Anything else you recently shot?
Talk to Me —that's an interesting film with Don Cheadle that should be out this summer. It's a biopic of Petey Green, real life deejay from the DC area during the ‘60s and the time of the Martin Luther King assignations. I play one of the radio deejays who are number one until this guy shows up. We have this kind of rivalry going, it's pretty cool.

Do you see yourself doing a role that is no comedy, but completely drama?
Yeah, I’m looking for that right role. I think that's important, especially as a comedian. I watch other great comedians that make those kind of switches be it Robin Williams, Adam Sandler's done it, Jim Carrey's done it, Jaime has flipped it in recent years. So, it's just really about just trying to find the right project that I think I’ll be able to pull it off and sink my teeth into. I'm interested in that for sure…

What do you think it might be?
I’ve been developing a story on Louis Armstrong for about a year—that's kind of interesting. We kind of found out none of the studios are really on the biopic thing right now, but it's still a good choice. Also, I have a very interesting developing story on Marcus Garvey, which was another role that I could probably develop and get into.

Why aren’t the studios into biopics?
It's very interesting… it was a big year for biopics a couple years ago. You think about Walk the Line and Ray so most of the studios are just saying they don’t really want to do that straight biopic. They want take it and do portions, or a different spin on it. There were a couple different scripts on Louis Armstrong, but I thought with this generation it would make sense to do a biopic. You have to be able to stay in his life because this new generation hears his voice be it commercials, ads, or different things. He’s got such a distinctive voice and characteristics, but I don’t think that this modern generation would really know who he was without giving the whole scope of the guy. So, that was my choice.

What did you think of the whole Kramer situation?
I think that at the core of it I was just disappointed in the fact that he kind of got trapped up there on the stage and didn’t have any comebacks for people. He chose to fall into what would be the lowest common denominator, which is trying to attack somebody on race. That's just whack! Even more so than that I was disappointed in the rage that he had— the fact that he was really mad about it. Even if you use the term it's one of those things like, okay, so you said it, but you said it with so much malicious intent. It’s the fact that he's using it all wrong. He uses the “N word” and obviously there's no real “N words” there because those are African-Americans—a nigga’ will whoop your ass! [Laughs] You lucky you were able to get out of that one that's all I say—you wanted somebody to just have a press conference!

I don’t agree with this but I wanted to ask this question— some people have said, “Well, black comics say horrible things about white people like Eddie Murphy or The Original Kings of Comedy.” How do you feel about that?
Again, I couldn’t say anything that was done with the degree of malice. You can talk about jokes that are different and the thing about comedians is that people have this leeway, or space to do that within their own ethnic groups. Then you have a little bit of room to go outside of that. You'll see Jewish comedians do a lot of Jewish jokes. Its okay and it can even be derogatory even at certain points, but because you have a membership card, so to speak, your able to kind of say this is my commentary on the matter. Now, if you grow up in New York then you live in a diverse society in these different boroughs and you grow up, you may even have the right to say something about another race. At least you feel you do and so people find it quite acceptable when you can say, well you can do a Jamaican joke, or you can do a Dominican joke in these kind of small subcultures based on their language, and people think, oh that's hilarious. All of a sudden when it comes on you it's a big deal, but I think that if it's done with intent to really hurt somebody—like you truly are trying to hurt this person's feelings and cut them down it's not at joke that point…you don’t even have a joke. You're being disrespectful and malice in your intent, now that's a violation. That's when the line has been crossed, and there should be a nice ass whooping following that! That should be in the manual—uh-oh I crossed the line here they come! There should’ve been somebody in the audience who just jumped up and said, “Stone him!” [Laughs] Just rocks flying at him that would’ve been fun!