Last Laugh.(Katt Williams)(Interview)

A small black man on a big white horse is bound to get attention. The comedian Katt Williams was in an Atlanta parking lot, on a Thursday morning last October, getting a riding lesson in preparation for the BET Hip-Hop Awards, which were two days away. He had been named the host, and he planned to make a glorious entrance (or maybe an ignominious exit--it wasn't clear) on horseback. Williams had got himself into the saddle, spurning the trainer's offer to use her sturdy thigh as a step. "That would be cheating," he said, as a crowd gathered to watch.

Williams had hosted the 2007 Hip-Hop Awards, and on that occasion he upstaged his own performance by appearing on the red carpet wearing a shiny pink suit, a black shirt, and, in place of a necktie, a noose. Nooses had been making an unlikely comeback: white high-school students in Jena, Louisiana, had allegedly hung nooses in a tree to intimidate black students, and a handful of copycat incidents had been reported around the country. Williams wanted to show that he found the resulting hysteria ridiculous. ("Niggas ain't scared of rope," he said. "It's the fuckin' hanging we had a problem with.") His return in 2008 as the show's host was one of its biggest selling points, and BET had built its promotional campaign around him.

The riding lesson went smoothly, but it soon became clear that something else had gone wrong. Williams had arranged to share the stage with a bevy of black cheerleaders. Two bevies, in fact: one that upheld normative notions of thinness as a feminine ideal and one that flouted them. Now the cheerleaders had become the focal point of a dispute involving Williams, the show's producers, BET executives, and a woman who seemed to be an independent talent wrangler. Depending on whom you asked, the dispute was over working conditions, corporate standards, who was in charge, or hurt feelings. (BET declined to comment.) Williams led an entourage of friends and assistants to the back of the parking lot, where the cheerleaders were mustering, resplendent in white-and-green outfits. Anxious-looking network executives approached, and Williams could be seen walking urgently toward them, then, just as urgently, walking away. After a few hours of negotiations, Williams announced that it was time to go. Another hour passed as his caravan--a black S.U.V., two white vans, an R.V. pulling a trailer, and a minibus--loaded up and finally began to snake out of the parking lot and onto the highway. The host was going home and taking his co-stars with him.

Williams is a virtuoso ranter and pleader, but, as a rule, he is neither an unsentimental social critic, like Chris Rock, nor a charming rogue, like Jamie Foxx. Instead, he presents himself as a little man who is desperate for slightly more respect than he deserves; the seriousness of this quest, and the futility of it, adds a hint of melancholy to his exuberant routines. In his act, he often circles back to the fact that he stands five feet five, turning his height into a symbol of the gap between the ideal world and the one he lives in. (Tucking his chin and scrunching his brow, he gives himself a morning pep talk: "Did you catch a growth spurt last night? You look like you could be five five and a half today. Nigga, this a tall day for you.") He is thirty-seven, but he hasn't quite lost a taste for whimsical sports coats or bulky Air Jordans that make him look as if he had borrowed someone else's feet. He has a mustache and a goatee that are as meticulously groomed as his straightened hair, and although he's not a young man, at least by the standards of hip-hop, he projects a twitchy energy that makes him seem at home in that world, and makes many of his contemporaries seem old-fashioned, or merely old, by comparison. Most of his observations are delivered in a carefully calibrated tone of mock outrage, as if he can't decide whether he wants to be reason's voice or its gleeful enemy. For example, news of salmonella-tainted poultry inspired in him not merely the expected comments about African-American eating habits but a sputtering disquisition on the unfairness of it all. The angrier he got, the more clearly he enunciated: "What! You gon' kill a nigga, chicken? The way we done supported your whole goddam career, chicken?" In this formulation, "chicken" is an epithet, and "nigga" is just a noun.

He has been telling jokes onstage for two decades, but he started drawing crowds only in 2002, after a minor role in "Friday After Next," a bawdy, high-spirited Christmas farce starring the rapper Ice Cube. (It is the third installment in the hip-hop comedy franchise that began with "Friday" and "Next Friday.") Williams ...