Adele Givens

Chicago, the Regal, and a contest win

Givens is from Chicago and began working in comedy in the late 1980s, in a scene where the competition circuit was the way a new act got noticed. Her reference-book credit is the Crown Royal Comedy Contest at Chicago's Regal Theater, which she won as grand prize winner; she followed it the next year as a finalist in the Miller Lite Comedy Search.

The dating of that Regal night is not entirely settled. Wikipedia puts the Crown Royal win in 1989. The biography that circulates on her club billings — the Improv chain's and Nate Jackson's Super Funny Comedy Club in Tacoma both carry versions of it — fixes the date at 3 February 1990 and treats it as her professional debut. Either way the Regal is the origin point every version of her story agrees on, and it is worth noting that the club copy still leads with it more than three decades later.

She also spent time behind a microphone of a different kind back home, co-hosting a morning show on Chicago's WGCI 107.5 FM.

Def Comedy Jam and the half-hour specials

The platform that carried her nationally was Russell Simmons' Def Comedy Jam, and the association has proved durable — promoters still put it on the poster. The Classic Center in Athens, Georgia, selling a show for October 2026, describes its headliners' credits as running from Def Comedy Jam to The Queens of Comedy.

Her recorded stand-up is a compact body of work rather than a steady stream. HBO gave her a One Night Stand half-hour in 1996. Comedy Central Presents followed in 2002. A DVD, The Original Queen, arrived in 2004. Across all of it the delivery is the same: personal material worked bluntly, punctuated by the line — "I am such a lady" — that became the thing audiences shout back at her. She has also turned up on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which for a comic working that raw is a useful measure of how far the act travelled.

The Queens of Comedy

The project that fixed her position was The Queens of Comedy, the tour and concert film she made with Mo'Nique, Sommore and Miss Laura Hayes. It was conceived as the answer to a male-dominated touring circuit and it worked commercially — her club biography counts thirteen sold-out dates on the run, and the recording drew a Grammy nomination. The special aired on Showtime in 2002.

Twenty-four years on it remains the shorthand for who she is. Every venue selling her in 2026 mentions it, usually in the same sentence as Def Comedy Jam, and the theatre bills she appears on are effectively built from that same generation of acts.

Film, television and a strange cameo

Her screen work started with Tricks in The Players Club in 1998 and ran through Helen — "Hollerin' Helen" — in Beauty Shop in 2005. After that the parts came at intervals: Sex Ain't Love in 2014, a female prisoner in Boo! A Madea Halloween in 2016, Alice in I Left My Girlfriend for Regina Jones in 2019, Darlene in Too Many Christmases in 2024.

On television she did the rounds of the Black sitcom era — Martin, Moesha, The Steve Harvey Show, The Parkers — and was a regular on UPN's The Hughleys. More recently she appeared in South Side in 2022, the Chicago-set comedy, which brought her back to the city she came up in.

The oddest entry in the record is 2018, when she appeared on a Kanye West and Lil Pump single and in its video, though she did not perform in the subsequent Saturday Night Live rendition — a credit that put her voice in front of an audience with no idea who she was.

Where she is in September 2026

Two things have moved this year. In February she surfaced on The D.L. Hughley Show podcast, in an eleven-minute segment posted on 26 February 2026, talking about honesty in comedy and the pressure of public opinion — not a promotional appearance for anything in particular, which is itself telling about how she operates.

The other is Tube-E Movie, a Chicago-made independent comedy released in 2026 in which she plays Angie. It is a small film about a crew discovering they are trapped inside their own movie, and it is a Chicago production, which fits the pattern of her recent work better than a studio part would.

There is no new stand-up special. What there is instead is a working calendar: fourteen listings on sale, running from early October through to 28 December 2026, split between comedy clubs and a couple of theatre-sized package shows.

The shape of the touring year

The autumn opens on 8 October 2026 at the Classic Center Theatre in Athens, Georgia, on a bill called The Heavy Hitters of Comedy, co-headlining with Earthquake, with Bishop and MC Lightfoot as special guests; doors at 7pm, show at 8pm, tickets from $53.25. The following two nights she is at Helium Comedy Club in Alpharetta, Georgia, doing doubles — 7pm and 9.15pm on the Friday, 7pm and 9.30pm on the Saturday.

A theatre date at Texas Trust CU Theatre in Grand Prairie, Texas, follows on 24 October. Then Ontario Improv in California on 13 and 14 November, again two shows a night, with tickets from $31.14 and a venue rule that the name on the ticket must match the ID presented at the door. The year closes with a five-show run at Goodnights Comedy Club in Raleigh, North Carolina, over 26, 27 and 28 December.

Earlier in 2026 she worked Helium in Philadelphia across 4–6 September. That room is 21 and over with a two-item minimum in the showroom, which is the standard architecture of the circuit she plays: late, licensed, adult, and sold on her name alone.