Katt Williams wanted to leave the aftershocks of his 2024 three-hour “Club Shay Shay” podcast with former NFL superstar Shannon Sharpe behind in 2024.

At least, at first he did.

“In 2025, I’m only talking about me,” said the comedian, 53, to the nearly sold-out crowd at the Prudential Center in Newark, holding for a brief pause.

“But I already wrote this.”

The 50-minute set during a Newark stop on Williams’s ‘Heaven Or Earth” tour included comedic greats such as Tommy Davidson, Marc Curry, and Melanie Comarcho.

But it almost didn’t happen, the comedian told the crowd. With dates already booked in nearby New York, some weren’t sure Williams could fill the Prudential Center.

“They weren’t even going to make 300 popcorn buckets,” he said.

But the comedian immediately expressed his gratitude to the raucous crowd.

Williams’s 2024 Netflix special, “Woke Foke,” was met with mixed reactions from fans. Perhaps Williams got locked into the high of the podcast appearance so much, he felt the need to retool jokes and observations around it.

His Newark routine was an abbreviated epilogue to the fallout of “Club Shay Shay” and his Netflix special. Legendary comedian and actress Monique served as the MC, regularly working the crowd between sets and hilariously quizzing them about sex acts and the effects of edibles.

Referencing his previous work — and the resulting controversies around his bold and sometimes bizarre claims about Hollywood, Williams declared to the audience that he was there to report his findings from “infiltrating the Illuminati.”

The comedian used his stage, accented with a giant LED screen in the back, as a canvas to paint broad strokes on affirmations, the political tumult of 2025, and the enemies he’s making in Hollywood throughout his “era of truth,” as he referred to it in an interview with GQ.

It’s not so much that Williams had any more axes to grind, but that he is gleefully burning bridges in celebrity circles. He spoke about Jamie Foxx and “loving him and his clone,” referring to his joke about Foxx’s having a mysterious illness in his 2024 special.

Williams expressed disappointment at Mike Tyson‘s boxing loss to Jake Paul (complete with showing an infamous picture of the former boxer in the locker room before the fight). There were also smaller jokes sent the way of Dave Chappelle (whom Williams says won’t be friends with him anymore), 50 Cent (he’s confused why he’s mad at him in the first place), and Cedric The Entertainer.

The laundry list brought out laughs from the crowd as the set went in rapid succession.

It’s as if Williams tailored his set to those who came to see his responses to the viral proclamations about the industry one year later.

Here’s a man whose impeccable comedic timing, hyperactive mind and southern drawl have led to a successful acting and stand-up career, complete with 13 specials.

But now Williams is speaking out about the excesses of Hollywood, drawing headlines with long monologues that veer into conspiracy theory and theology.

This isn’t to say Williams’s routine wasn’t structured. The comedian’s punchlines centered around affirmations for 2025 and a joke after that.

For example, Williams proclaimed to the crowd that in 2025, you are one change away from everything going better for you. Sometimes, that might mean changing your name. From there, he flipped it into a brief story about the spice Paprika and how it’s made from crushed bell peppers. Is the name “crushed bell peppers” enticing? Not really, and that was his point.

As a segue, Williams then moved to the political spectrum. The comedian pointed to former vice president Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid, saying, “She didn’t win enough Electoral College votes to graduate.”

Williams’s observations surrounding President Donald Trump (or whom he called Trump Vader) saying it could be a robot due to his “Peter Griffith-like” reaction to his assassination attempt over the summer and the rash of directives he’s done in his second administration, including the executive order seeking to disband the Department of Education.

“They said the kids can’t read,” Williams told the crowd. “Trump said, ‘Let’s get rid of books!‘”

Some of the funniest moments of the special were when Williams observed the security guards in the crowd. Prudential Center had a strict no-phone usage policy, and people in the audience still tried to use them anyway. Security not only had to combat that with strong flashlight-assisted warnings, but Williams also made a note of all the marijuana usage and the difficulties of trying to track it.

At the end of Williams’s set, it felt like the comedian had finally started to settle in. However, the crowd could tell he was beginning to wrap up as he moved his golden mic stand to the front of the stage.

“We love you, Katt!” a fan from the front row yelled as Williams acknowledged. In his 34-year career as a comedian, Williams is living in many moments (good and bad) where he’s captured the view of pop culture.

Right now, it feels like he’s splitting time between his classic comedic stylings and riding the wave of his “era of truth” — no matter what.

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Murjani Rawls may be reached at [email protected]