Long before he ever picked up the mic to do comedy, Martin Lawrence knew how to do one thing — pick up his fists and keep punching.
From his teenage years as a Mid-Atlantic Golden Gloves boxing contender to becoming one of the biggest box office names in comedy, the reflexes that always made him combat-ready brought him to the heights of success and helped him fight his way back to the limelight after some years outside of it. Punching up his material and keeping jokes fresh, relevant and funny, is an even bigger part of that process since he returned to the road last July. Packing stadiums across the country on the “Y’all Know What It Is” tour, Lawrence finally hits his adopted hometown of roughly 30 years for a show at Crypto.com arena on Friday.
“Boxing the way they train, getting out there jogging every morning, and jumping rope and shadowboxing and all that — I use that as a metaphor for me in comedy,” Lawrence said, sitting hunched forward and speaking slowly, but with a spark of sage-like intensity on a green chaise lounge in a Toluca Lake house he long ago converted into his business. “The way fighters train, I train my comedy like that.”
On a recent weekday at the office of RunTelDal Entertainment — his entertainment company named after his 2002 comedy special — which is steered by his brother Robert Lawrence, Martin is focused and in good spirits. He’s dressed every bit like a boxer in training, with a black hoodie and sweatpants, sporting one of his company ball caps with an embroidered logo of a mic and stool to represent the raw elements of stand-up.
It was his talent for being not just funny, but also authentic, that launched his rise as one of the kings of stand-up back in the era of Def Comedy Jam. Nightly he took on savage crowds with X-rated punchlines typically stemming from his sexual exploits and roasting people in an often star-studded audience. He took pride in taking no prisoners when it came to making people laugh at themselves and his on-stage antics.
“I was getting everybody in the crowd, I didn’t give a damn who they were. If they were sitting in a seat, it was open season,” he said with a laugh.
The raw fire he possessed on stage would eventually make him a household name on his hit show “Martin,” which ran for five seasons from 1992 to 1997. The fandom that follows Lawrence (and everyone’s favorite character, “Sheneneh Jenkins”) as well as the rest of the cast is a testament to the on-stage chemistry they possessed that made the show so popular. Sadly — though understandably — Lawrence says the series will not return due to the real-life loss of cast member “Tommy,” played by Thomas Mikael Ford, who died in 2016.
“We could never do a reboot of ‘Martin,’” Lawrence said. “We don’t have Tommy. He was a major piece of the puzzle. And without Tommy, it wouldn’t be the same.”
At the apex of the show’s popularity, “Martin” was unstoppable and created a footprint in Black entertainment history that still largely defines Lawrence’s career. When meeting fans after a live show, they’ll quote their favorite lines from years of watching it in syndication or on various streaming platforms. Of course, at the time, achieving success on the small screen wasn’t enough. In 1995, Lawrence leveled up to become an action movie star with world-class comic relief skills in “Bad Boys,” starring opposite Will Smith. Oddly, the buddy cops originally assigned to the lead roles in the script were Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz — which most certainly would’ve yielded an entirely different movie. But Lawrence and Smith proved to be a match made in blockbuster heaven. Lawrence’s role as a franchise actor and comedian carved a path that seems almost impossible to achieve today — being a major star on stage, TV and film simultaneously.
Though it has been years since Lawrence has done a proper arena show in L.A., he’s retained his revered stature in the local comedy scene, popping up recently in places such as the Comedy Store to “work out” his jokes that would become the basis for this current 22-city world tour, which he wrote and rehearsed in just four weeks on the heels of filming “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the successful fourth installment of the “Bad Boys” franchise.
“As a comedian, you’re always starting fresh,” Lawrence said. “Every show, it’s like going back to the beginning. You have to start back at one, to get to five, to get to 10 [minutes of material] just to start back at one. So you always got to go back to the beginning.”
Following the announcement of his new tour last July, Lawrence resumed deftly dominating crowds with his brand of sex-centric, deep-blue (i.e. dirty) material, mixed in with his thoughts on current events and family life.
It’s a sense of family that still anchors his comedy. Even his office in Toluca Lake is in a house that belonged to his mother, Chlora, who died in 2008. With family photos and keepsakes all around, it’s a place that grounds him and helps him run his business.
“Family is everything,” Lawrence said. “Life ain’t nothing without family, you know, and they’re the ones who help you get through the hard times, as well as the good times, you know. … They your anchor, your strength.”
Lawrence is quick to admit that he’s not the funniest person in his clan — that title, he says, goes to his brother Robert.
“He helps me write a lot of my material. A lot of my stuff comes from him,” Lawrence said.
His late grandmother was also pretty savage when it came to roasting.
“She just kept it real. If she cussed you out, she cussed you out. She was getting on you about something, she got on you about something, and she did it the right way,” Lawrence said.
A father of three daughters, Lawrence says his kids are used to being in his comedic orbit, coming to shows to watch their dad throw out some raunchy material that would cause any ordinary dad’s offspring to blush. But as Lawrence says, they’ve been around him long enough to know what to expect.
“Two of my daughters came to my show, one of my shows, and they really enjoyed it,” Lawrence said. “They know daddy don’t pull no punches. Yeah, I say what I’m gonna say. I let them know just how it is out there and they enjoy it.”
Recently, his daughter Jasmin, 28, became engaged to Eric Murphy, son of fellow comedy legend Eddie Murphy, one of Lawrence’s longtime friends. It’s another sign that keeping it all in the family has been a good luck mantra for Lawrence. Keeping tight with family and trusting his instincts, he said, have been the right and left hook he’s used to keep punching throughout his career.
“I’ve had an over 30-year career,” Lawrence said. “I mean, most people in entertainment don’t have a 30-year career. … You might get one hit TV show and that runs for a while, then that’s it. To still be in the game after 30 years and doing it at this level, I know I’m truly blessed.”
As far as what lies ahead for 2025 after the tour, the comedian has set his sights on a number of projects, including a sequel to his 1999 comedy film “Blue Streak” co-starring Luke Wilson, writing a book and traveling internationally to bring his stand-up to audiences around the world. In October, he performed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, delivering the cleanest comedy sets he’s ever done, giving the Saudis what they wanted — a co-star of “Bad Boys,” one of the country’s biggest blockbuster openings — while dialing back his normally X-rated material to avoid being insulting.
“That was challenging, and I had to be fearless to do that, because it’s a whole different culture, and you can’t just say anything over there,” Lawrence said. “So you have to respect the culture. And so I worked on clean material, which I’m not used to doing. I just stuck to the plan, [didn’t] veer off or try to be blue or nothing like that. I stuck to the plan, and it went well!”
As a comedic veteran — whether he’s performing at home or abroad — Lawrence remains one of the comics who still has the power to keep his jokes and jab as sharp and savage as the day he started and get where he needed to go in life with comedy as his North Star. He’s always ready to go another round.
“What still excites me the most about stand-up today, is just the fact that I can still do it, “ Lawrence said. “And I can still do it at a high level, I’m blessed with this gift, this gift to make people laugh.”