Chico Bean

Comedian · Verified

Comedian and 85 South Show co-host known for quick improv humor.

#85Hub rank

2.5MInstagram followers

About Chico Bean

Chico Bean is the most dangerous man on Wild ’N Out — the cast member Nick Cannon keeps in the holster for when somebody needs to get destroyed. Anthony Jamal Bean’s roast game is surgical: guests, castmates, the host himself, nobody is safe, everybody is laughing.

Born Anthony Jamal Bean on February 20, 1987, in Washington, D.C., he sharpened his craft far from the industry’s spotlight — on the comedy stages of Greensboro, North Carolina, while attending North Carolina A&T State University. The early résumé reads like a grinder’s apprenticeship: opening sets for Chris Wiles, founding the Freestyle Funny Comedy Show with Darren Brand and B-Daht, running with the NC Comics All-Stars, and gigging clubs, colleges, and universities across the country.

The break came the way breaks are supposed to come: on stage. Bean tore through a set at Nick Cannon’s “Fresh Faces of Comedy” showcase — a run that included the renowned Gotham Comedy Club in New York — and Cannon, in the audience, saw the future. An audition followed, and in 2013 Bean joined the cast of “Wild ’N Out” for its fifth season. He never left. More than a decade later he remains one of the show’s defining cast members, the guy the celebrity guests learn to fear in the freestyle rounds.

His signature moments are the stuff of the show’s lore. The “Sucka MC Battles” — his endlessly quotable back-and-forth with fellow cast member Karlous Miller — became appointment viewing, two comics trying to out-rap each other while the studio lost its mind. His Wildstyle battle with rapper Safaree in the T-Pain episode of Season 7 is still cited by fans as an all-timer. The official supercuts tell the rest of the story: across seasons 20 and 21, Chico went off on Michael Blackson, Sukihana, Ari Fletcher, Kirk Franklin, and DC Young Fly — a hit list that reads like a comedy hall of fame. What powers it is a genuinely unusual gift: Bean can memorize the words to a song almost instantly on first listen, and can spin a brand-new jingle out of thin air — a party trick that, on an improv show, is a weapon.

Off the show, he built an empire with his two closest collaborators. The “85 South Show” — Bean, DC Young Fly, and Karlous Miller, with Clayton English in the early days — started as a comedy podcast and became a touring juggernaut: part stand-up, part roast session, part barbershop conversation, entirely unfiltered. The chemistry that made their “Wild ’N Out” battles electric turned out to scale — the 85 South live show sells out theaters with the same chaotic energy as the podcast, and the brand has grown into one of the most successful independent comedy operations in the business.

The mainstream noticed. In October 2020 and again in 2021, Bean co-hosted the BET Hip-Hop Awards alongside DC Young Fly and Karlous Miller — the 85 South trio bringing their chemistry to one of culture’s biggest stages. His acting and writing résumé kept pace: MTV2’s “Guy Court,” where comedians playfully adjudicated relationship disputes; a writing and acting turn on E!’s sketch series “The James Davis Project”; a guest spot on TruTV’s “Trivial Takedown” in 2017; and, in 2023, a PrizePicks commercial as a deadpan Black genie explaining the app.

The road work is relentless. Beyond the soundstages, Chico tours the country — headlining Improv clubs from Ontario to Chicago to Raleigh to Pittsburgh — while the 85 South specials out of Denver, Philly, and Boston stand as full-length comedy films, each an hour-plus of roast battles and stand-up racking up millions of views apiece. Television made him famous, but the road made him rich. And through it all, the “Wild ’N Out” appearances keep coming — because when you need someone to end a battle in one line, there is exactly one call to make.

The style is old-school: quick, devastating, and always in control. Chico comes from the tradition of comedians who can read a room in five seconds and own it in ten — stand-up, improv, roasts, fluent in all of it, and the camera loves him because the audience already does. Younger comics study his battles the way ballplayers study film: the setups are clean, the callbacks are ruthless, and the finishing lines land like they’d been written for weeks instead of invented on the spot. In an era when so much comedy is content, Chico Bean is still a craftsman — and the craft is destroying people, lovingly, in real time.

That longevity is the real résumé. Cast members cycle through “Wild ’N Out” every season; Bean has outlasted them all, because you can’t replace what he does — you can only point a camera at it and get out of the way.

Previously covers Chico Bean because the roast is an art form — and he’s its most dangerous practitioner. For the full trio, see 85 South Show — and for his favorite target, DC Young Fly.