Summary
Katt Williams is an iconic comedian at the best of times, but The Last Report finds him embracing a new mode as an Illuminati inside man.
Katt Williams is one of the finest comedians who has ever lived, and his longevity has proved that better than I can. But in recent times — thanks largely to a viral Shannon Sharpe interview, which is mentioned here in his fourth Netflix special, The Last Report — Williams has taken on a slightly different role than just a joke-teller. He’s now a kind of secular saint, the general public’s inside man in the whirring machinery of the Hollywood apparatus and, as he would have it, the Illuminati. At one point in this hour, he says outright that his job is to learn everything he can about what’s really going on and then hurry back to share that information with us.
You have to take it with a pinch of salt, obviously. A lot of the jokes are just jokes. But far too many people get far too upset with the things Katt says — this, too, is addressed, particularly in the context of men who have worn dresses in their careers — to dismiss everything out of hand. Remember, part of the reason that Shannon Sharpe interview went so viral was that a lot of it sounded like insider trading, like a soothsayer reeling off things that were difficult to believe but nonetheless ended up coming true. Katt has undoubtedly seen and heard some things that he wasn’t supposed to share.
Not all of The Last Report is like this. A lot of it is quintessential Katt Williams, like an extended bit about farm life where he riffs on going off the grid without really understanding what the grid is, and buying an entire menagerie of tasty animals that, four years later, he still hasn’t managed to kill one of because they’re too cute. There are bits on the importance of women, racial differences, and Trump, as there necessarily must be. Some of this is embellished with little musical riffs — not to the extent of, say, Mo Gilligan, but it’s there — and occasionally visual aids. The lowest hanging fruit he picks is an ad hominem attack on FBI Director Kash Patel for being cross-eyed.
But a lot of the material feels more revelatory than that. Katt obviously likes the idea of using his platform to share information about drugs and mental health — and paprika, weirdly — that people probably don’t know but could definitely stand to. P Diddy predictably can’t escape criticism, especially given his eventual four-year sentence for trafficking was comparable to the four-year sentence Katt was facing for possessing a couple of blunts that, as far as he’s concerned, were purely decorative. A brilliant bit about Usher — he doesn’t name him, but we all know who he’s talking about — feeding women cherries during his Vegas residency has the exact same vibe as most of the things he said on Shannon Sharpe’s show, just more performative.
The Last Report is so-called because of the Illuminati thing, the idea that every hour might be Katt’s last if he continues to aggravate the wrong people and say the things he isn’t supposed to. The extent to which this is true or not — and let’s be clear, we’re not living in a Dan Brown novel — is kind of beside the point. The mode just works for Katt Williams, who has made a career out of being adaptable without ever losing his sense of self. There’s a good chance he’ll never produce a special as purely funny as The Pimp Chronicles Pt. 1, which, for my money, is an hour up there with Eddie Murphy: Delirious and Richard Pryor Live in Concert. But perhaps he doesn’t have to. Perhaps he can have just as much impact telling the truth about Ozempic and who’s partying just a little too hard.
