Earthquake

Ballou High, then a bomb bay

Earthquake was born Nathaniel Stroman in Washington, D.C., and the name is his mother's work: any child who arrives after every precaution has been taken, she reasoned, can only be named after a natural disaster. He graduated from Ballou High School in south-east Washington and enlisted in the United States Air Force the day afterwards.

His trade was aircraft armament systems specialist — AFSC 2W1X1, the people who hang ordnance on aeroplanes. He told Howard Stern he once dropped a nuclear weapon while loading a B-52 at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The first stage he stood on was a service one: the Air Force talent competition Tops in Blue. The material that would later fill theatres started there, in front of airmen who had nowhere else to be.

Atlanta, and a club of his own

He moved to Atlanta in 1991 after a CNN segment named it the best city in America for Black people trying to get ahead. He has been blunt about the debt since: there would be no Earthquake without Atlanta. Comedy was meant to be a side earner while he pursued law.

In 1992 the city's leading Black comedy room turned him down for stage time. His mother's advice was to stop asking and open his own. By 1993 he was co-owner of Uptown Comedy Corner in Buckhead, which ran until 2000 and had Chris Tucker, Mo'Nique and Mike Epps among its regulars. He later opened Earthquake's Comedy Corner rooms in Dallas and Atlanta. The original club eventually moved out to Hapeville and closed for good in July 2025, which gave the timing of everything that followed an odd symmetry.

The national break came in 1997, when Russell Simmons put him on the Def Comedy Jam tour. The Latham Entertainment Presents tour followed in 2002, and ABC signed him for a sitcom in 2004 that never went to air.

The hours, the voices and the drive-time slot

His HBO One Night Stand aired on 26 August 2005, the same year as the album that made his reputation with other comedians, About Got Damn Time — John Mulaney has named it among his favourite comedy records. Shaquille O'Neal's All-Star Comedy Jam special followed in 2009. In April 2013 Whoopi Goldberg introduced him on The View as her favourite stand-up working.

Screen work ran alongside it rather than replacing it. He voiced Root the Rooster in Barnyard in 2006 and its spin-off series, took a small part in Kevin Smith's Clerks II the same year and a supporting role in The Longshots in 2008. He played Uncle Mike on Everybody Hates Chris and reprised him for Everybody Still Hates Chris, held a recurring role on CBS's The Neighborhood from 2018 to 2021, and turned up in South Side, Johnson, Winning Time and Jerry Seinfeld's film Unfrosted.

Radio did as much for his voice as television. He contributed to The Steve Harvey Morning Show on Tuesdays and Thursdays, then took a full-time weekday afternoon slot at 107.5 WBLS in New York from 2013 until February 2016. He now hosts Quake's House daily on SiriusXM channel 96, carried by Kevin Hart's Laugh Out Loud network — a daily hour of talking to strangers that keeps the material turning over between road dates.

Joke Telling Business, and a sitcom with his name on it

Dave Chappelle produced Chappelle's Home Team – Earthquake: Legendary, released by Netflix in February 2022; his own site still leads with the New York Times calling it the funniest special of its year. That half-hour did what three decades of club work had not, and the 2022 road show took its name, with Donnell Rawlings sharing the bill at the Chicago Theatre on 9 July that year.

The follow-up is his first full hour for the service. Earthquake: Joke Telling Business was taped at the Buckhead Theatre in Atlanta in May 2025 — a few hundred yards from where his club stood — directed by Stan Lathan, and released worldwide on 30 September 2025 at 45 minutes. The set works through the economy, Donald Trump, the Diddy case and the general condition of love. Reviewing it for Decider on 7 October 2025, Sean L. McCarthy wrote that his old tag line, these ain't jokes, feels truer now more than ever. Audience scoring has been cooler than the trade notices: IMDb users have it at 5.7.

He has described the last stretch as being treated like an overnight sensation after thirty years. A half-hour Fox comedy based on his life, with him starring as himself, has been in development since June 2025, set up as a multi-camera show with Bill Burr's North Hill Productions and 3 Arts Entertainment and pointed at the 2026–27 season. In Los Angeles he played the Netflix Is a Joke festival on 7 May 2026, a 9.45pm stand-up slot at the Belasco.

Autumn 2026 on the road

The current routing is the unglamorous kind that working headliners actually run, and it is booked deep. Listings as of 22 September 2026 show a two-night stand at Bricktown Comedy Club in Oklahoma City on 25 and 26 September, then the Classic Center Theatre in Athens, Georgia on 8 October and Raleigh Memorial Auditorium on 9 October.

October and November alternate theatres with club weekends: Rivers Casino in Philadelphia on 23 October, the Texas Trust CU Theatre at Grand Prairie on 24 October, the Funny Bone in Orlando on 30 and 31 October, the Stress Factory in Bridgeport on 6 and 7 November, three nights at the Comedy Zone in Greensboro from 13 to 15 November and three more at Cap City in Austin from 20 to 22 November. Laugh Out Loud Comedy Club in San Antonio takes 4 to 6 December.

The diary already runs well past that — the Funny Bone in Tampa on 8 and 9 January 2027, the Comedy Zone in Greenville on 2 April, the Comedy Zone in Jacksonville on 26 August — with around forty dates on sale in total.