Cedric the Entertainer
Himself
Overview
Donning his signature suit and fedora, the dapper comic offers a unique spin on getting old, the presidential election and "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk."
Cast
Reviews
2 min readThe fedora gets there first
Cedric the Entertainer walks into Live from the Ville already dressed for a civil night. Dapper suit. That fedora. Warm stage light. The hat is a flag. It belongs to stand-up that refuses to sprint. Warmth, then a cut, then the room noticing how ridiculous the week has been.
The special landed in 2016. The crowd looks like people he could have had over. There is no real fourth wall, only the polite fiction of one.
Cedric slumps, half-smiles, then drops a line that sounds like recognition instead of a trap. Filmed stand-up lives or dies on whether you forget the screen. Cedric makes you forget.
Netflix teased the bit about sexting with his wife. He does not treat the phones as a scandal. He treats them as a gadget that showed up after he already knew how to be married.
You can picture him hunched over the screen, squinting like the keyboard is a foreign object, trying to decode a text a younger man would have answered in ten seconds. The laugh is not the dirty part. The laugh is the age in the delay.
Full Plot (Spoilers)
Spoiler warning
This section contains the full plot, including major story reveals. Overview above stays spoiler-free.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThe marching band hit the pews first.
The Tennessee State University marching band walked onto the Ryman Auditorium stage before Cedric the Entertainer did. He wanted the room to feel bigger than it is. The pews used to belong to a church. The acoustics still do. Country acts made the address famous. Cedric told EURweb he had played there before and picked it for Live from the Ville because the venue was small but big enough to fit his persona, and because Nashville now had a New South circuit, latestnetflix.com contends, not only the Grand Ole Opry ghost story. Netflix dropped the hour on September 16, 2016. 
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t1781OdVvQ
Mashable got the trailer a week early. Suit, fedora, hip-hop lyrics, Snapchat parenting, the 2016 election, and a bit on "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk." Netflix's own media note called him an Original King of Comedy in a packed house, taking aim at rap lyrics, kids on phones, and Obama's legacy. Troy Miller directed. Cedric wrote it and produced it with Jillian Ellis and Miller. TMDB files the special as a one-hour comedy, documentary, and TV movie. The official trailer is still on YouTube. , , , ,
Ten years is a long time to leave a mic cold.
His last solo special was Taking You Higher, HBO, 2006, from the Wiltern in Los Angeles. AV Club's Kevin Johnson opened the 2016 review by putting that gap next to a bad week for Black late night. The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore had been canceled. Trevor Noah was still finding The Daily Show. Steve Harvey had gone paternal. D.L. Hughley was on CNN. Bernie Mac was dead. Johnson asked if Cedric could come back with material that still landed. The grade was a B. The set bounced, Johnson wrote, from get-off-my-lawn jokes to light current-events jabs to talking animals to a personal bit about his eldest daughter demanding a car. He was 51. He still danced.
Brett Smiley at Thrillist called it an entertaining hour of Hollywood weight-loss talk, Snapchat decoding, and Obama's last days in office. Jacob Oller at Vague Visages wanted fewer barbecue jokes and called the act old-fashioned, some of it more old than fashioned. IMDb lists 6.3 from 769 votes. Cedric's TV Land sitcom The Soul Man had just ended a five-season run that June. He did not need the special to launch him. He needed it to prove the church pews still wanted a man in a suit. , 
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Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.