Comic Ali Siddiq on fatherhood, prison, and his biggest regret

Public media is no longer federally funded, but the NPR network remains yours in service to and powered by you. Keep public media public with a donation today at donate.npr.org and thank you. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And my guest today is Ali Sadiq.

He's a comedian, but that word undersells it. What he really does is tell stories, true ones, from his own life, and he's told so many of them that while watching his specials, I realize Sadiq is giving us a memoir, delivered one set at a time. For instance, a few years back, he went viral with the story about surviving a prison riot. Sadiq served six years for cocaine trafficking, arrested four days after his 19th birthday. He started doing stand-up after he got out, and nearly 30 years later, he's got more than a dozen specials, most of them independent on YouTube with millions of views.

In his 2022 series Domino Effect, he traces his life growing up in Houston, starting at 10, the year he went to live with his father and first got into trouble. all the way through the choices that landed him in prison. This month he has a new special called My Father. It's about everything that passed between Sadiq and his dad before his father died in 2018. It premieres on YouTube June 21st.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (50 minutes, 7,786 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.