Katt Williams

The comedian whose Money Mike, Slickback voice and HBO Pimp Chronicles made the pimp persona a mainstream comic register in the 2000s.

Katt Williams is a stand-up comedian and actor whose breakthrough and much of his early screen identity came through pimp characters. This record concerns those portrayals, not his wider career. His first major film role was Money Mike in Friday After Next (New Line, released November 22, 2002, directed by Marcus Raboy), the third film in Ice Cube's Friday series. Money Mike is a diminutive, permed, flamboyantly dressed shopkeeper who runs a clothing store called "Pimps and Hos" in the strip mall where Ice Cube's and Mike Epps's characters work as security guards. A November 2002 blackfilm.com review called him "the flamboyant pimp turned retail entrepreneur." Bishop Don Magic Juan, the Chicago pimp turned Players Ball impresario, appears in the film as himself, and Williams said on Club Shay Shay in January 2024 that he had told the producers not to cast an actor as a pimp when "an actual pimp" was available.

Williams has said he wrote Money Mike's lines and designed the hair, and in the same interview told Shannon Sharpe that an early draft had Money Mike raped in a bathroom; he said he had the scene cut because "rape is never funny," a claim reported by NBC News.

Two years after Friday After Next he voiced A Pimp Named Slickback in Aaron McGruder's animated The Boondocks (Adult Swim, 2005–2008), a character who insists on his full name and dispenses pimp philosophy to the Freeman boys. Slickback has his own record in this archive at A Pimp Named Slickback; the point here is that one persona ran across live action, animation and stand-up. On HBO's Katt Williams: The Pimp Chronicles Pt. 1, taped at the Atlanta Civic Center on April 15, 2006 and released September 16, 2006, he performed in the Money Mike register, complete with the perm and suits, and the special's own billing identified him as "Katt Williams (aka Money Mike)." DVD Talk's David Walker summarised the act as "he is, after all, a pimp," meaning the character, not the man. American Hustle (2007) and It's Pimpin' Pimpin' (recorded in Washington, D.C., released on HBO in 2008 and as a Warner Bros. album on January 27, 2009) extended the brand name even as the material shifted toward politics. In Norbit (2007) he and Eddie Griffin played Lord Have Mercy and Pope Sweet Jesus, retired pimps who run a rib shack; Williams told MovieWeb the role required research because "that world is so foreign to us."

That last remark sits awkwardly beside what he has said since. On Club Shay Shay he described a period in Oklahoma when, as a young door-to-door salesman, he met a group of women in the sex trade and stayed, and said the experience "certainly helps me in formulating Money Mike" and Slickback. On Michelle Obama's IMO podcast (December 3, 2025) he went further, saying the women's pimp had been killed and that he "volunteered for the pimp position." The women are unnamed in his telling. No independent record corroborates the episode; the archive files it as the performer's own account, offered decades later in a comic frame. What is documented is the cultural work: Williams took the mack figure of the 1970s films and Don Magic Juan's Players Ball and made it a family-film cameo, a cartoon and a cable special, for an audience that laughed with the persona rather than at its costs.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Micah Sierra Williams

BORN
Cincinnati, Ohio, September 2, 1971

STATUS
Living

ERA
2002–present (pimp-persona screen work)

ASSOCIATED WITH
Friday After Next; The Boondocks; HBO; Norbit; Bishop Don Magic Juan; Ice Cube

STANDING
Documented