Brad Williams has a little joke for you. As a matter of fact, he’s got several jokes about his diminutive size.
Williams, who appears Saturday at Hawaiian Brian’s, was born with achondroplasia, a type of dwarfism. Standing 4 feet 4 inches tall, he’s hit it big with his off-color, observational comedy using his lack of height to poke fun at the foibles and flaws of others.
It’s brought him appearances on all the late-night talk shows, a popular podcast called "About Last Night" and the top-rated comedy special on Comedy Central this year. The network wants him to do another special, and he’s happy to oblige.
"I need people to come out to the show in Hawaii so I can get that last chunk of the special ready," he said. "If you’ve seen the special, don’t think you’re going to come and see the same hour because that’s absolutely not the case. It’s all brand-new stuff."
He got some material during his last visit to Hawaii in 2012, when he created a scene in the waves off Waikiki.
"The beach pretty much shut down when they saw a dwarf on a surfboard," he said. "Outrigger boats stopped leaving, pigs stopped spinning on the luau and they all looked at me like, ‘What’s this?’
"The craziest part about it was there was a dog that was surfing about 20 yards from me, and no one was staring at the dog. I looked at my surfing instructor and was like, ‘How come no one’s staring at the dog?’ And he says, ‘Oh, Stanley? He’s here every Thursday.’ Apparently it was no big deal to see a dog on a surfboard. But a dwarf? Holy crap, stop the presses."
COMEDIAN BRAD WILLIAMS Where: Hawaiian Brian’s, 1680 Kapiolani Blvd. When: 7 p.m. Saturday Cost: $20-$40 Info: flavorus.com or 855-235-2867 |
Because he lives in Los Angeles, Williams has been able to keep up with board sports, though he’s more into stand-up paddling. "I have the arms of a Tyrannosaurus rex, so I’m not very good at the old paddling thing, I can’t get that much speed going. I use the oar and it works out just fine."
That pretty much describes life in general for the 31-year-old comedian these days, though it wasn’t always so. He remembers being frustrated as a teenager trying to get dateswhen tall girls "weren’t ready" to go out with someone like him.
"I realized I couldn’t just go up to a girl and have my looks do everything for me," he said. "I had to advance my skill set. I had to develop other personality traits. I had to get funny and that helped. And I had to get rich, and that really helped.
"And I had to realize that a lot of women, when they look at me, there’s a select number, a low percentage of the population of women who, when they see me, they go, ‘Ooh — bucket list.’ And I’m all right with that."
He’s now dating a Chinese-American woman who isn’t much taller than Williams. He didn’t have the same luck with Samoan women. Williams thinks Samoans are good people, but he got set up with a Samoan dwarf "and she was 5’8." That wasn’t going to work out at all."
Williams had done some acting in school and was a member of an improv comedy troupe when he got his big break at a comedy club where Carlos Mencia was performing. Mencia made a joke about dwarfs, and everyone sitting near Williams was afraid to laugh. Mencia wound up inviting Williams up to the microphone, where the two exchanged wisecracks.
"I thought, ‘Wow, that was me just going off the top, not even planning stuff out,’" he said. " I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll try this out,’ and the high I got from making a live audience laugh right there was like nothing I’d ever seen. … I haven’t stopped since. I was 19 when that happened, and I’ve never had another job," Williams said.
He gets a mixed reaction from other dwarfs.
"Some absolutely love me. Some don’t like me at all," he said. "Most of the ones who don’t like me haven’t actually seen the act. They think I’m just on stage exploiting myself, and they don’t know what I’m talking about. They don’t know the message I’m putting out about the positive aspects of the condition. There’s a lot of dwarfs that have come to see me perform and said, ‘I had one opinion about what you do, and then I saw your show and now it’s the complete opposite.’
"It’s fine. It’s always fun to sort of change someone’s mind that way."