When The Original Kings of Comedy rocked theaters in 2000, one of the revelations was that D.L. Hughley was a damn funny stand-up comedian. No offense to the writers of his show, The Hughleys, which ran for an impressive four years, but the kind of safe comedy writing on that series was nothing compared to the no-holds-barred style of Original Kings. It wasn't the last time that Hughley wouldn't seem like himself. Even in his own HBO comedy special, he sometimes doesn't play to his strength - thinking off the cuff. When you can see Hughley coming up with ideas on the fly, he's riveting. When he pulls out the canned material, on The Hughleys or in some of the awful movies he's made or even on stage, he's forgettable.

All four of the guys on Kings went on to bigger and better things with Bernie Mac doing regular work in TV and film, Cedric the Entertainer doing the same, and Steve Harvey being a regular on the stage circuit and on TV. D.L. Hughley never seemed to find the right project. He was great in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but projects like Scary Movie 3 and Soul Plane didn't seem like the right fit. Hughley seems most at home on the stage, which is where HBO viewers found him on a Saturday night at the end of September. You can find his comedy special, Unapologetic, on HBO On Demand and on the network and it's also already available on DVD.

Filmed in DC, Unapologetic lives up to its name. It's Hughley's take-no-prisoners style that keeps the special entertaining, even if he does seem to point his comedic gun at a few easy targets. We don't need Michael Richards or Don Imus jokes any more. Let's close the door and put the nail in those coffins. What separates Hughley from many of his peers is his ability to riff. At the end of the special, he starts to take apart people in the first few rows and it's clearly complete improvisation, something that not everyone can do. The canned stuff, like the impersonations of white people yelling at cops, sound dated and unoriginal. But Hughley is still a definite talent, as his fourth HBO comedy special proves. Unlike a few recent stand-ups on the network that has been most supporting of them over the years who delivered awful shows (Saget's was unbearable), we're looking forward to Hughley's fifth HBO special. When he keeps it fresh, he's quicker and smarter than most of them working today, which makes the canned material that much more frustrating.