A couple of years ago, at age 49 — three decades removed from an FBI drug bust that sent him to prison and 24 years into his career as an ex-con turned stand-up comedian — Ali Siddiq was still in great demand. break in show business.
Siddiq’s debut special, It’s bigger than these barsfound him back in a Texas prison performing for inmates, but he came and went on Comedy Central after a few airings in 2018. The following summer, NBC put him in primetime, where he competed against a Matt Rife look-alike in that unknown time. Bring The Funny (Siddiq won that round).
But in 2022, Siddiq, like Rife, found himself on his own, producing and releasing his next special directly on his YouTube channel. And like Rife, Siddique’s career and fame have skyrocketed ever since. The Domino Effect: Part 1 has garnered more than 15 million views in just over two years and landed Siddiq on numerous lists of the best comedies of 2022. But unlike Rife, Siddiq’s viral fame has yet to lead to a lucrative deal with Netflix, although it continues to garner massive viewership on YouTube.
The following two chapters of The Domino Effect (with nearly 20 million combined views and counting) have followed Siddiq as he tells the rest of the story of how he grew up in the Houston projects, ended up selling drugs, and finally broke at 19. The fourth and final chapter, The Domino Effect: Pins and Needlespremiered last month on subscription platform Moment (making it Emmy-eligible) and is streaming for free on his YouTube channel just in time for Father’s Day.
In a new interview, Siddiq tells The Daily Beast how far he’s come without landing a Netflix deal or leaving his hometown of Houston, and how Father’s Day is different for him now that he’s found himself like a successful comedian trying to juggle both. a grown son and a teenager who will never truly understand the struggle he endured.
“I remember being 13, but I don’t remember being 13 like him,” Ali says of his youngest son Hassan. “He’s super privileged and I wasn’t, and he has a dad who’s there and a dad who’s not selfish like my dad was, so I don’t understand that he doesn’t come to me and I don’t want to talk.”
Their experiences are in stark contrast to his. Although Siddiq didn’t have much, and was never close to his father, he trusted his mother explicitly and still does.
“I still talk to my mother. And when things go wrong, or when I don’t understand something, I immediately tell my mother,” he says. “And I know women are like, ‘You talk to your mom.’ Or men say, ‘Oh, you’re a mama’s boy.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, sure, and somebody who’s lived 70 years and has more experience than me, why don’t I go ask him about a situation? She has been right all my life. She has the right for 50 years. She was wrong about one thing. Because she didn’t understand how comedy worked and neither did I.”
Although he attended his first open mic in Houston within two months of his release from prison after serving six years of a 15-year sentence, Siddiq spent the next 16 years performing on his own stage of local comedy before winning a nationwide Comedy Central competition in 2013. .
“I thought I’d done it so many times until I started to realize it’s not a thing,” Siddiq explains. Within two months of his first time on stage, where he was greeted by her, he had made such a triumphant return that he would co-host the weekly mic as well as the working weekends at that club. The following year, 1999, he earned his first television credit, on BET’s ComicView, and was invited several times. By 2008, after touring as DL Hughley’s opening act, he ended up in what was then the series finale of Def Comedy Jam.
You may have blinked and missed seeing him in a Bill Bellamy showcase on Showtime, or a past season of The last comic stand, or stand-up series on smaller cable channels like EPIX (now MGM+), Bounce or TV One. Or even music videos where he could venture into comedic interludes to Mike Jones’ “Back Then” and “Flossin’,” or Lil Keke’s “Chunk Up The Deuce.”
“I’m in all these music videos that don’t get me anywhere,” he recalls.
Then Raymond Cook, the general manager at the Houston Improv, talked her into entering Comedy Central’s “Up Next” competition. Siddiq’s finals win in Carolines on Broadway gave him his first real taste of success and the Big Apple, but it also led to more opportunities. He turned down multiple offers, but said yes to Ari Shaffir’s story exhibition, This Is Not Happening.
It was a decision that would change his life forever.
This was the first time Siddiq had spoken openly about his time behind bars and people were paying attention. That group’s video has garnered 14.5 million views since Comedy Central uploaded it to YouTube in January 2015.
“Yes, the Mexican is wearing boots.” That’s what it’s called with love. It’s called ‘Prison Revolt’. And then I go back and do ‘Mitchell’ (another prison story, 11.8 million views on YouTube as of January 2017),” he says, adding that he came back a third time when Roy Wood Jr. replaced Shaffir as host and told a story about making mushrooms with Shaffir (“The Journey”, 8.6 million views on YouTube as of January 2019).
Then came that summer reality show Bring The Funnywhere Siddiq defeated Rife among NBC judges Kenan Thompson, Chrissy Teigen and Jeff Foxworthy to reach the finals.
“We can go back to when I was on the road when Matt Rife was much younger,” says Siddiq. “They were doing this show together and they were trying to push me and Matt Rife and this other kid and it didn’t work out. And we laugh a lot about it.”
Now Rife is a huge Netflix star, while Siddiq considers himself “the last of the independents.” Even more so considering that he never left Houston to pursue his show business aspirations in Los Angeles or New York City, which makes him feel even more proud now of his success.
“Before me, I’ve never heard anyone talk about not moving to LA or New York to start their career,” he says. “I have never heard of it. In 26 years, I never heard it. I was the first person I ever heard say, man, I’m going to stay home, I’m going to stay in Houston and they’re going to find me.
Since the pandemic and the rise of comedians becoming famous everywhere outside of TikTok or Instagram, there are more people trying to follow in Siddiq’s footsteps. And more comedians have also embraced his long-form storytelling style. But even the other current king of this approach, Mike Birbiglia, is not going as detailed and detailed in telling his life story as Siddiq has documented his teenage years. The Domino Effect series. And certainly no one has tried and succeeded like Siddiq outside of major streaming platforms.
It’s a fact that that figure worked against him in the turns to win over Emmy voters. “But if Ali Siddiq wins an Emmy for The Domino Effect or the Golden Globe for The Domino Effect 3 or 4, that changes everything,” he says. He premiered his last two specials on Moment’s PPV platform specifically for this opportunity.
And even before the latest installment hits YouTube, he already has a new 90-minute special ready to be filmed based on the actual hour he’s been touring America this year. Two actually, he reveals, based on his sons’ parenting. Oh, and four more after that.
“I’ll probably do six specials in the next two years,” telling the rest of his life story, including a series called “In the Shadows” that will chronicle his early comedy years, he boasts he. “I think it’s a very honest approach to an art form that I think has suffered a bit.”
Not long ago, Siddiq says he tried to buy back his 2018 Comedy Central special so he could It’s bigger than these bars a fifth chapter of The Domino Effect. Instead, Comedy Central decided to finally put it on its own YouTube channel, where it has been viewed more than 2.5 million times, “way more” than what it got when it first aired on TV.
“So, yeah,” he says, “we won.”
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