“I’m a fucking happy person about achieving what I said that I was going to achieve. I could die and be like, ‘Yo, man, I fucking did it, bro.’”
Photo: Allie Leepson + Jesse McClary
To start every stand-up set, comedian Ali Siddiq sits and waits for the audience to calm down. He’s got a lot to tell them, and he’s not in a rush. For nearly two decades, the Houston native’s material focused on observations on a fairly standard set of topics: growing up, parenting, dating, dealing with white people. That changed in January 2015, when Siddiq appeared on Comedy Central’s web series This Is Not Happening and talked about his prison experience for the first time. In the set, he walks the audience through the day he was…
