Brad Williams Knew Comedy Was His Thing…on His 1st Day of Kindergarten?!?!

Most comedians can point to the night they caught the bug. Brad Williams can point to a morning, specifically the first day of kindergarten at Laguna Road Elementary in Fullerton, California. That is where he found out comedy was going to be his life, and he has the origin story to back it up.

The setup started at home. Williams explained that his father, an average-height man, knew his son would look different and get picked on, so he built a defense. "He would make fun of me first, but then say, okay, now hit me back with something," Williams told Seth Rollins on the show. "My dad and I would write comebacks together. He inadvertently trained me to be a comedian."

The training paid off fast. On day one, a classmate walked up and went for the obvious. "A kid came up literally on the first day of school and said, ha ha, you're little," Williams recalled. His counter was not little at all. "I looked at him and went, ha ha, your mom doesn't live with your dad anymore." Growing up in Orange County, he figured that was a 75 percent bet. He was right, and he paid for it. "I got sent to the principal's office for having the better joke." From that moment, the reputation stuck. "Kids were like, don't mess with Brad."

His father, a defense attorney, assumed the gift pointed toward law. It pointed somewhere else entirely, and Williams can date the pivot too. He brought his dad to a comedy show for Father's Day in 2004, and the comedian on stage started riffing on the crowd around him. "The comedian goes, what, is one of them here? And I just raised my creepy little hand in the air like, yes." Called on stage at 19 and asked what he did for a living, Williams answered honestly. "I said, I work at Disneyland." Then, without trying, he landed the button. "Shut up. I'm not one of the seven." He still leans on it. "My first joke still gets a laugh."

Williams and Rollins found real kinship in the grind their two worlds share. "No one gets into wrestling and just day one, you're a main eventer," Rollins noted, and Williams agreed the comedy ladder works the same way. "No one just starts headlining the clubs or the theaters. You have to pay your dues." Twenty-two years in, Williams joked, he is finally "an overnight sensation."

He also has one match on his résumé, and it is a good one. On Chris Jericho's Rock 'n' Wrestling Rager at Sea, Williams crossed paths with fellow performer Hornswoggle, and the tension wrote itself. When Hornswoggle, serving as special guest referee, double-crossed the babyface, Williams charged the ring for a stare-down that got the boat chanting. Then he delivered a Stone Cold Stunner. "When you stun a dwarf, it's like when Sonic would get hit, all the rings just fly out," he said. His takeaway was the same rush that hooked him in kindergarten. "Oh, this is why you guys do this."