Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ms. Pat: Y’All Wanna Hear Something Crazy?’ On Netflix, A Comedian For Whom Nothing Is Off Limits

When you’ve grown up so poor that juvenile detention seems like a better way of life, had babies as a teen, sold drugs, gotten shot more than once, served time behind bars and lived to joke about it, it puts all of that debate about “cancel culture” into perspective. She mines her childhood and motherhood into laughs for her first solo Netflix special.

MS. PAT: Y’ALL WANNA HEAR SOMETHING CRAZY?: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Previously seen performing a shorter set on Netflix’s The Degenerates, and also adapting her life story for the BET+ series, The Ms. Pat Show, the comedian born Patricia Williams traveled back to her hometown of Atlanta to film her first hour special for Netflix. It’s directed by one black comedy legend in Robert Townsend, and produced by another in Wanda Sykes. Ms. Pat devotes her time here to letting us know what it was like growing up poor and black in the 1980s.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Her brutal honesty about trying to keep her family together as the matriarch hasn’t really been heard since Roseanne Barr a generation ago, while the things Ms. Pat has seen and survived evoke the memories and experiences of the late, great Richard Pryor.
Memorable Jokes: How poor was Ms. Pat’s family? Poor enough for her mother to use the home’s chimney as a substitute for electricity.

So poor she once licked the TV during a fast-food commercial. So poor she ate better in juvenile detention than at home. So poor her mother baptized her dozens of times to take advantage of the charity of churches.

She gets a huge laugh when she stops to re-adjust her pants, claiming they’ll cut that out of the special (they never do cut those funny parts out, tho).
She also gets big laughs out of explaining what it means for her mother and sister to live with wry necks.

And she has two major set pieces about her family; the first, sharing childhood memories of her Uncle Cecil, whom she helped get ready for his encounters with prostitutes on account of his physical and mental handicaps; she then closes her special with stories about having her first child at only 14, and later coming to terms with that daughter coming out as a lesbian.
Our Take: If you’ve seen Ms. Pat’s previous Netflix performance or her BET+ series, you know what you’re gonna get. And if you haven’t, then this hour may serve to tease and tempt you to explore more of her work.
She bookends the special with inspirational messages, first letting her podcast co-hosts know that she can laugh at her past because doing so allows her to control her narrative, and ending the special onstage by telling her audience to do likewise. When you’re approaching 50 and raising your third set of kids due to circumstances that might be out of your control, what else is there to do? And when one of those kids, now growing up in an otherwise all-white neighborhood in Indiana, writes his school essay about heroes for Black History Month and names you as your hero, how do you react?

If you’re Ms. Pat, you lean in. No wry neck on her to worry about.
And nothing is off limits as she relates her childhood experience to those of kids these days. As she wryly notes in a bit about emotional support animals, missing the days when you could tie the dog up to a tree in the yard, she laughs at the audience’s reaction. “I don’t who the f— y’all think y’all came to see!”
Our Call: STREAM IT. In the darkest days of the pandemic and politics, Ms. Pat’s message resonates even louder: “Learn how to take the darkest s— in your life and turn that s— into laughter. ‘Cause when you can laugh at it, that means you got control of it.”

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.