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“I felt like a king,” Lil Rel says, still half-groggy in a suite at the Royal Sonesta on an unseasonably nippy August morning in his native Chicago. The night before he had taken the stage to do an hour of new stand-up comedy at the famed Chicago Theater with a king’s entrance, backed by pre-recorded chants of “Rel” that crescendoed to a deafening buzz, a reference to the rapper Lil Flip’s classic track “Game Over.” It didn’t take long for the audience to start chanting in unison at the bespectacled, 42-year-old returning hometown hero standing before them, clad in a red and black suit—an homage to his comedy GOAT Eddie Murphy as well as Bobby Brown, who he considers the king to “dark-skinned brothers” of a certain age: “I’m not even lying to you,” he says. “I googled Bobby Brown outfits. It was between three of them.” Rel tore the house down in his two back-to-back sold-out shows: Walking onstage for his second is when he had the realization that “none of these motherfuckers are better than me.”
His impetus for doing a special came from feeling left out. He felt constantly aware of the absence of his name in “the conversation.” From the social-media-prompt memes that only make room for a quadrant of faces when they ask who’s the best or who’s gotta go, to decidedly offline but still culturally relevant barbershop discussions, his name wasn’t coming up in the debate over Best Comic Out debate, despite a solid 15 years of working the comedy circuit before Get Out blew up his acting career. Or at least, his name wasn’t coming up often enough for his liking. “Motherfuckers forgot how they met me,” Rel says matter-of-factly, his voice reduced to a hoarse low register.
Rel (whose real name is Milton Howery, or “Terry” to his family to avoid confusion with the three other Miltons in it) delivered one hell of a reintroduction: The two shows were filmed and combined to create his new HBO special, I said it. Y’all thinking it, which debuted this morning on HBO Max. “You saw my full skill set [last night],” he asserts in the Sonesta, assessing his performance. “I’ve [never] displayed it in [my previous] specials. For some reason yesterday, that shit happened. Like how I can just make up a song on the spot,” he says, referencing a bit that hinges on a pitch-perfect Bone Thugs N Harmony impression, “or the ants.” (A top joke of the night, it paints success as just having a different, higher class of insect invading your house.) His previous HBO special, 2019’s Crenshaw, showcased his knack for telling fully-fleshed out, longform stories with multiple characters and payoffs, with almost 45 minutes dedicated to a family member’s funeral that he reluctantly paid for. But this new hour has everything from ripped-from-the-headlines jokes (about the reemergence of polio), to a first-person account of the moment Verzuz jumped the shark, to, yes, his take on The Slap.
Anyone watching Rel’s back-to-back tapings would be struck by just how much of his show is created in the moment. Televised specials are usually the end result of a comic painstakingly crafting and testing a set before audiences, making sure every punchline lands when the cameras roll. Rarely do comedians use valuable taping time to remove the safety net and just riff. And yet here was Rel, inspired by a random yell from an audience member to reference the Morgan Freeman-starring Black Movie Classic Lean on Me, and then digress into a full five-minute bit about the film, from impressions of some of the ridiculously intense characters to leading the crowd in a sing-a-long of the title song. “None of that shit was planned,” he proudly says about his many improvs. Rel commands the stage masterfully, but casually, with no hint of grandiose self-importance or self-doubt. It’s as if he just wandered into his family’s living room to find a full couch, so he decided he might as well entertain them. Decades of performing have given him the ease to craft fully developed jokes on a whim that keep the crowd roaring.
Frazier Tharpe
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