Greatest Black Comedian/Comedic Actors

Redd Foxx began doing stand-up comedy on the infamous "Chitlin' Circuit" in the 1940s and 1950s. Foxx was one of the premier "blue humor" comedians. Blue humor was very dirty, too dirty for white audiences. For years his party albums were not available in white record stores. In the 1960s his records became available...

William H. Cosby Jr. was born on July 12th, 1937, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and for over thirty years, he has been one of the world's most respected and well-known entertainers and comedians. After tenth grade, Cosby joined the Navy and completed high school through a correspondence course. He later took up an athletics scholarship at Temple University...

The trail-blazing linchpin of a sprawling African-American family of comic entertainers, it was multi-talented writer/director/producer Keenen Ivory Wayans (born June 8, 1958, in New York City) who was the first to achieve national prominence by successfully creating, launching and hosting a landmark 1990s black-oriented comedy satire on Fox TV...

Best remembered for his raunchy humor, Robin Harris became famous in supporting roles in movies such as Do The Right Thing as Sweet Dick Willie and House Party. He has left a legacy that fans and actors will truly miss due to his career which was cut by a massive heart attack at the age of 36. Spike Lee dedicated Mo'Better Blues to Harris after his untimely death.

David Alan Grier trained in Shakespeare at Yale University, where he received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. Grier began his professional career on Broadway as Jackie Robinson in "The First", for which he earned a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical and won the Theatre World Award (1981)...

Hughley is the second of four children. His father was an airline maintenance worker and his mother was a homemaker. He grew up in L.A.'s South Central where he was a member of the Bloods gang after getting kicked out of high school. However, he turned his life around after a cousin was shot. He quit the gang and got a job as a telemarketer for the Los Angeles Times...

Bernard Jeffrey McCollough was born in Chicago in 1957. He grew up in Chicago, in a rougher neighborhood than most others, with a large family living under one roof. This situation provided him with a great insight into his comedy, as his family, and the situations surrounding them would be what dominated his comedy...

Chris Rock was raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is in Brooklyn, New York. He has been in stand-up comedy for over twelve years. He made his big screen debut in Beverly Hills Cop II and spent three years on the cast of Saturday Night Live. He does commercials for 1-800 Collect and Nike and covered the presidential campaign for the show Politically Incorrect. He now lives in Alpine, New Jersey.

Davidson started his career as a stand-up comedian in Washington DC, earning an ardent following with sheer hard work in various comedy clubs. As one of the cutting-edge, young stand-ups, he was spotted by major concert promoters, who booked him as the opening act for A-list touring acts, including Patti LaBelle...

Jamie's mother, Louise, was an adopted child. When her marriage to his father failed, his grandparents, Mark and Estelle Talley, stepped in and, at age 7 months, adopted him too. He says he had a very rigid upbringing that placed him in the Boy Scouts and the church choir. During high school, he played quarterback for his high school team and was good enough that he got press in Dallas newspapers...

A class clown since his earliest years, Mark quickly learned that a wild sense of humor could take him places. While working at a drugstore after quitting college he honed and polished a comedy act that he regularly practiced on customers. It was these customers, as well as his family and friends, who finally encouraged Mark to try his stand-up routine at area comedy clubs...

She is the half sister of Nia Long who played in the first Friday. Her and Long share the same father and have never been in the same movie. She attend Morris Brown College in Atlanta Ga (where movies like Drumline and Stomp the Yard was filmed. Sommore appeared with Monique in the Original Queens of Comedy and the Parkers.

Dave's career started while he was in high school at Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC. His career really took off when he moved to New York City shortly after graduation. He grew up with a blind grandfather, whose blindness was a direct result of the Tuskegee Experiment.

Lenworth George Henry was born on August 29, 1958, in Dudley, West Midlands in England to a family of Jamaican immigrants. He made his TV debut on a talent show called "New Faces" in 1975 at the age of 16. He won and went on to things such as The Fosters and Tiswas, which was when his career as a comedian took off...

He symbolized the 70s American dream of success -- the former kid from the ghetto who rose to wisecracking TV superstardom. While in his element as the broadly strutting, gleamy-toothed J.J. Evans of the popular urban-styled sitcom Good Times, Jimmie Walker lived the extremely good life. Following the series' demise...

Actor, Writer and Director Kel Mitchell was honored with a Cable Ace Award in 1997 for Best Actor in a comedy series for his work in the Nickelodeon series "Kenan and Kel" and also honored with a Kids Choice Award in 1999 for Best Actor in a comedy series for both Nickelodeon series "All That" and "Kenan and Kel"...

Guy Torry is a native of St. Louis, Missouri. Known as "Torry" by college friends, Guy attended Southeast Missouri State University, the alma mater of fellow comedian and St. Louisan, Cedric The Entertainer. His comic genius was evident to fellow students during these college years. Guy often held impromptu comedy "slams" in dorm breakrooms...

Perry was born and raised in New Orleans. His mother was a church-goer and took Perry along with her once a week. His father was a carpenter and they had a very strained and abusive relationship, which led Perry to suffer from depression as a teenager. In 1991, he was working an office job, when he saw an episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" (1986) discussing the therapeutic nature of writing...

Tisha Campbell's first TV appearance was at the age of 8, on episode #006 of the PBS show The Big Blue Marble. The show featured stories on the life and culture of children from around the world. In her segment, Tisha was shown playing with her brother, going to school with her mother who was also her voice coach, and singing at a jazz concert in New York's Greenwich Village.

Noted for portraying characters older than his actual age, Whitman Mayo was in his early 40s in the early 1970s when he first played the sexagenarian "Grady" on "Sandford & Son" -- a role that popularized the expression "Good Goobily Goop!" Nearly thirty years later his "Grady" role had just about caught up with him in terms of age and...

Thelma McQueen attended public school in Augusta, Georgia and graduated from high school in Long Island, New York. She studied dance with Katherine Dunham, Geoffrey Holder, and Janet Collins. She danced with the Venezuela Jones Negro Youth Group. The "Butterfly" stage name, which does describe her constantly moving arms...

Although his brand of humor has been reviled for decades, black character actor Mantan Moreland parlayed his cocky but jittery character into a recognizable presence in the late 1930s and early 1940s, appearing in a long string of comedy thrillers . . . and was considered quite funny at the time! Born just after the turn of the century in Louisiana...

At one point in time, was the highest paid actor in Hollywood. Christopher Tucker was born in Atlanta, Georgia to Mary Louise Tucker (Bryant) and Norris Tucker. After graduating from high school, Tucker made the change to move to Hollywood from Georgia to pursue a career in show business. Chris Tucker found himself being a frequent guest on the Def Comedy Jam...

Wanda Sykes has been called one of the funniest stand-up comics by her peers and ranks among Entertainment Weekly's 25 Funniest People in America. Her smart-witted stand-up has sent her career in many different areas. She was recently seen in Comedy Central's Wanda Does It, where she tried various non-showbiz jobs...

He first made a name for himself in the late 1970s and early 1980s, performing several shows of raunchy comedy a day at outdoor parks in New York City, most notably in Washington Square Park, where he competed for crowds with musicians, Frisbees players, jugglers and other entertainers. Charlie was...

Her trademark sass complimented by a distinctively adenoidal voice that could out-snarl Eartha Kitt and Fran Drescher put together, short (4'11"), round, and robust Nell Carter was one indomitable, in-your-face firecracker...and it made her a star. She was born Nell Ruth Hardy in 1948 in Birmingham...

Sammy Davis Jr. was often billed as the "greatest living entertainer in the world". The son of vaudeville star Sammy Davis Sr., he was known as someone who could do it all--sing, dance, play instruments, act, do stand-up--and he was known for his self-deprecating humor; he once heard someone complaining about discrimination...