Erica Faye Watson, comedic ‘hidden gem of Chicago’

When a candidate for state’s attorney in Cook County, Illinois, held a lunchtime fundraiser in downtown Chicago in 2016, the campaign hired a local comedian and television personality named Erica Faye Watson to warm up the crowd.

Watson had never met the candidate, Kim Foxx, but that didn’t keep her from diving into an extended riff about Foxx’s hair. “I had never been publicly roasted before,” Foxx said in an interview. “I was like, who is this woman?”

But the jokes were just a setup for Watson’s real point: what it would mean to have a Black woman as the county’s chief prosecutor, and how proud she would be to see Foxx in that role. The two became fast friends.

“She was very much about empowering Black women,” said Foxx, who is now in her second term. “She was fighting not just for herself but for people like her.”

Watson was a Chicagoland celebrity, best known as a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning talk show on WLS-TV, Chicago’s ABC station. She also performed stand-up comedy, wrote and directed plays and acted in movies.

Watson died Saturday in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She was 48. The cause was COVID-19, Patti Gill, her former agent, said.

“Erica was a hidden gem of Chicago and a voice for overlooked businesses and causes,” said Gill, who cast her in “BlacKorea,” a short film she wrote, in 2017.

Erica Faye Watson was born Feb. 26, 1973, in Chicago, to Henry Watson, a postal worker, and Willie Mae Watson, a homemaker.

Her survivors include her parents and her brother, Eric.

Watson attended the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was a fixture on the school’s Black arts scene.

“If there was something involving the Black community on campus, Erica was going to be a part of it,” said John Jennings, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, who was a graduate student when she arrived.

Watson later transferred to Columbia College Chicago, where she graduated in 1998 with a degree in film directing. She received a master’s in arts, entertainment and media management from Columbia in 2005.