Onstage, Epps convincingly plays that rascal who has charmed his way out of trouble. Sometimes, his charisma is a crutch. His writing can coast, especially early in this hour when he seems to be at his most generic, doing pandering or familiar jokes about prison rape, fat girls and code-switching. His most surprising moments are not punchlines, but when he says something that could in different hands come off as serious, like when he mentions he’s been pretending to dislike white people for 40 years. There’s also a moodier side to him that you get peeks of in his stand-up but that probably deserves fuller expression.
His personal material is where this is most evident, especially in his commitment to digging into his own flaws, to celebrating the screw-ups in life. He pulls this off with an unexpected, even religious conviction. How is this for a comically counterintuitive defense of doing the wrong thing: “Give God a chance to keep working with you.”
Like Dave Chappelle, Epps makes a habit of scampering across the stage after a punchline and hitting the microphone. But there’s something sweetly innocent about his version, often accompanied by a wide smile. Where he takes on more weight is in his act-outs of other characters. Deft at setting scenes, he’s a fantastic mimic. Epps has long been compared to his fellow Midwesterner Richard Pryor, who imbued his finest work with a startlingly human vulnerability. The swagger there was only a setup to the joke, something that many of his successors missed. But not Epps. You can hear the influence most overtly in a joke about how cocaine affects your sex life, when he gives his penis a voice.
Epps beat out several other comics, including Marlon Wayans, for the title role in a much-anticipated biopic about Richard Pryor. It was supposed to be the role that pushed Epps to the next level of fame. But the director, Lee Daniels, dropped out in 2016, and the film never moved beyond the development stage. Its nonexistence itself became famous, the subject of talk-show appearances. We might have gotten a peek into why the film fell apart after Epps did play Pryor in a short but impressive cameo on the HBO series “Winning Time,” where the character gives advice to the Lakers great Magic Johnson on the perils of fame. Pryor’s widow tweeted out her disapproval.
At 53, Epps is part of the last generation that believes in a stigma against selling out, as the special’s title suggests. In the closing joke, he refers to his past resentment of comics like Hart. There’s unspoken context here: In 2018, Epps said that Hart was not funny. That earned a sharp response from Hart, kicking off a feud that simmered for years.