Ms. Pat's favorite comedian/storytellers:

Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle

The three people Ms. Pat would most like to meet (circa 2010):

Ice Cube, Whitney Houston and Michael Vick

Talk about your redemption story. According to her count, Ms. Pat, government name Patricia Williams, has been shot twice (once in the nipple, the other in the back of the head) and hit by a dump truck once. She gave birth to two kids by age 15 (by a married man seven years her senior). She did a year in jail for drug trafficking (at one point, her "trap" — the corner on which she regularly sold drugs — was just feet from her daughter's elementary school). She was baptized more than 50 times (her mom was running a scam on area churches, which usually sent their new members home with food and cash).

But then Pat was saved. Not by a Horatio Alger sugar daddy or an Extreme Makeover or Jesus. No, it was comedy that gave Pat riches where she had rags. And also a good husband. And weirdly enough, her welfare case worker, who told Pat that her stories of unrelenting gloom and misery were actually kind of funny and that she ought to be a comedian. And so she tried telling jokes, just straight-up, setup-then-punchline jokes. And those might've worked at an open mic, but it was when she started talking about her own life that she really started to heal. She took power away from gruesome tales of gun violence and public indecency and mindless homophobia by laughing at their absurdity. She put distance between the comedian and survivor she is and the lost child that she was.

Born and raised, for better and often worse, in Atlanta, Pat moved with her husband and kids eight years ago to Plainfield. And she's steadily, assiduously worked on her comedy since then, haunting open mic nights, sitting in the back during the weekends, answering phones at Morty's. She got a big bump from two of the city's best friends to comedians, Mr. Bob and Mr. Tom, who first had her on their show four years ago and haven't hesitated to invite her back. Opening gigs for Katt Williams and Arnez J. gave her a taste of the big time.

And then, last fall, her fans bugged some podcasters enough to get her some bookings. First was Talkin' Shit with Eddie Ifft, and then the big boys. She kicked it on The Joe Rogan Experience, visited Marc Maron's cat-filled garage and landed in Ari Shaffir's Skeptic Tank. Shaffir liked her so much that he asked her to try out for his new Comedy Central show — and Pat did so well that she appeared on This Is Not Happening in February. And then Maron invited Pat to do a bit part in his IFC TV show, though she had some trouble with her lines on what was her very first acting gig.No matter. The producers gave her latitude to say the lines in her own voice — "You want me to say it Black?"

she asked them — which could make for the liveliest turn by a customer care representative in recent history.

But what was that smell in the air as the NUVO crew drove through the winding streets of a Plainfield subdivision marooned in the cornfields? Well, it wasn't basic cable. Nope, that was the reek of full-on network television. It was a good thing we scheduled our interview and photo shoot for early afternoon, because the Last Comic Standing team was on the way to tape a profile segment with Pat, who will compete in the show's ninth season, premiering in May. All the better, because it meant that she had her Atlanta-based makeup artist on the ground, ready with touchups. We scored a couple hours of her increasingly valuable time as family members puttered around her.

Click here (or head to page 4) for outtakes from our interview with Ms. Pat that didn't make it into the print edition of NUVO.

NUVO: What's it like to try to make it from Indianapolis? It's not a major center for comedy, but there are some clubs. Ms. Pat: But there's nowhere you can really hone your skills. Most open mics here are once a month. You've got to sign up; you only get three minutes. And the jokes: White boys and their cats just do something to me. I'll be like, 'Can you go out and do something serious like jump off a bridge, make a baby and not take care of it? Real problems — not your cat problems.' Indianapolis humbled me so much, because I came from Atlanta, where if you don't like somebody in this spot, you can say, 'Fuck 'em,' and go over somewhere else. You can't just slap somebody running an open mic in Indianapolis, because you might not be able to get back up — and there are really only two or three open mics. And at that time, the owner of Morty's — the first owner — was just such a dick. He did everything he could to run me away. One time he let me host, and then he was like, 'You're just too ghetto. My 7 o'clock white crowd isn't gonna get you.' I'm like, 'When it's funny, everybody can get it — if you have a sense of humor.' Ten years ago I would've beat his ass and dragged him all around the club. But thank God and diabetes, I grew up. I just said, 'Okay, thank you for the opportunity.' But another manager who worked there, Avery Dellinger, pulled me to the side to say, 'Ms. Pat, don't worry about that guy. I'll help you.' At that time I was just a raw comic; I didn't know how to put nothing together. So Avery took the time to help me, and, eventually, I ended up with my own show at Morty's. It was every Thursday, called Bust a Gut with Ms. Pat. And it was packed! All the little white kids from Purdue used to ride up to hear me talk cold cash shit. It was crazy, because there'd be like 50 little white Purdue kids, studying engineering with their daddy's credit cards, getting tore up on a Thursday night! 'If your daddy knew what you've been doing with this money, he'd kill all of us!' NUVO: Wasn't it a welfare case worker who first told you you were funny, when you were telling awful stories to try to earn her sympathy and get money out of her? Pat: I went to the welfare office to run a scam on her. And she was like, 'Well, you should be a comedian.' I said, 'What are you talking about? A person who tells jokes? I don't have no jokes.' And she was like, 'Yes, you do. This shit is funny. You could be just like Richard Pryor?' And I was like, 'Who the hell is Richard Pryor?' When I started listening to Pryor, he really made me open up on stage to who I was, and not worry about being judged. That's one of the biggest things comics worry about. We want to be liked, and we worry about if you like what we say. But fake fans will be weeded out; the real ones will stick with you, and the fake ones will come and go. He just made me start to be true to who I was. No longer being embarrassed of my past of being a teenage mom, selling drugs; the stuff that I went through to survive. I'm OK with myself now, and a lot of that came from studying Pryor. NUVO: But when you started doing open mics, you weren't talking about your past. What kind of jokes were you doing? Pat: Ghetto Black woman jokes. I was doing female jokes, how about that? I was doing sexual jokes, period jokes, 'I hate my man' jokes; just dumb stuff like that. And I was like, 'This don't even fit me; I have a good man!' Then I started to wean myself away from that, started talking about me, because I thought I was way more interesting than a blowjob joke. NUVO: What was it like the first time you started really talking about yourself on stage? Was that scary? Pat: Really, especially when I started talking about being a drug dealer. It was like if you stood up in front of a bunch of people and took your clothes off. Everybody ain't going to think your navel is sexy. It was eye-opening. I felt like, I shouldn't have done that, ashamed. But people said, 'You've just got to stick to who you are.' And I just kept at it, and I got more comfortable with who I was. It helped to heal also, to come clean with what I've done in my life. The more I talked about it, the more I stopped being ashamed of it, the more I faced what I've gone through, as a 15-year-old parent with two kids by a married man. And when I was in Atlanta, I didn't talk about being shot in the breast; I started talking about that part of my life in Indianapolis. THE YEAR OF PAT On TV: This Is Not Happening on Comedy Central (airing Thursdays, 12:30 a.m.; Pat's episode premiered in late February) Last Comic Standing on NBC (Season Nine premieres May 21) Maron on IFC (Season Three premieres in Spring 2015) On shelves: Rabbit: A Memoir (HarperCollins, due mid-April 2016) On podcasts: WTF with Marc Maron, The Joe Rogan Experience, Talkin' Shit with Eddie Ifft, Ari Shaffir's Skeptic Tank, Bertcast, The CrabFeast with Ryan Sickler & Jay Larson, Your Mom's House [page] NUVO: You were a victim, but at the same time, because of that cycle of violence, you were putting other people in tough situations. Pat: Yes, because I pulled other family members into what I was doing. My cousin ended up going to jail for me. I had a niece that ended up staying in it and becoming a convicted felon. That's what bothered me the most, that they didn't get a chance. I should've been helping them in another way. Instead I pulled them into the lifestyle that I'd known. And that's the cycle of family. Instead of someone saying, 'Hey, let's go this a-way,' everyone just got sucked into that hole. Eventually, I looked around and I was like, 'My kids are going to end up in jail and drop out. I've got to get out of here. There's got to be a better way.' That's when I started to realize I was getting into a cycle and I've got to get out of it. NUVO: You grew up in Atlanta in a bootleg house? Pat: Right, in a bootleg house run by my granddaddy. He sold corn liquor. We grew up there, and we saw a lot. My husband says that's why me and my sisters and brothers don't have a job, because we all learned how to hustle from those incidents. I don't think anybody ever had a career in my family, aside from my husband and now me. Everybody else either sold drugs or stole or hustled. NUVO: What was fun for you then? Pat: Pac-Man. Pac-Man took me away. There was something about going down the street from my granddaddy's house to play that took me away from everything. And that song, Whitney Houston's 'I Believe the Children Are Our Future' ['Greatest Love Of All']. I listened to that thing so often that the tape broke. We tried to glue it back together to keep playing it. That was my escape. NUVO: It was like a message from another world. Pat: I was like, 'Whitney, you don't know where I live. What children are you talking about?' NUVO: But he provided and you had a place to stay, so when he went to jail for shooting a woman, things got a little trickier. Pat: That's when stuff started to crumble a little bit. Granddaddy went to jail when I was eight, and when I was 12, I met my kids' father. Got pregnant when I was 13. Gave birth when I was 14. Where's that birth certificate? I want to get this right. [Pat consults her first child's birth certificate, conveniently located on the kitchen table.] And he was 21. NUVO: And he signed that birth certificate at the hospital. No one cared about the age difference. And they were pretty rough on you at the hospital, right? Pat: It was in the '80s, so teenage pregnancy was running rapid in the inner cities. It was out of control; nobody acted like they cared about it. Nobody was talking to young girls: 'Hey, don't have a baby. This is what birth control is.' I think the women at the hospital knew how hard it was going to be for these young girls who had a baby, because there was no system for that. I think that's why they were so mean. They probably saw it every day. And they probably saw it younger than me. And you had these old guys coming in and signing birth certificates. And nobody did nothing. I was asking myself the other day, 'Why wasn't he arrested? Why wasn't he questioned?' NUVO: Your mom gave the world's worst advice. Pat: She said one time, 'If a man don't hit you, he don't love you.' So I think that's why I took a lot of the crap that I took off my kids' father. I'm thinking every punch is a love punch. But how many times are you going to get your eye stitched up? And I was not only physically, but mentally abused. I'm in my 40s now, and sometimes I still hear stuff. A song can come on the radio, and it can remind me of a situation, and I have to turn it. NUVO: Not to force this comparison, but it seems to me that you've always had an impressive work ethic, whether you were involved in legal or illegal activities. Pat: Sometimes people will tell me, 'You're so spontaneous,' and I'm like, 'No, it was already in my head.' Once I got started in comedy, I told myself, 'I'm going to get a sitcom.' I don't have a sitcom, but I'm still working really hard. I told my husband, 'One day, you're going to be able to quit your job.' He said, 'More of this crap.' NUVO: You're getting closer to that, right? Pat: I think I'm getting closer. That's just my work ethic in anything I do. When I want something, I try to work really hard at making sure I get it. You could be a $300 comedian for the rest of your life. People don't realize, comedy is hard. I wake up in the middle of the night, working on my sets. But that's what it takes. And I have such a great manager who's honest with me, who makes me constantly switch stuff around. It makes me crazy, but in the end he's always right. NUVO: Can you talk about writing your memoir? Pat: I'm not writing my memoir. I have a GED. The writer is writing it; he's telling the stories. It was really hard. A lot of stuff I have blocked out because it caused so much pain in my life. I had to call one of my ex-girlfriends [who had a child with the father of Pat's first two kids]; we raised our kids as brother and sister together. We're good friends to this day. She started telling me stories that I started to remember, and she couldn't stop crying. Believe it or not, the writer be crying too. But there's some good parts to the book. The book's got all types of emotions. You're going to cry, you're going to be sorry; you're going to be cheering me on; you're going to get mad at him, you're going to get mad at me at the mistakes I make. NUVO: Being in somewhere like Indianapolis or Plainfield may be boring sometimes, but you're far enough away to get a new start and change habits. Pat: That's what I do like about living here. That's what my husband likes about living here. We don't have any family here, so when they need to borrow $5, you can say, 'Come get it.' But they never come. I do miss my girlfriends and some of my immediate family, like my brothers, but I started this thing last year where they come up here for Thanksgiving. NUVO: What's it like to play casinos, like you did earlier this month? Those can be extraordinarily drunk crowds. Pat: Any late show is drunk people anyways. I hate to see good old 7:00 people get stuck at a 9:30 show, because you have drunk-ass people, who had a little bit too much fun before they came to the show. They can be the worst crowd, and they can turn out to be the greatest people in the world. When they're that drunk, I kind of go out of my set to talk to them, doing dumb crap to calm them down, to let them know I can hear them talking. Because I don't like putting people down. And I don't like belittling people either. NUVO: But sometimes you have to, right? Pat: Yes. I just had to put a lady out of my show in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last week. She was right up front, and after every joke she was like, 'Go, girl!' I was like, 'Bitch, this ain't church! This ain't TV!' Finally, she got on her phone and started texting her son. I was like, 'Bitch, it's time for you to go home. Goodbye.' NUVO: What was your worst show? Pat: Black people are crazy. Black people think that you already better be funny. White people sit there, 'That joke didn't work, but we applaud you for trying.' Black people are like, 'Don't come back here, and I'm going to kill all your children if you do.' I was doing this open mic about three months after I started performing. It's called a Nerf show. They give the audience five Nerf balls each, and if the audience don't like you, they throw these Nerf balls at you. I was already in a bad mood. We'd just had snow in Atlanta and I'm having a real female issue — my stomach is hurting; my head is hurting. But they're like, 'Go up there Ms. Pat. They called your name.' I tell a joke, and this man hit me in the head with a Nerf ball. And it stung. It made me think about my bad relationship, and I was like, 'Fuck these balls. You throw one more ball and I'll jump off the stage and kill you.' And I got a standing ovation. That was my first standing ovation. [page] NUVO: You strike a balance in your act between more joke-based material that's set in the present — like shopping at Lane Bryant — and stories from your past. Pat: Yeah, because my life is dark. You've got to give people something easy before you slap them across the head with all of this dark stuff. I want them to like me with the Lane Bryant material, stuff about my kids, living in Plainfield. Then when I take them to the hood, that's more dark, but by that time they like me; they're in it with me. They say, 'OK, Ms. Pat, we're going to let you put us on the back of this bus and take us through a shootout. We're going to do this drive-by with you Ms. Pat; we like you.' NUVO: I'll bet you hear from a lot of people who identify with your stories and life. Pat: Every day I get something from fans saying, 'Thank you for sharing your story.' When I started doing this, I didn't realize how many people had gone through the same stuff I went through. I had a lady in Chicago who looked like she was rich, a diamond on her finger; I don't know if it was real, but she looked like she had not gone through anything. And she whispered in my ear, 'I had my baby at 14 too.' I was like, 'Holy crap. Are you serious?' And she said, 'Thank you for sharing your story.' When people hear my story, a lot of people say, 'There's nothing that I have to hide anymore.' People are hiding a lot of stuff that happened to them because they don't want people to judge them. I say, 'Fuck 'em. Be who you are.' I live by, if Jesus Christ came here and died for you and he couldn't please you, then who the hell am I? And I ain't anywhere near as good as him. I also get mail where people don't like me. This is how I respond: 'Thank you. Do what my real daddy did and get the fuck out of my life. I don't miss him and I won't miss you.' NUVO: So you reply to all of your mail, even hate mail? Pat: No, I had to stop, because my daughter, my 16-year-old, she was like, 'Mama, you can't tell everybody to fuck off.' NUVO: I asked about your worst show, but what's been your best? Or a moment when you've said, 'Damn, I can't believe I've made it this far?' Pat: Every day I'm saying that. With all the stuff I'm working on, I just told my friend, 'I think God is answering all my prayers!' The phone calls I've been taking lately — they're not blowing my mind; it's more like they're just unbelievable. NUVO: Any plans to move to LA once things take off? Pat: Yeah, but my husband doesn't want to go, so he's going to stay here. He's at Allison [Transmission], so he's doing pretty good. I want to move home. I want to move back to Atlanta. Hopefully, I can make enough money so one day I can say, 'Will you please quit your job so we can move out of the Midwest? I don't want to deal with real snow.' I just need that half of inch of snow that Atlanta gets every five years when the whole city shuts down. NUVO: Are crowds better for you in the South or can you make it work anywhere? Pat: As long as I've been traveling and with all the people I've worked with, I can make it work anywhere. I really can. I used to open for Katt Williams. His crowd was so diverse, it shocked me. He had a mainstream crowd — of 20,000. He had four or five openers, and once he came on stage, he would call all of them back to thank them. And hearing the applause when he walked out there, I was like, 'This is what I want. This is what I need in my life.' It was awesome. NUVO: You made it pretty far before your husband came to a show. Did he discourage you or just kind of humor you? Pat: He said, 'One day this, the next day this. You can't never stick on one thing. One time you're selling hot dogs; the next you're selling drugs.' I said, 'I'm going to keep doing something until I get it right.' He used to call my jokes 'chicken house jokes.' 'Don't nobody want to hear them chicken house jokes.' But he always supported my career. If I needed a plane ticket to go and audition, or to drive somewhere to try and showcase, he was always there. But he wouldn't go! Last year, he went to Madison with me, and this year, to Chicago. But he still wouldn't see me perform. NUVO: Do you think of yourself as more of a storyteller or a comedian? Pat: A storyteller. The only way I know how to do it is tell stories. To me, what makes jokes so great is detail. Once you have that detail, people can start to visualize. Wherever you're at, they go into that situation that you're in. I like people who tell stories. I don't like one-liner comics. I want the full effect. NUVO: How do you develop material? Pat: I don't just try to pull stuff out of the air. A lot of it is what I see, what I hear, what I've been through. The other day, my son said, 'Mom, I want to take you to the movies.' I was like, 'Okay, what you want to see?' 'I want to take you to see 1,000 Shades of Grey.' And my daughter said, 'Uh, first of all, where'd you get the other 950 Shades from? And second of all, why do you want to take your mom to see a porn?' Boy, I just about fell out of the chair laughing. They're all so fucking funny, dude. They've all got a personality. [page] A random sampling of outtakes Here are some excerpts from our interview with Ms. Pat, grouped by theme, that we couldn't quite fit in the print edition of NUVO (or that appeared in truncated form). Ms. Pat on staying anonymous: Well, I have a custom plate. We won't say what it is, but it would easily tell you what I do. People don't really mess with me. If they stop me at Morty's, and I don't have on makeup, and they want to take a picture, I say, 'Look, I'm a woman. I don't have on makeup. I don't even have my good bra on today. That's kind of like asking a woman how old she is. Get your ass out of here. Ms. Pat on doing a sitcom: I want a sitcom, not a reality show. My kids shouldn't be on TV everyday. And I need some kids who can act like they like me. Ms. Pat explains why Michael Vick is one of the top three people she'd like to meet (along with Whitney Houston and Ice Cube): I love Michael Vick. I like people who get second chances in life and do the right thing, because I was given a second chance. Everything I'm doing now is a second chance. I didn't go to prison; I didn't get killed; so to me, I have a second chance to get it right. People are so quick to judge, 'Oh, what you did was wrong.' But if you really went in a room and told everybody what you did, they'd say, 'You did some wrong shit too.' NUVO: And it's important to know where he was coming from. I'm from the south. I fought my dog too. I wasn't into any of the shit he was into, but it was just something that we did, a culture thing. It's like Mexicans for cock fighting. If you lock up a young Mexican for cock fighting, what does he learn from it? Ms. Pat responds to people who don't like her stage name: I'm sorry. I was born in the '70s and I have an old woman name. It's Patricia. I always wanted to be named Mercedes or Porsche, but it didn't work out. Ms. Pat on trolls: I call 'em keyboard thugs. It's so easy for a keyboard thug to say something about something he don't know. You don't know what I've been through. Ms. Pat on her grandfather: If granddaddy was fighting, that was always a good fight, because he'd hit you and knock your ass clean out. And he would hit you so hard that you stumbled all the way out the door and over the porch. Granddaddy was badass. Ms. Pat on Bill Cosby: Everybody heard those stories [in the comedy world], but everybody looked away. Who am I to judge? Who knows if they real? I'm in a business where you get groupies. And then you get innocent women which this probably happened to. I don't really know; I wasn't there; I don't want to judge. I can't say the man is guilty. If 102 people came out and said I did it, I'm probably guilty, but I don't want to judge. It's a shame for somebody like Cosby to get torn down like this, because so many comedians like myself come up wanting to be like Cosby. That's where I started to tell stories. Ms. Pat on working in Indianapolis: I've been here eight years, and I'm probably the top comic in Indianapolis. I play Morty's. I can't play Crackers because they have this thing where you can't play both Crackers and Morty's; I don't know why. So I've been playing Morty's on and off for eight years, and I don't have a problem walking in and saying, 'Let me get some stage time.' As far as gigs, my gigs are booked out of L.A. by my manager. I'm at a point now where people call for me; I don't call them. Ms. Pat on pushing buttons: I do a joke about how, when I was young, I used to live in a house where my next door neighbor was shooting up cocaine. My mama used to shoot up everyday because she had diabetes, so I thought he had diabetes too. He would shoot the drugs on the back porch and then take off all his clothes. And he'd come over to my side of the porch, put his ass over my face and be like, 'Get the rat out of ass!' I said, 'Your diabetes messing you up!' People are like, 'Where the hell was your mama at?' But that was normal in my neighborhood, to see Jaybelle naked every day. A lot of times people [who just stumbled into her show], say, 'Oh my God. Did she just say that.' Some of them become my fans and some are like, 'I can't take this!' They can't take the honesty. But I say, 'Fuck 'em. Go find somebody who'll tell you some cat jokes.' Ms. Pat on Bob & Tom: They've been great. I didn't have a career until I went on that radio station. That gave me a little more respect in this city. I'm so grateful to those guys. Ms. Pat on not giving a fuck: I don't care about what people think about me. I'm over putting people first in my life that don't matter. Life is too short for me to be trying to please you. If I'm going to waste that type of energy, I'm going to get on my knees and go pray. You ain't no better than me. We're all equal. Finally, Ms. Pat on her Jimmy Carter joke: [See the video below for the entire routine, but here's the gist: Pat was working at McDonalds when Carter showed up, Secret Service in tow, to grab a burger. She he not only failed to recognize him, but asked him, point-blank, 'Nigger, where the fuck I know you from?' When the line cook told her he was the President, she said he would get his cheeseburger for free.] If you could have how pink he turned that day... And I'm from the hood. That's the word we use in the hood. And when I said that Jimmy Carter, he said, 'Young lady, young lady!' But I did know him from somewhere. And it's a natural thing for Black people to say. That was my most embarrassing story, and it took a minute for me to let that one go. But my manager said, 'Pat, that is such a funny joke.' NUVO: So you'll have to keep doing it for a while. Yeah, until I do my special, and then I'm done with it. It makes me seem so stupid!