‘The Ms. Pat Show’ Is The Real Hero Of Sitcom TV

“IRunThis” is a weekly interview series that highlights Black women and femmes who do dope shit in entertainment and culture while creating visibility, access and empowerment for those who look like them. Read my Gail Bean interview  here.

Patricia “Ms. Pat” Williams doesn’t have on her lashes when she joins our Zoom call from her iPad. Her camera is off, so I only hear her.

“Hold on, let me get my glasses,” she calls out in a voice that could carry an equal amount of depth whether she’s telling you some real shit or a “yo mama” joke. She turns the camera on and I inform her this interview is only for a written piece and the video won’t be used. 

“Oh, I’ll take my damn glasses off then.” It’s not funny, but it’s funny. 

Ms. Pat’s honest reactions with the perfect cusses peppered in here and there — sometimes everywhere — are part of what makes her one of the funniest comedians of today. Her story, and willingness to tell it, make up the rest of it. 

The 50-year-old is gearing up for the Season 3 premiere of “The Ms. Pat Show,” the BET+ comedy loosely based on Pat’s own story. It’s a story, on its head, that many wouldn’t find humor in. Born and raised in Atlanta, Ms. Pat doesn’t hold any bars when it comes to detailing the traumas of her life before she found comedy. But her experiences of poverty, teenage pregnancy, sexual abuse, violence and prison not only found a way into her stand-up, her resilience through comedy has become a crucial part of her brand. She calls her fan base her crack babies, a humorous ode to the drug she once sold outside of her daughter’s school.

But the road to “The Ms. Pat Show” was one that the comedian made sure she didn’t put all her bets on. After five years of dead ends and three attempts to sell the show, executive producer Lee Daniels recruited showrunner Jordan E. Cooper to find a home for Ms. Pat to play the raunchy TV mom navigating new life in the suburbs as she pursues a comedy career. 

“I just think I’m a voice that a lot of people in the industry overlooked,” she said. “There’s always been an audience there for the type of mom that I am on TV and in real life, but people were like, ‘We couldn’t dare have a woman saying those words or acting like that,’ but when you see Black mamas portrayed and you at the house, like, ‘That ain’t my damn mama. When they gonna put a mama on TV that look like me or sound like my mama?’ Finally we got one, which was me.”

Along with Ms. Pat herself, the show stars Tami Roman, J. Bernard Calloway, Theodore Barnes, Briyana Guadalupe, Brittany Inge and Vince Shawn. Debbie Allen directed the show’s pilot and has come back to direct an episode each season. Last year, the show earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series, BET’s first major Emmy nomination for a scripted series.

For “I Run This,” Ms. Pat talks about how her authenticity makes “The Ms. Pat Show” what it is, the power of never giving up and the fact that she doesn’t have to steal any more.

"The Ms. Pat Show" is loosely based off of the comedian's life as she transitioned to her career in stand up.

Congratulations on Season 3. We’re fans of your show at HuffPost. I’m a true ’90s baby, so my favorite shows growing up were recorded in front of a live studio audience, and shows that really had not only the strong Black presence on them but also a message that didn’t feel like it was hitting you over the head. How does it feel to have your show, based on your story, set a refreshed tone in this long lineage of sitcoms that we haven’t had in a while?

It really feels good because I grew up on live studio audiences also. I remember watching “The Jeffersons” and “Good Times” when you could hear people talking in the audience. When the show first started off, we thought about single-cam, and then we changed. We went through a few writers, and my last writer decided, “Hey, she should be in front of a live studio audience, she’s a comedian.” At first I thought I really couldn’t do it, but I’m a comic, all we need is an audience. You give us an audience, that’s energy. I really loved the audience being there, just playing with them. They allow you to know what’s funny and what’s not funny right away.

I’m 50 years old and I grew up on that type of TV, and to be the first TV show to shoot in front of a live studio audience in Atlanta with a sitcom, I’m happy. Hopefully we’re bringing multi-cam back, ’cause it was dead for a while, everybody went to canned laughter. You can tell the difference between canned laughter and real laughter. When we first came back, everybody was like, “Nah, this is canned laughter,” and I’m like, “No, these are people out here laughing,” to the point where we turn our cameras around sometimes. Thank God for social media, because we record and we go live a lot, and people can see it’s a live studio audience. I think the audience has grown from the first season. The third season, we was turning people away. That also really put a smile on our face, to say, “This is what people was missing.”

Where do you get your funny bone from? Where did it start?

I would say my mom, now that I look back at my mother. She was very funny, but I’ve always just been the person that would say stuff other people wouldn’t say, like they would think it, but they would be too scared to say it. 

I remember when I first put my son in Little League, and the coach had his son there, but the coach’s son always played in the starting position. I just told him, “We know your son sucks, and he wouldn’t be the pitcher if you wasn’t the daddy.” Everybody was like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe she said that,” I said, “But everybody was thinking it, I could see it on y’all face,” and they would laugh with honesty. I think mine comes with just being honest, and it just happened to fall out of my mouth funny, but 99% of the time I’m just being honest.

Do you see a difference between performing for a live studio audience for TV and performing for your stand-up sets?

The only difference is I’m reading lines from a paper, but it’s all comedy. I cut a foolon my show and I get to ad-lib. Some of the most precious moments are just stuff that just fell out of my mouth. I’ll give you an example, like I don’t know if you watched Season 2 when the daughter was eating cake, and I stuck my finger in her mouth and I ate it. I remember just standing there saying, “What would a Black mama do?” and I was like, “This is what I would do,” and we lost it. By the time I got that cake out of her mouth and walked away with it, everybody was like, “Did she just do it?” There was just cream on the side of her face, and I wiped it and ate it because I was supposed to have been on a diet. Just moments like that when I’m ad libbing, and it’s all the same like standup, I just love it. I would do a multi-cam any day over a single-cam, and I ain’t never did a single-cam.

You’ve been so vulnerable and unapologetic about the way that you go about telling your story about how you came up. How did you get to a point, if it was a challenge, to even become that raw and real about your own story, and be able to be true to that in such a real way that resonates with your audience?

I just think, I’ve said this a million times, when you can laugh at what you’ve been through, then you got control over it. When you stay mad about what people have done for you, that anger would control you, it brings on depression, tears. I don’t have time to be sitting around crying. I’m 50 years old. I’ve forgiven the people who harmed me, who hurt me, who molested me, who treated me wrong, and I’m living. 

A lot of those people are still living too, but I think the only reason why I can move on is because I’m comfortable with what I’ve been through. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, I want you to find out a way to be comfortable with what you’ve been through, so you can have a smile on your face. I’m not ashamed of nothing that I went through. One time my husband asked me, “If you could change anything, what would you change?” I said, “Not a damn thing,” and I had a baby by a married man at 14. Sometimes I just truly believe that you’re chosen for a certain situation.

Maybe I needed to go through all of this so I can let people know, no matter what you go through in life, you can laugh about it, ’cause I did not see me being a comedian in my damn future, I thought I was going to be forever buying bootleg shit off the street and stealing. To me, you’ve got to forgive and move on, I cannot hold a grudge. I can literally cuss you out and be like, “You want to go out to eat with me?” ’cause when I say what I have to say, it’s over, let’s go. Ain’t no sense in me sitting there being mad at you and not speaking to you for two weeks, and rolling my eyes two weeks in a row. That’s a lot of exercise in my head that I don’t want to do.

A lot of comedians have talked about the healing power of their craft. Through episodes about baby daddy drama, hair or other real moments, you’ve mentioned finding healing. Are there any highlights in Season 3 that feel like healing?

The first two seasons was really heavy but truthful, but funny. This is more of a light season, like we can really kick back. It’s more me trying to become a comedian than what I went through as a woman, as a comic. Women catch it hard in this damn job, so it’s just really put on display what I went through. It’s just a fun season, it’s not as heavy, I don’t even think we have a cliffhanger this year. 

People be like, “Ms. Pat, your cliffhangers are killing me, oh my God.” I think just a mild season where people just sit back and laugh and enjoy, and to me it’s one of the funniest seasons.

What is the difference in how you approach comedy now versus at the beginning of the show? 

It took five years of, “We don’t know,” or a yes then a no, but I never really invested all of my heart and I didn’t invest a whole lot into the show. I wanted the show to happen, but I always knew that I didn’t have control of it. Somebody bought the show and I work for them, so I invest 100% into my stand-up, that’s what I own, that’s what I control. The stand-up has went through the roof because of the show, so I can’t thank BET+ enough for that. It brought me a whole new audience, which was Black people, because before that my audience was Caucasians, and to see them all mixed in now, it really puts a smile on my face because I’m talking about real events that happened in my life.

I’m African American, and you can sit there and see us — old white man laughing and a 20-year-old Black man — that mean we all go through the same crap in life. With the TV show, it elevated the comedy career just so much.

Who are your comedic inspirations that you would like to work with, who you haven’t worked with yet, especially if there are any women in comedy that are on that list?

Sommore — actually I did an interview with her today, [I’d] love to work with her. I opened for Sheryl Underwood early on in my career. I would like to work with Chelsea Handler, I don’t think I ever worked with Big Les [Leslie Jones] either, I’ve never been on a show with her; I would like to work for her also. My biggest comedian influence would have to be Richard Pryor, who I would love to work with as a male is Dave Chappelle, never worked with him, I’ve never worked with Kevin [Hart] either.

Season 3 of "The Ms. Pat Show" premieres on BET+ on Feb. 23.

Do you see movies in your future? Is that something that you want to do?

That’s definitely something I want to do, yeah, I want to create them too, I would love to create comedies too. Working on a few now, but that’s what I really want to do, I want to create a lot of stuff that I can be in, ’cause I like ownership. If you just throw me in something, the residual might not be as good if I created it myself.

You do a good job of making sure that basically nobody f**ks with your story. It seems like you have a lot of control over your own story. A lot of times, it feels like Black stories are for the consumption of others rather than for our agency, for us to tell them in the way that we see fit. How do you decide what you can and cannot compromise over when it comes to telling your story in an authentic way be it on the show or a stand-up special?

I would not let you make me unfunny. I know how to be funny, I’ve been funny a long f**king time in my own way, and I think that’s what people love about me. I don’t have a problem with walking away. Money will never rule me ’cause I always say it, “You can never give me as much as I could steal from you,” so I don’t mind losing. If you take something away from me, it wasn’t for me. If I create something, I just ask you to let me create. I don’t have a problem with taking notes, but when it don’t fit and it don’t work, then I’m not going to compromise my project to make you comfortable. 

I think I ran into a lot of that during the first season with the stories that we told, because sometimes you would get pushed back. Even in the second season with the abortion episode, and the daddy grabbed me and they was like, “Oh no, Terry can’t grab you.” I said, “Let me get beat, I know how to get beat, I know how to handle myself, because people are going to know it’s real, they’re going to feel it.” Season 1 with me and Tami arguing, oh my God, I thought people was going to lose their damn mind, two Black women talking to each other like that? It’s an argument with two sisters. 

In that event, what I did with Tami was true to a person in my life. That incident happened, so I wanted the audience to feel it, and they felt it. I got so many inboxes and emails about, “Thank you, thank you.” Nobody wants fake TV, at least if you’re dealing with me, I don’t want fake TV, I can only give you what feels real. That’s all I know. When we created “The Ms. Pat Show,” we go joke after joke after joke, and if you heard it, we ain’t going to do it. That’s what people appreciate, so I’m not going to compromise who I am for your network, I won’t do it.

I’m a stand-up. The greatest part about being a stand-up, I can take my fat ass back to the stage when y’all done with me, and I’ll still make me some money. That’s the greatest part about it. I’m not waiting on the next movie role, all I’m waiting on is the club to say, “You’re booked.” I have a fan base, I can go do a fucking show at a bar and eat for the rest of my life, that’s all I give a f**k about.

Oops, I’m sorry, that’s all I care about.

Girl, it’s OK, you can cuss.

Nah, I don’t want to curse. But I’m not going to be ruled by people that don’t know what it is to be me.

What do you want your legacy to be?

A prime example of never giving up. It’s not about how you start. I’m an eighth grade dropout. Sometimes, I’ll open my bank account, I’ll be like, “Shit, I didn’t even steal this money.” Just never giving up, believing in yourself. So many people didn’t believe in me, so many people. I mean, I’ve been married with the same man for 31 years, and I remember when I first said I’m a comedian, he said, “Take your ass to Walmart.” I was working at Walmart, then I went to go work at General Motors, and he was like, “You’re going to quit a job for ... You don’t even make no money as a comic.” I said, “It’s something in this, and I’m going to go find out.” It rocked my marriage, and I just told him, I said, “Look, I love you, but if you leave me, you going to take your two fat-ass kids with you ’cause I already got some kids, so go on and take your kids with you, ’cause I don’t want to raise no more.” We’ve been rocking out ever since. He retired last year. 

Believe in yourself, ’cause ain’t nobody going to believe in you the way you believe in you, ’cause there was so many times I was supposed to quit and I didn’t; there was so many times I was supposed to give up, I didn’t. If I had, I probably wouldn’t be where I’m at today. I just tell people all the time, “If you don’t do nothing, if you feel like you got a talent or you want to do something, forget what everybody else say, keep trying it until it catch on or you die.”

Season 3 of “The Ms. Pat Show” premieres on Feb. 23 on BET+.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.