Chris Redd was supposed to be a guest on this past week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast, but he canceled at the last minute due to a personal matter. And as I told him when we finally connected for our interview on Wednesday, it wasn’t until TMZ broke the news the next morning that he’d been brutally attacked outside of the Comedy Cellar that I found out why.
“So did I!” the comedian and former SNL cast member joked, calling the incident a “surprise party of one fist.”
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In an Instagram message over the weekend, Redd, whose first big hour-long stand-up special Why Am I Like This? premieres on HBO Max today, thanked fans for all the messages of love, the jokes, and the concern,” and said he was “OK and healing fast.” He also disputed the reports that the unidentified assailant snatched the chain off his neck.
But our conversation, which you can hear a preview of below and will be released in full next Tuesday, is the first time he has spoken in any detail publicly about what happened. And he had some misinformation to clear up.
Redd didn’t get out of a car in front of the club (“I walked there like any New Yorker”) and he does not believe the incident was an attempted mugging as previously described. As he started walking toward the door, “This man hit me in the face with something metal,” he told me. “I thought it was brass knuckles because of the way it cut my nose to the bone.”
After years of boxing, Redd said he’s “taken a punch in the face before” so while he didn’t find the ordeal “terrifying” he did start getting concerned when he saw “how much blood” was coming out of his face. He ended up getting rushed to Bellevue Hospital to treat two fractures in his nose and another in his cheek. “A fist don’t normally do all of that at one time,” he said. “So it was safe to assume I was hit with something.”
“But the dude just hit me and ran off,” he continued. “I fell down so fast. I didn’t even know I fell until I looked at the [surveillance] footage.” When Redd stood back up, the man was gone and his face was “gushing blood.”
“It wasn’t really about the pain at that point, it was just so much blood,” he reiterated, explaining that he decided it wasn’t a good idea to try to “chase him down the street with blood gushing out of my face.”
When I asked Redd if he was tempted to go right into the Comedy Cellar and start talking about what happened on stage, he replied, “Absolutely, I was, man.” That’s why there was blood on the stairs leading down to the club, he explained, because he actually started trying to go inside before someone stopped him.
“If we could have stopped the bleeding, I would have went on stage,” he said. “I was like, I can’t wait to talk about this shit. And I’m glad I waited, but that was my first thought.”
The comedian has already started to think about how he might turn the attack into material on stage once he gets back up. “I got some jokes for sure,” he confirmed. “As many jokes as other people have, nobody has as many jokes about this as I do.”
Subscribe to The Last Laugh podcast now to hear our full conversation with Chris Redd about his new HBO Max special ‘Why Am I Like This?’, what Kanye West thought about his impression, the rumors surrounding his departure from SNL and more when it drops next Tuesday, November 8th.
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