---
title: "D.L. Hughley says Stevie Wonder fired him three times from the singer’s Los Angeles radio station"
url: https://badiyaa.com/dl-hughley-stevie-wonder-fired-kjlh/
published: 2026-10-16T22:12:00+01:00
modified: 2026-10-17T19:39:05+01:00
section: Entertainment
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# D.L. Hughley says Stevie Wonder fired him three times from the singer’s Los Angeles radio station

On The Jennifer Hudson Show, the Kings of Comedy headliner recalled the jokes that cost him his KJLH job and talked up Charlie's Boy, his memoir about the man who raised him.

D.L. Hughley says Stevie Wonder fired him three times, and the first time took about half an hour. Appearing on The Jennifer Hudson Show in a segment the program posted to YouTube on October 15, the comedian traced the firings to his early days at KJLH, the Los Angeles radio station Wonder has owned since 1979, where Hughley worked as the sidekick to a host he named as Cliff “the Body” Winston.

His account of the first dismissal is one line long. On air, he says, he wondered aloud: “Man, do you think this place would be this raggedy if Stevie could see?” By his telling, “In 30 minutes he was down there,” asking where Hughley was, and fired him on the spot.

## A radio station with a famous landlord

The setting explains why the joke landed so hard. Wonder bought KJLH from John Lamar Hill, the funeral-home owner whose initials are in the call letters, for more than $2 million in 1979, running it through a separate company, Taxi Productions, and giving the call letters a slogan: “Kindness, Joy, Love & Happiness.” The station, which broadcasts on 102.3 FM from studios in Inglewood, is described as the oldest Black-owned radio station on the West Coast. Winston later became its program director. A sidekick mocking the building on the owner’s own airwaves was never going to stay private.

Hughley went on to a career far bigger than a radio booth. He was the original host of the stand-up series ComicView from 1992 to 1993, then wrote, produced and starred in the sitcom The Hughleys from 1998 to 2002, a show drawn from his own family’s move into a wealthier neighborhood. He was one of the four headliners on the Kings of Comedy tour with Steve Harvey, Cedric the Entertainer and Bernie Mac, which became Spike Lee’s concert film The Original Kings of Comedy in 2000.

That film is the clearest measure of the tour’s pull. It opened to $11,053,832 on just 847 screens and finished at $38,168,022. Divide the first figure by the second and the opening weekend alone delivered about 29% of the film’s entire box-office total, a front-loaded pattern that shows how much of its audience was already waiting for it. Hughley has since added syndicated radio, a Peabody-winning special, The Endangered List, and five earlier books.

## What the clip shows, and what it skips

The segment runs a little over four minutes and splits into two halves. The Wonder material is the hook; the second half is a book plug, for Charlie’s Boy, a memoir about the man who raised him.

Taken as comedy, the Wonder story works because Hughley casts himself as the problem. The second firing, he says, came at House Full of Toys, an event for children Wonder used to hold at the Forum: “I cussed during the whole thing and then he fired me.” The punch line arrives with a recent coda. About three years ago, Hughley says, Wonder turned up uninvited at his Christmas party and started singing Christmas songs; when Hughley asked for a spot on the singer’s show, the answer, as he tells it, was “Not at all.” His verdict: “He never got the humor.”

Taken as an account, it is thinner. The title promises three firings, but the clip describes two; the party anecdote is a rejection, not a dismissal. No dates are given for any of it. Everything about Wonder here is Hughley’s version, told for laughs, and the singer does not respond in the segment.

The father section is where the clip earns its length. Hughley says Charlie Hughley never called him by name, only “boy,” and that he resented it before he understood it as ownership. He quotes his father on happiness (“Happy? That’s a woman’s word. I ain’t happy.”) and on affection (“You ate, right?”). He calls him “the dopest dude I’ve ever met, but he wouldn’t know it,” and says his no-vacations work ethic comes from him. The kicker is a funeral story: co-workers, including comedian Ruben Paul, told him his father mostly gave orders at work and once took them all to Disneyland. “He ain’t never took me to Disneyland,” Hughley says.

What the talk-show cut leaves out is the book’s biggest disclosure. The publisher’s description of Charlie’s Boy says Charlie Hughley was not D.L.’s biological father, something the comedian learned at 10, and describes him as an airport bag handler, where in the clip Hughley says simply that he worked at Delta Airlines. The memoir also covers his teenage years in the Bloods and his move to Ohio after threats on his life. None of that is in the segment. Anyone who wants the full story will have to go to the book, which Mariner Books published on October 6; the unabridged audiobook, narrated by Hughley himself, is listed at $23.99.

## Further reading

- [Wikipedia: D. L. Hughley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._L._Hughley)

- [Wikipedia: KJLH](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KJLH)

- [Wikipedia: The Original Kings of Comedy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Original_Kings_of_Comedy)

*Image: Anders Krusberg / Peabody Awards, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*