Comedian Ali Siddiq says he doesn’t quite remember his first comedy show, but it went well enough that he soon ended up as the club’s host.
“I was 29 years old and started at open mics,” he says via phone from his Houston home. Siddiq brings his Custom Fit tour to Connor Palace on Friday, June 5. “Like anybody else, I was trying things out. I remember I was talking about pregnancy and subjects of that nature, and I had to take two weeks off due to my work schedule, but I ended up hosting that same room.”
Siddiq released his debut comedy album, Talking Loud Saying Something, in 2010 and famously recorded an hour-long special at the Bell County Jail in 2017. Siddiq, who likes to joke that his life took a wrong turn when he was only 10, spent six years in prison. He talks about how he wound up behind bars in the recent special Ali Siddiq: From Inside.
“I was asked to come and speak to prisoners based on that [Bell County Jail] comedy special,” he says. “I put From Inside out hoping that it would help people see what it’s like on the inside and help the guys who had been to prison and/or the guys headed to prison see the value of accountability. People need to be accountable to the situations they in. I don’t know about the system. The point is that you should not do things that put you in the system. Society needs to change too, and people should stop glorifying being the bad guy.”
His latest special, Mondays, finds Siddiq showing off his storytelling abilities as he talks about four things that all happened on Mondays. “Mondays are hard,” he jokes in the special. “I don’t care if you are unemployed, if you employed or if you own your own business.” He then goes on to talk about a boxing workout that went awry for him on a recent Monday.
His latest special, My Father, comes out on June 21, and he has three more specials in the can.
“It’s about the ups and downs between me and my dad, and everything that happened between us before he passed in 2018,” he says of My Father.
For his latest tour, Custom Fit, he focuses on friendships.
“People think the show is about clothing, and I do have a lot of custom clothes,” he says. “But it’s more about tailoring the people around you and being selective about people who you have in your company due to them being jealous and envious of you. I think a lot, so I just come up with things that happen to people in normal life and put it all together and start crafting stories based upon that concept of being envious and jealous of your friend.”
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