D.L. Hughley has spent nearly four decades on stages making crowds laugh — and think. But when he sat down at The Pageant Thursday night for a conversation hosted by the St. Louis County Library Foundation, humor wasn’t the point.
This night was about vulnerability. About memory. And about the man who shaped him long before anyone knew his name.
Presented in partnership with Eye See Me Books, the event brought Hughley together with longtime St. Louis sportscaster Mike Claiborne for a conversation about Charlie’s Boy — the memoir that traces the quiet, steady presence of the father who raised him and the lessons that stayed with him.
Claiborne opened by asking when Hughley knew he needed to tell the story. Hughley said the book began as a conversation he wished he could have had with his father — a man who rarely spoke, but whose influence was unmistakable.
“I thought I would have to talk my publisher into it,” Hughley said. “How often do you hear about a Black man talking about his love for his father? But he immediately got it.”
Hughley didn’t grow up knowing the man he called his father wasn’t his biological father. He learned the truth around age 10 or 11 — a discovery that left him angry at first, but ultimately more determined to honor the man who chose him.
“I decided I’d be worthy of his name,” he said. “He didn’t have the words, but he had the actions.”
Claiborne asked about the complicated relationship Hughley had with his mother — something he writes about with honesty but without bitterness. Hughley said he understood, even as a child, that she was navigating her own pain.
“Yeah, yeah, I looked like my biological father, who was the love of my mother’s life,” Hughley said. “And my father, I would imagine, would have been hard to raise the physical manifestation of something he never had.”
He said he felt mistreated at times because he resembled the man who broke her heart — but he also believes the experience prepared him for the world.
“I think that what she did inadvertently or not was prepared me for the life I would see,” Hughley said. “And so there’s very little for me to fear. My upbringing had everything to do with that.”
The heart of the evening centered on Charlie — the man who taught him duty, discipline and how to stand up for himself. Hughley shared the story of the school bully who kept taking his lunch money until his father confronted him about why he was coming home from school hungry.
“He said, ‘I’ll never feed a coward,’” Hughley recalled.
The next day, Hughley fought back.
“He beat the [expletive] out of me,” Hughley said. “But it was the best lunch I ever tasted. Once you’re not afraid to lose, you can win.”
Comedy came later — almost by accident. Hughley said he didn’t grow up with a clear talent. He wasn’t an athlete, a hustler or a standout student. But he could make people laugh.
“If I made my mother laugh, she wasn’t as mad. If I made my father laugh, he saw me,” he said.
He finally picked up a microphone on a dare after constantly cracking jokes at the barbershop.
“I used to talk [expletive] at the barbershop,” Hughley said. “Back then at the barbershop, they sold weed, did taxes, sold VCRs. Basically it was Costco without the free samples.”
His first gig was at a place called Crayons in West Los Angeles. He made $7.50.
“I still have that money in my drawer,” he said. “I knew from that moment on that this was what I was meant to be doing.”
He learned a new word that night.
“Epiphany,” Hughley said. “I went, ‘This is the thing.’”
But the road wasn’t glamorous. Hughley talked about working long hours, driving between jobs, sleeping in his car and passing out from exhaustion on stage. He said he survived those years because people along the way saw something in him — including a supervisor at the Los Angeles Times who gave him a loan and kept his benefits active while he chased comedy full time.
“If you want grace, you have to give grace,” Hughley said. “I’ve seen mercy all through my life.”
The conversation moved between humor and reflection, with Claiborne guiding Hughley through stories of marriage, fatherhood, career setbacks and the moment he met his biological father — an encounter he described as awkward, emotional and necessary.
Hughley said writing the book forced him to confront memories he might have otherwise buried.
“If you’re not writing a book, what use would you have for these memories? I would have hid them away. I would have drank them away,” he said. “It forced me to mine them — and to face them. What I learned is that the things that scared me didn’t cripple me.”
“It’s hard to feel small and tell yourself that you are never going to feel like that again and then have to go back to the place where that started,” he said. “I can say that I learned to be proud of myself.”
He also shared a moment that revealed the depth of his friendship with fellow King of Comedy — and St. Louis native — Cedric the Entertainer.
“Me and Ced were having dinner the other day in New York,” Hughley said.
He recalled the time he passed out on stage during the early days of COVID and was quarantined for two weeks.
“I remember when I went through COVID and I passed out on stage, Ced brought me food every day,” Hughley said. “Back then COVID was killing people. And they would quarantine you for 14 days.”
On the last night of his quarantine, Cedric showed up at his house.
“Ced comes over to my house at 10 o’clock at night. A Friday night. Out of nowhere, he just walked up and gave me a big hug,” Hughley said.
Then Cedric added a joke only a close friend could deliver.
“And then he said, ‘You sure it was 14, right? ’Cause you know you got a GED and it could have been 12.’”
By the end of the evening, it was clear that Charlie’s Boy isn’t just a memoir. It’s Hughley’s attempt to honor a man who shaped him quietly but profoundly — and to give readers a story that might help them make sense of their own.
The audience responded with the kind of warmth that comes from recognizing pieces of themselves in someone else’s story.