Life hasn’t always been so nice. Before she found comedy, Williams was a drug dealer with a rap sheet that included depositing bad checks and going on a shopping spree with a stolen credit card. She’d had her first child at 13, her second at 15. There was good money in drugs, and going straight was difficult. “I went from selling drugs to doing absolutely nothing, like working at McDonald’s,” she says. “I meet a man, I get married, I turn my life around, and I go through a whole depression, because now I’m going from I have money to I don’t have money.”

Life is good for Ms. Pat (a.k.a. Patricia Williams). Fifteen years into her stand-up career, she is a headliner at clubs around the country. She’s topping the bill at the Rockwell in Somerville Friday and doing sets at the Burren and the Rockwell on Saturday, all part of the Boston Comedy Festival. On Saturday afternoon, she’ll be signing her new memoir, “Rabbit: The Autobiography of Ms. Pat,” at the Barnes & Noble in the Prudential Center. And when the weekend is over, she’ll go back to Indianapolis to her husband and kids in a nice home with a pond and ducks.


She trained to be a medical assistant, but no one would hire her because she was a convicted felon. That’s when her welfare caseworker suggested she give comedy a try. At least no one would be checking her criminal record. Encouraged by friends who told her she was funny, Williams gave it a shot; it wound up changing her life. “I was like, they gonna pay me to talk?” she says. “I like to talk. When I got on that stage, comedy is addicting. I said, ‘I like this.’ My drug-dealing technique was hustling, and I put it into comedy, and I learned to hustle a whole different way.”

Now Williams routinely mines those difficult experiences — growing up broke, becoming a mother when she was barely a teen, a life of crime — for material. But that’s not how she started in stand-up. “I was about seven years in before I started opening up about my life. Because you know I was a little ashamed about my life. Two kids [at] 15, eighth-grade dropout. I went through a lot of [stuff] that I was ashamed of.”


She says she was more clichéd and profane when she began performing; her friends noticed she was funnier when she was just telling stories from her life. “It took me a while to figure out how to take that pain and put it on the funny,” she says. “I can tell you my life two ways — I can make you laugh or I can make you cry. But as a comic, when I started to share this, I didn’t know that. So I was just telling [stuff] how it happened.”

“I been shot two times and hit by a dump truck,” says Williams in one of her signature routines. “Nobody cares who shot me. They’re like, ‘Who hit you with a dump truck?’ ”

She says performing in front of people and talking about her life is still daunting, even compared with the dangers she encountered in her previous life. “There’s no rejection in drug dealing,” she says. “All you’ve got to worry about is the police. They don’t come in two or three hundred. [Comedy] crowds come in two or three hundred. All you’ve got to do is hide the dope and sell the dope. [In comedy] you’re looking for somebody to tell you that you’re good, that you’re funny. People are going to buy drugs whether they’re good or bad.”


Now, after 15 years in comedy, Williams has told a lot of stories, but she’s not worried about running out of material. “No, I’m married,” she says. “You never run out of jokes when you’re married and got children. People say that all the time. ‘What you gonna do when you’re through telling your life?’ I’m gonna tell my current life. I’m gonna tell my grandkids’ life and my kids’ life.”

Ms. Pat

At the Rockwell, Somerville, Sept. 22 at 9:30 p.m. Tickets $20, 617-684-4445, www.therockwell.org

Nick A. Zaino III can be reached at nick@nickzaino.com.