What follows is an excerpt from a longer piece on black stand-up comedy, “Unlikely Heirs: The Comedic Children of Cosby,” that places contemporary comics in relation to Bill Cosby, including ones who are not easily seen as being in his tradition. In the course of limning the Cosby aesthetic, McInnis highlights two little miracles performed by Ali Siddiq.
I discovered Siddiq after he was already a sixteen-year vet of comedy on two episodes of Comedy Central’s This Is not Happening, “Mitchell” and “Prison Riot.”
In both episodes, Siddiq tells horrifying stories about prison life, but I was unable to stop listening or laughing. Y’all know that I don’t do blood or gore. I don’t like violence in reality or art. Thus, I don’t watch horror films or films with graphic killings. Yet, I was captivated by Siddiq and couldn’t figure out why. Then, midway through “Prison Riot,” I understood my enjoyment. Siddiq is a word painter who creates vivid images of people and their sensibilities, which are often more important than their actions. I realized that this wasn’t a constant firing of quick hitters and one-liners. Siddiq cares about his characters—who they are and what they represent—and takes the time to build them and their setting so that the meaning of his narrative can be unfurled slowly, fully, and satisfyingly. There are clearly good and bad people in his stories. But, each of them is a whole and often complex being, which makes his stories whole and complex, rather than flat and one-dimensional. Ironically, Siddiq has followed a path similar to Pryor’s, at least thematically. He had already performed and made a name for himself on Def Comedy Jam as a general observation comic before he began telling prison stories because, as he states, “…I didn’t want people to think that I was some one-trick pony. ‘Oh, all he do is tell prison jokes.’ I’m not the prison comic…I hadn’t told a prison story until I did This Is not Happening.” (See interview here) Despite those prison stories being rooted in his real life, Siddiq is more concerned about honoring the story rather than cracking “jokes” that make himself and his characters caricatures, which would flatten the humanity of his community. But, even though those stories are now synonymous with his career, it’s how he tells the stories—the cadence, rhythm, exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement—that evoke the storytelling genius of Cosby.