“It’s really hard for you to have growth without change,” he explains. “What you’re doing is you’re attempting to change the bad things about you into better things, without changing who you are as a person. And so I’m doing about as well as can be hoped. Comme ci, comme ça. I made a lot more mistakes than I would like, and so what I’m finding is that to err is human. I’m done erring, now I’m onto joking.”