Ali Siddiq starred in his own half-hour Comedy Central special back in 2016, and this month he returns to the network with his first hourlong special titled It’s Bigger Than These Bars. Comedy Central announced today that Siddiq’s special, which was taped at Texas’s Bell County Jail, will premiere Friday, February 23rd at 11:00pm. Here’s more from the press release:
Using his signature storytelling style, Ali recounts hilarious experiences from both incarceration and freedom and conducts conversations with jailers and the jailed about life in lockup. Encouraging and inspiring his inmate audience, Siddiq turns hard time into hearty laughs with stories about everything from uncomfortable prison nudity to the time he doused himself in baby oil and refused to leave his cell.
“A lot of comics will come backstage before a show and say, ‘How’s the crowd?’ The reason I never ask that is because I came from a horrible crowd,†Siddiq told us 2016. “I came from a prison crowd. I wasn’t doing standup in a structured place. It just happened to happen two or three times a day. I was doing two or three shows a day because I was working in the laundry with 15 people and I was the one who was saying stuff.†Check out a trailer for the special below: