Lil Rel Howery feints ending his second HBO special a couple different times, in a few different ways. He does a joke about going to a Benihana in Atlanta and watching a Black chef refuse to play along with the theater of elaborate table-side cooking. Then there’s a pause and a bit of self-reflection. He’s excited, he says, and adds that he might edit this part out later — he’s playing Santa Claus in a movie, and he’s grateful that he’s being given roles that are fun and fulfilling. There’s a tenuous transition onto the topic of Al Sharpton, which then leads to an Al Sharpton anecdote. It’s fun but it’s small, and it doesn’t have the kind of big explosive-joke ending that screams, “I’m the closer of this special.†The audience ripples in response, pleased but generally calm. Howery pauses again, then says, “I think I’m gonna get the fuck out of here. It’s been about an hour.†This gets a bigger laugh than the Sharpton joke, but Howery doesn’t end here, either. Next comes a little premise about how people don’t want to work anymore, and an almost perversely low-key joke about how everyone wants to start a business instead, but that the businesses make no sense. There’s a tiny Rel act-out as a man who’s decided to sell Popsicles — but only grape. “Only grape,†he chuckles to himself. Another pause. He puts the mic back in the stand. “All right! Well, uh …†He pauses, buttoning his jacket. The audience, reading this as yet another joking attempt to end the special, laughs in recognition. But this time it really is the end, not with a bang but with a moment of appreciation.
The ending of I Said It. Y’all Thinking It. is the clearest encapsulation of what this special is and how it works, and the undeniable appeal of Lil Rel Howery. He stands and looks at the audience for a moment and explains that he doesn’t want to end on a big, loud punch line. He wants to end quietly, he tells them, so that he can take a minute to appreciate where he is. He is in Chicago, playing a theater he’s walked past hundreds of times in his life. He is grateful. He’s emotional. He’s deliberately, counterintuitively pumping the brakes on the raucous, buoyant energy of this special so he can make everyone stop and consider exactly where they are and how good it feels to be there. This is not a special about painstaking joke balance or stunning, genre-defining narrative precision. It’s a special about feeling very, very good.
Howery’s previous HBO hour, 2019’s Live in Crenshaw, is one of those comedy specials that sticks in the mind thanks to both its glorious direction and Rel’s storytelling prowess. There are several extended stories about his family in that hour, including one long, remarkable joke about organizing a family funeral. To some extent, I Said It. Y’all Thinking It. also plays with several iterations of a particular idea. Howery’s getting older, so there are jokes about the pleasure of having a settled relationship, getting a good night’s sleep, rolling around his neighborhood with his old friends, and how little he envies his friend with a much younger girlfriend. That last joke is representative of Howery’s always infectious character work: He embodies that young, energetic girlfriend character with a pursed lip, a raised voice, and a hand gesture, and yet she’s instantly there onstage. There’s no menace to that act-out, in spite of how easy it might be to mock this woman. Likewise, there’s no resentment or bitterness in his jokes on aging more generally, because he feels no sense of loss about it. He’s befuddled by why his friend would want to live on that wavelength. It sounds exhausting. Meanwhile he, Rel, is perfectly happy to be exactly where he is.
There are certainly some personal disclosures tucked into all that material on getting older, and occasionally the subtext of it — Howery’s mental health, his sense of peace — becomes more explicit. There are a few references to going to therapy, including one notably poignant joke about how his therapist has been helping Howery deal with the grief of his mother’s death. On the whole, though, this special is less about describing Howery’s sense of happiness and more about expressing what that feels like to him, then reflecting that joy back to the crowd. So instead of a heady, mournful, challenging set of themes and variations, I Said It. Y’all Thinking It. is more like Howery as a pop-cultural jukebox, channeling and embodying a range of songs, celebrities, movie references, and familiar cultural touchstones from current events. He has an extensive close read of a recent news story about a Brooklyn pastor who was robbed in the middle of a church-service livestream. There’s a long joke that’s just Howery explaining and performing parts of the movie Lean on Me. He has another one about various Verzuz battles, including a bit on the Bone Thugs-n-Harmony appearance that allows him to settle into a favorite trope of his: the goofiness of performing the harmony lines from one member of a group who’s not singing the melody.
Superfically, that material all falls into some obvious categories. They’re demonstrations of Howery’s age because they reflect the culture he consumes. They’re pop-culture jokes, largely referential and light. He gets to play characters, something he loves. He sings in many of these jokes, which works because his singing voice is good enough to be recognizable but just amateurish enough to still be very funny. But the primary shared quality of all those pop-culture references is that they make Howery happy, and he feels confident enough about the crowd who’s come to see him in his hometown that he knows they’ll make them happy too. These are the jokes you’d tell to your best friends, the people you know will have seen the viral video you’re describing, people who are already halfway toward laughter by the time you say the first word.
“I go to therapy every Tuesday. I’m just a happy motherfucker,†Howery says in the special’s closing minutes. “This is what happiness looks like.†I Said It. Y’all Thinking It. does not reach the bravura genre-defining heights of his last special, but he’s absolutely right. This is what happiness looks like, and it’s a delight to get swept along with him.