A High-Speed Tricycle Chase and a $300K Pirate Ship: Katt Williams’ Crazy Week

Not many people are covering the insane meltdown that Katt Williams has been having for the past few weeks, I suspect because there’s just too much to cover. I almost broke my browser trying to keep track of it all. But by God, any story that involves a guy attempting to pay cash for a state ferry and going on a high-speed tricycle chase is a story that deserves to be told. I’m going to go in chronological order here, so bear with me, because a lot of the best stuff is at the end.

• In October, Williams pulled a gun on Faizon Love (yes, the fat guy from Blue Crush), supposedly after an argument over $50 grand that Williams owes, which ended with Williams getting arrested.

• Separate from that incident, Williams was arrested for battery outside a nightclub in Oakland. An altercation that apparently began when Williams assaulted 18-year-old “aspiring rapper” Delvahn Mosley-Davis on board Williams’ tour bus.

• Williams was in town for his shows at the Coliseum formerly known as the Oakland Coliseum, and two days after the battery arrest, Williams abruptly left the stage ten minutes into a show. He later got sued by multiple angry fans. MONEY QUOTE: “The suit filed by 35-year-old Brian Herline, of Modesto, says he and hundreds of fans were disappointed when Williams took off his clothes and challenged people to fight.”

• Following that incident, Katt Williams showed up in Sacramento, where he was driving some sort of three-wheeled motorcycle called a Can Am on sidewalks and almost hitting people. Cops were called, Katt Williams told them he wasn’t going to stop, before leading them on a brief, high-speed tricycle chase (seriously), with Williams running several red lights until cops eventually gave up to avoid endangering the general public.

• Did I mention he slapped a kid at Target and it was captured on video?

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Here’s a fun little video that’s been making the rounds among my stand-up comedian friends: comedian Jake Weisman, performing at the Hell Yes Fest in New Orleans over the weekend, finds himself dealing with your typical drunk jackass who thinks he’s helping entertain the audience by interjecting dumb comments in the middle of Weisman’s set ups (you’d be amazed at how common it is for drunk people to talk to the the guy on stage as if it’s a private conversation between just them two – I mentioned this phenomenon in my Dave Chappelle story a while back). It starts about 4:40 into the video, and rather than trying to power through his bits over the top of Drunk Jackass, Weisman wisely sits down and prods the guy who wants all the attention onto the stage.

Shockingly, the drunk guy is obnoxious and not funny, and is very bad at taking direction. Weisman starts literally, physically wrestling with Drunk J, and at that point, even the heckler-humiliation bit is starting to go south, when all of a sudden, at 6:55 of the video, a bag of cocaine falls out of DJ’s pocket. Weisman points out that this is the first time he’s seen cocaine (and you call yourself a comedian?!) and tries to convince DJ that’s he’s going to go to jail. The guy eventually leaves, and it’d be nice to think that he’d learned a lesson, but I doubt it. If it was me, I would’ve done what my grandpappy did to teach me a lesson when I got into his coke stash: he made me snort the whole bag.

In any case, well done, Jake Weisman, you win the award for heckler-shaming. Though I have to admit, that little shrug the kid gives when Weisman hands him his cocaine is pretty classic. “Eh, he found my cocaine, whaddyagonna do?”

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"My kingdom for a sandwich!"

Bill Hicks was a legendary American comic who was always more famous in England and Europe than he was in the US (mainly from touring there in the early nineties). He died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 32, and still holds the all-time comedian record for fewest pictures of him smiling. Russell Crowe is an Oscar-winning actor who loves sandwiches. According to the Daily Telegraph (Australia), Crowe is set to make his directorial debut on a biopic of Hicks.

RUSSELL Crowe has signed on to make his feature film directorial debut – a biopic about the life of the late US comedian Bill Hicks.
Currently in Iceland shooting biblical epic Noah, Crowe has teamed up with old schoolmate Mark Staufer who has written the script. Production is expected to start next year.
“Bill Hicks’ life is tragically short, but spectacularly interesting,” Staufer said. “The screenplay has gone through a number of drafts and we’ll go into production early next year.”
Crowe was tipped to play the film’s lead but has signed on for directorial duties. His only directing jobs have been short films and video clips for wife Danielle Spencer. [Telegraph]

It’s hard to tell yet how far into development this actually is just yet. It hasn’t hit the US trades yet, and scoops from Australian papers can be pretty sketchy. With biopics, you’d imagine there’s a complicated legal dance over who owns life rights, and whose permission you have to get, and who owns certain bits, and blah blah blah – which the story says nothing about. In any case, if it’s really happening, it seems like a weird choice. Russell Crowe is a great actor, and with some guys who are great actors, you can tell they understand comedy – Alec Baldwin, George Clooney, John C. Reilly. Unless you count 30 Odd Foot of Grunts videos, I’m not sure Russell Crowe has even been in a comedy. It’s hard to know if he understands comedy. He seems more like a guy who understands buffets.

See what I did there? I bet you had no idea I was going to end with a fat joke. You see, that’s what comedy is all about, the element of surprise.

After torturing us with rave reviews out of Sundance and SXSW, Mike Birbiglia’s directorial debut Sleepwalk with Me will finally hit theaters on August 24, albeit in limited release. Regardless, IFC was wise enough to scoop this treasure up when nobody else would, and those of us who don’t get to attend film festivals because of work and/or lack of money can finally stop hearing from our friends about how awesome this movie was.

Of course, we won’t stop hearing about how cool Austin is – “Bro, you totally need to go, I saw Chris Cornell perform in a phone booth!” – but this will at least be a good start. So what the hell is Sleepwalk with Me about anyway?

Based on Birbiglia’s one-man off-Broadway show of the same name (which has spawned an award-winning book and comedy album), “Sleepwalk With Me” follows Matt Pandamiglio (Birbiglia), a struggling Brooklyn-based comic in the throes of twin life-crisises: after eight years together, his girlfriend Abby (Lauren Ambrose) wants to get married, and — in a perhaps-related twist — he’s developed an REM behavior disorder that makes him prone to very active bouts of sleepwalking. Naturally, neither issue fits into Matt’s schedule: he jokes that he doesn’t want to marry Abby until he’s sure “nothing else good could happen in [his] life,” and he won’t go to the doctor for his sleepwalking because his growing stand-up career has him traveling from Vermont to Ohio for low-paying gigs on the regular. (Via Moviefone)

If you’re unfamiliar with Birbiglia’s comedy, I strongly recommend you check out his special, “What I Should Have Said Was Nothing” because he’s a very charming and naturally funny guy. In fact, his bit about his summer job and Joey Bag-o-donuts just makes me laugh with delight every time.

Anyway, we finally have a trailer for Sleepwalk with Me, which is great news for people who are too lazy to read plot summaries. *points to self*

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Before this descends into the usual Dane Cook-bashing, I feel compelled to say that I do have some sympathy for the guy. Joke-stealing aside, he had a few okay bits, and if you’ve seen a lot of comedy, all things considered, you’d probably call him above-average. Then he got famous way too fast and it showed, and everyone hated him for it, and I’m not sure it was entirely his fault. He was more overexposed than terrible. (There are worse – have you ever seen Ant?)

Anyway, he stopped by the Laugh Factory for a drop in last night, and apparently it got ugly.

There were some, like Daniel Kinno, who found themselves bumped so that Cook could take the stage for as long as he wanted while he worked out new material, a raw process of discovery that Kinno describes thusly: “Watched him spiral for 45 minutes before I left. Could have been worse, he could have done his act.” YouTube star Jenna Marbles was slightly less charitable or pithy, saying, “Dane Cook took a sh*t on everyone. Might as well have been literally.” And stand-up comic and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon writer Ali Waller provided a more specific appraisal, saying, “Glad Dane Cook stopped by the Improv tonight, otherwise I’d never hear the story about how he ‘chainsaw-f*cked’ a ‘disgusting whore’s c*nt.’” [via AVClub]

To be fair, “chainsaw-f*cked a disgusting whore’s c*nt” is decent wordplay. And if he’d actually sh*t on everyone literally, he’d be hailed as an Andy Kaufman-level subversive genius. WHAT, BRO? THIS IS ALT COMEDY!

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