Ali Siddiq sits on stage, mic in hand, in front of a theater full of people, looking at the ground. He starts repeating the same six numbers a few times: 679346. “This is a number I know better than my phone number; I know better than my social security number. … I remember the day that I thought that I forgot it. I was happy—and, then, I remembered.”
This is how he begins Pins & Needles, the final installment in The Domino Effect, a four-part, one-man show that can currently be found on Siddiq’s YouTube channel. This quartet of specials has Siddiq tracing his evolution from young drug dealer (or, as he calls it, “street pharmaceutical rep”) to convicted felon (his inmate identification being those aforementioned numbers) to stand-up comedian.
The first part, released in 2022 and recorded in Houston—Siddiq grew up in the Bayou City’s Hillcroft area and now lives in the suburbs of Pearland—has accumulated over 13 million views. The final installment, recorded in Washington, D.C., and released in June, has gotten 2 million.
“My push is not to be in the industry on their terms—only mine.”
Siddiq, 50, isn’t your standard stand-up who instantly hits you with jokes and one-liners. He’s really a storyteller, humorously recalling his life on the streets and in the slammer. His knack for anecdotal humor has already gotten him noticed by the New York Times (which called him comedy’s “Best Storyteller” in 2023). And it’s not just the press; other comics are giving him props for bypassing streamers like Netflix and Max and bankrolling and distributing his own specials. Wild ’n Out alum Affion Crockett told the Los Angeles Times that he commended Siddiq for “going directly to YouTube and dropping an hour-long special every quarter, it feels like.”
After talking about his prison experiences on the Comedy Central stand-up show This Is Not Happening in 2015, Siddiq began delving more into his past life behind bars. He got with Comedy Central again in 2018 for It’s Bigger Than These Bars, an hour-long special filmed at Bell County Jail in Belton.
With the Domino series, Siddiq is basically using his own life story as a cautionary tale. Near the end of the third special, First Day of School, Siddiq describes an epiphany while being moved to another correctional facility. “I got a problem with all of this shit,” he tells the audience. “’Cuz when they put me on the chain, now I am reflecting on things and information I know. This is judicial slavery.”
But don’t get him wrong. After serving six years of a 15-year sentence for “delivery of a controlled substance” at the Ruben M. Torres Unit in Hondo and hanging in the same tank as hardcore criminals, he believes that prisons are also a necessary evil—and he holds himself accountable for the actions that got him incarcerated.
“It’s hard for me to say, ‘Oh, I’m against the criminal justice system!’ when I believe that the mass majority of us don’t deal with the criminal justice system if you’re not doing or putting yourself in the place of crime,” Siddiq told the Texas Observer during a July Zoom call. “And I know people say, ‘Ali, why would you say that?’ Because I was a drug dealer. … I used to be inside of an institution, and I used to listen to people say why they were in there and I was like, ‘Yeah, you in there! You’re supposed to be!’”
As he explains in his first special, if it wasn’t for his years living with his drug-dealing dad and getting the itch to hustle so he could buy tracksuits and other fresh gear, he probably wouldn’t have ended up in jail. “I wish that I was really strong enough at this time not to be out there, because I never had to sell drugs because my mother had a job,” he said. “I’m very forthcoming about how I didn’t have to do none of this.”
When he got locked up in 1991, New Jack City and Boyz n the Hood were making money at the box office. Houston’s own Geto Boys scored a rap hit that same year with the urban crime parable “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” This practically marked the beginning of pop culture’s inundation with Black entertainers creating pain-filled pulp that makes both Black and white audiences believe those are the only Black stories to be told. This doesn’t sit well with Siddiq.
“There’s this stigma in the Black community that is very problematic,” said Siddiq. “If I feel that I gotta come up from struggle, that’s the only way you’re gonna respect me being up—if I came from struggle. And, then, the other one is everybody in the Black community is threatened by crime. We’re just plagued with crime, and that’s what you gotta do to come up. You gotta hustle to come up. So, why was I the only person among my friends that was selling drugs? Why did I know that TSU [Texas Southern University] had a plethora of Black people there that were not selling drugs?”
As much as Siddiq regales his audience with hilarious accounts of coming up in the drug game and, eventually, getting locked up for it (his experiences recapping Martin episodes for other inmates without television privileges is what got him doing stand-up), he can also drop some unexpected emotional moments as well. During his second special, Loss, Siddiq tearfully breaks down as he tells the audience how losing his 8-year-old sister Ashley to a sudden illness turned him into a savage. “It’s the worst goddamn shit ever,” he says in the special. “I am so fucking dead inside after this shit, I am a fucking monster in the street. You can’t say a fucking word to me because I would fucking blow your brains out.”
The tears dropped down his shirt as he told the Observer how emotional it was for him to discuss all that in front of an audience, which included family and friends. The funniest response at the special taping came from one of his old street buddies. Siddiq recounted, “He come and tell me, ‘Bro, I ain’t even gonna lie to you, man. I oughta shoot you in your gotdamn head. You got me muhfuckin’ crying out here in front of my wife.’”
Siddiq is continuing his mission of racking up specials for his YouTube channel. (He’ll be in Dallas shooting two in October.) You could say his years hustling as both a drug dealer and an incarcerated, aspiring stand-up made him the independent, take-no-shit funnyman he is today.
“My push is not to be in the industry on their terms—only mine,” he said. “If I do something, then you can trust and believe—you can bet your bottom dollar on it—that I got the upper hand. … I don’t need ’em, and I keep proving to other artists that they don’t need ’em if you really depend on yourself. There’s only a gatekeeper if you’re trying to get in somebody else’s gate.”
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