Mojo Brookzz

Chicago, a dying sister's advice, and four people in the room

Dyon Brooks took a bachelor's degree in criminal justice and worked as a party promoter and a private investigator before comedy was anything more than a thing he was funny at. The push came from his sister, who told him to try it two days before she died of cancer in 2013. He began making sketches roughly six months after her death and started doing stand-up a few months after that.

The first show drew four people: his mother, his cousins and two strangers who happened to be there. The day job did not survive the hobby either. A supervisor's post at a Best Buy distribution centre ended once management worked out he was the man in the viral clips, and he drew unemployment while he kept filming.

By the time Netflix wrote him up in 2026 he had been performing stand-up for twelve years, which is the detail most of the coverage skips. The internet made him look sudden. The gigging was not.

The sketch audience, and the slow conversion into tickets

The sketches are character work built around ordinary domestic and social situations, and they travelled on Facebook first rather than TikTok, which is unusual for a comic of his generation and shaped who turns up. Listings for the New York run put him at 3.3 million followers on Facebook, 2.2 million on Instagram and 1.5 million on TikTok. His tour publicity in May 2026 counted more than 28 million likes across the sketch catalogue; by September the reported figure across Facebook and Instagram alone was above 5.5 million followers.

The conversion from views to seats happened across three tours. The Unhand Me Now run in 2024 sold out every date. The I Know You F*ckin Lyin tour that followed covered more than forty cities and over 100,000 tickets, and took in a sold-out Chicago Theatre on home ground. Alongside his own dates he was hand-picked onto Mike Epps's arena-level We Them Ones tour, and had signed on for a third stint with it by the spring of 2026.

That arena apprenticeship matters for what came later. He had already worked rooms of that size as a supporting name before he tried to fill one with his own name on the poster.

Screen work, and an Emmy nobody expects

Nick Cannon brought him onto Wild 'N Out for season 21 after the sketches reached him, which put Brooks in front of a television audience that overlapped heavily with his online one. In 2025 he played Basil Henderson in Miss Governor, the Netflix sitcom executive produced by Tyler Perry, and that credit now leads almost every venue bio he has.

The least predictable line on the CV is a Sports Emmy, won for commercial writing on campaigns made with the Chicago Bears. Variety named him one of its ten Comics to Watch for 2025, and he was programmed at Just For Laughs in Montreal, the two industry stamps that tend to precede a streaming special.

I Know You Lying, and the argument about crowd work

The debut hour was taped at Center Stage Theater in Atlanta in December 2025, directed by Mike Lavin, and landed on Netflix on 6 October 2026 at 47 minutes and a 16+ rating. The material runs through celebrity parties, an encounter involving Bobby Brown, cosmetic-surgery culture and the BBL economy, modern bedroom practice and relationship dynamics, a sex-shop trip, an Usher concert, his grandmother's dementia, and a shopping trip with his niece that becomes a coming-out present.

Reception split along a line that says more about the current argument in stand-up than about the hour itself. Ready Steady Cut found him entertaining but judged the special all style and no real substance, with little in the set that resonated. The counter-case came from KevOnStage, who singled out the dementia bit as a favourite and pointed at the room rather than the reviews: "If you watch his special, his audience is dying in them seats." He also made the broader defence — "As a stand-up comedian, all you can ever hope to do is build an audience of people who like your style of humour. He's doing what we want to do" — and argued the criticism had been unnecessarily harsh.

The specific charge was that the hour would be thin without crowd work, since improvised exchanges with the front rows are what his clips are made of and what the algorithm rewarded on the way up. The special is a scripted set, which is exactly why the complaint surfaced when it did.

Where he stands in November 2026

The Outta Pocket Comedy Tour was announced on 11 May 2026 and went on general sale on 15 May, booked as a theatre-and-arena headline run. Demand outran the rooms almost immediately. The Detroit date at the Fox Theatre on 11 September sold out, and on 20 May a 10.30pm second performance was added behind the 7pm show. In Chicago the 12 September booking at Wintrust Arena, a roughly 10,300-seat building, sold out before the presales had finished, and a second night was added on 13 September.

He filled both. Video of him breaking down on stage in front of a hometown arena crowd circulated widely and was written up on 22 September — the distance from four seats to two nights at Wintrust is thirteen years, and he did not get through acknowledging it.

The run has kept going through autumn without a gap: Riverside Theater in Milwaukee on 6 November, the Orpheum in Minneapolis on 7 November, The Met in Philadelphia on 13 November, the Lyric in Baltimore on 14 November, two shows at the Beacon Theatre in New York on 15 November as part of the New York Comedy Festival, two nights at The Criterion in Oklahoma City on 19 and 20 November, two at the Majestic in Dallas on 21 and 22 November, Little Rock on 27 November and Shreveport on 28 November. December and the first half of 2027 carry on into Columbus on 5 December, Tampa on 11 December, a New Orleans date shared with Desi Banks, the Gulf South, Canadian stops in Pickering and Ottawa, and a western leg through Reno, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson. Huntsville, Pickering, Wheatland, Coachella, San Jose, the early Spokane show, Los Angeles and Newark are already gone, and most of the November theatre dates are down to waiting lists.

What the tour is actually selling

Nothing in the venue copy promises a theme, a device or a through-line, and that is honest rather than lazy. The pitch across the Pabst, CAPA and Criterion listings is the same: a comic who came off the internet and can hold a theatre for a night on personality and real-life material.

The risk in that model is visible in the reviews of the special. A set assembled from observational runs and crowd exchanges is close to unbeatable in a live room and loses something when it is fixed to tape. On the evidence of the autumn ticket counts, the live half of that trade is working.