Ali Siddiq Interview: The Comedian on Storytelling, Fatherhood and Laughter
Ahead of his Custom Fit Tour stop at the Victoria Theatre on Oct. 1, comedian Ali Siddiq talks about storytelling, culture, perseverance, fatherhood and the moments when laughter turns into medicine.
By RoShawn Winburn, Dayton Weekly News
Sometimes you know why something is funny before the comedian reaches the punchline. He mentions the look your mother gave you when you acted up in public, or the uncle everybody in the family knows about, or the way people talked on the block where you grew up. Nobody ever sat you down and explained those things. You laugh because you recognize them.
Laughter has a cultural context. A shared set of experiences lets a comedian say very little, because the audience already knows the rest of the story.
That was the idea I brought with me when I sat down with comedian Ali Siddiq ahead of his Oct. 1 show at the Victoria Theatre, part of his international Custom Fit Tour. Siddiq complicated it. Culture matters, he agreed, but a good story can reach past it. Tell a story honestly enough and people who didn’t grow up where you did, don’t look like you and haven’t lived your life can still find themselves in it.
That may explain why Siddiq doesn’t really write jokes anymore.
“I Haven’t Written a Joke in Probably About Eight Years”
“I think that’s the best thing about me,” Siddiq said. “I haven’t written a joke in probably about eight years.”
His longtime fans notice. He said they can tell when a special includes a few conventional jokes, because nearly everything he does now is built around stories.
Traditional stand-up tends to move quickly from setup to punchline. Siddiq takes his time. He sets up the people, the places, the relationships and the circumstances, and the humor comes out of what happens in the world he builds. Watching him feels a lot like sitting on the porch while somebody tells you what happened.
The approach has worked. Vulture has called him “stand-up comedy’s most prolific storyteller.” His four-part series The Domino Effect, released from 2022 to 2024, has drawn more than 47 million views, according to his team. This year alone, his special Rugged won three Webby Awards, and My Two Sons won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Variety (Series or Special).
That storytelling approach also lets him find common ground between people who seem to have little in common. When I asked whether he ever has to explain cultural references to mixed audiences, he said he builds stories that can connect with different parts of people’s lives. Then he gave an example that had nothing to do with comedy.
“There’s No Racism in Fishing”
Siddiq remembered being out fishing and looking around at who else was there. “There was a white man with a swastika tattooed on his head, a Mexican man, a Black man, a Muslim man. All of them were fishing, and nobody was catching anything for hours. Suddenly one man caught something and we all jumped in.” They celebrated together, because as he says, “There’s no racism in fishing!”
It’s a funny line, and it says a lot about how Siddiq sees the world. The differences between those men were still there, but for that stretch of time they shared something. Fishing gave them common ground, and comedy can do the same. A story that starts in a Black neighborhood in Houston can still hold something familiar for someone who has never been there. The specific cultural details don’t keep outsiders from getting in. Often, they are what make the story human enough to walk into.
Siddiq also pushes back when “Black comedy” becomes a box that decides what Black comedians are supposed to be. He brought up Dick Gregory as he rejected the idea that Black comedy has to fit a stereotype.
Being funny isn’t enough for him. He wants people to leave with something.
The Grind Before the Audience
Ask Siddiq when his professional comedy career began and he gives you a date, not a year. Without even thinking about it, he says December 4, 1997.
Nothing about the career that followed came from a viral clip. He learned the craft a few minutes at a time, getting stage time, then opening, hosting and featuring, often in small rooms that were never meant for comedy. “I am the poster child for perseverance and mental fortitude,” he said.
Some of those shows paid late. “You did a show and they’ll pay you two weeks later,” he recalled. That was a problem when he needed the money right then, to keep the phone bill paid so the phone would still work when someone called with the next gig.
Those years also built bonds. “You could be in a room with five people, but you would never have camaraderie if the five didn’t [go] through the process together,” Siddiq said.
He isn’t telling younger comedians to stay off the internet. He has built a huge online following himself, and he did it without a network. Siddiq produces his specials himself and releases them free on his YouTube channel. His team says My Two Sons is the first independently produced and released YouTube special to win a major award. He now executive produces and distributes specials for other comedians too, including Malik S. and Ryan Davis.
His concern is how comedians develop, because being seen and being good at the craft are two different things. The grind gave him a foundation, and everything that came later sits on top of it.
Happiness, Freedom and “Making It”
Most people would describe success in entertainment with sold-out arenas, TV specials, money, fame or awards. Siddiq has plenty of those. He used one word:
“Happiness.”
Then he said it again. “Happiness is the ultimate success in this business.”
He doesn’t measure his career against what anyone else has. “I am happy. I am grateful. I am content,” he said.
As he described what success looks like for him, having his dream job and control over that job, another word came up between us:
“Freedom,” Siddiq agreed.
He doesn’t think he has reached a finish line, though. I asked whether he had ever had the moment successful people describe, when they look around and think, I made it.
“I don’t think I’ll get to that moment,” he said. Reaching it, he suggested, might mean he was done. Then he offered the comedian’s version of a retirement plan: “Comics don’t retire, we die.”
Siddiq can be content without getting complacent. There’s always another story to tell, another goal to chase and another way to sharpen the craft. One of the clearest signs of what he has done with the freedom he earned shows up off the stage, in his family.
A Different Kind of Generational Wealth
Fatherhood runs through Siddiq’s newest work. His latest hour, My Father, premiered on his YouTube channel on June 21 and has passed 4 million views. In it, he admits his own father “was not ideal,” then unpacks why “I’m a responsible man because of my Momma. I’m a good man because of my Daddy.”
Partway through our interview, Siddiq’s daughter stepped briefly into the frame. Fans who have followed his comedy for years know the stories about her as a competitive swimmer. Today she is a mother, a chef and a restaurant owner. Siddiq was doing our interview from her restaurant in Houston, which gave extra weight to what he said about being a father himself.
“I’m a softer parent than I was parented by,” he said. He isn’t raising his children under the same pressures earlier generations faced. “I’m not parenting from frustration,” he said. “I’m not parenting in survival mode.”
That gives his children room to make mistakes and work out who they want to be. What he wants from them is simple. “I just want them to be good people, be compassionate people, understand that they have been given a life that a lot of people haven’t,” he said with passion. He wants them to care about others instead of moving through the world thinking only about themselves.
His daughter shows what that looks like in practice. In the 10th grade, she came to him and said she didn’t want to swim anymore. She wanted to be a chef.
“I put everything into what she wanted to be,” Siddiq said. Now she owns a restaurant doing exactly that.
Sitting in that restaurant, he offered another way to think about what one generation can pass to the next. “I see generational wealth,” he said. “That’s a generational happiness.”
For Siddiq, the reward is bigger than owning a business. As a father, he had the freedom and the means to help his daughter build the life she chose. That same idea, helping someone get to something better, runs through a part of his career he never saw coming.
When Laughter Becomes Medicine
Comedians know a joke works when people laugh. They rarely know what happens after the audience goes home.
Siddiq has learned some of that from the people who find him after shows. Some meet-and-greet moments are funny and some are awkward, and he joked about the strange things fans say and why some performers stop doing them altogether. He keeps doing them, because every so often someone tells him something he could never have learned from the stage.
People have told him they found his specials during deep depression or grief. One man said he was in one of the darkest places of his life when he started watching Siddiq’s work.
“You ain’t even imagine when you first start this business that you would be some sort of medicine for people,” Siddiq said.
Another encounter was heavier still. A man and his daughter came up to him after a show. The man’s wife had been a fan, and she had been murdered only weeks earlier, Siddiq recalled. The family already had tickets, and they came anyway, leaving an empty seat between them.
Moments like that are why he stays after the lights come up. Sometimes the reward is learning that something he made reached a person exactly when they needed it.
Lately he has been taking that message to people directly. In April, he released Ali Siddiq: From Inside, a conversation filmed inside a county jail. It isn’t a comedy special. Siddiq, who has spoken openly about his own time in prison, talks with inmates about accountability, choices and what it takes to keep from going back.
That brings me back to the idea I started with. We laugh because we recognize something. Maybe it’s our mother, our neighborhood, our mistakes, our children, our struggles, our own ridiculous behavior. The power of a good story is that the recognition doesn’t have to stop at the edge of a culture. A stranger can tell you about a life you’ve never lived and still show you something about your own.
When Ali Siddiq walks onto the Victoria Theatre stage, he’ll be telling stories to a room full of people he doesn’t know. Some will catch every cultural reference. Some won’t. Some will just laugh, and somewhere in that theater may be someone carrying a weight Siddiq lifted and will never hear about.
Nearly 30 years after December 4, 1997, he understands something about comedy he couldn’t have imagined when he started. Laughter can be entertainment, and it can be connection. Sometimes, as he put it, it becomes “some sort of medicine for people.”
Ali Siddiq: The Custom Fit Tour comes to the Victoria Theatre in Dayton on Thursday, Oct. 1. Show and ticket information is available at AliSiddiq.com.
His specials, including My Father, stream free on his YouTube channel:
On April 19, Ali released Ali Siddiq: From Inside, where Ali speaks directly to inmates about accountability, choices, and the reality of recidivism in America.
This is not a comedy special. Ali Siddiq: From Inside is a powerful, real conversation filmed inside a county jail with a message aimed at breaking the cycle of incarceration and confronting the mindset that leads to repeat offenses. Ali speaks directly to inmates about accountability, choices, and the reality of recidivism in America; where nearly 70% of people released from prison are arrested again within five years. This isn’t about jokes… this is about survival, growth, and finding a different way. If you’ve been through the system, or have friends, family, or loved ones who are incarcerated, this message could change a life. Share it. Start a conversation. Be part of breaking the cycle. Watch. Reflect. Pass it on.
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