Comedian, actor and screenwriter Marlon Wayans will bring his SCANDAL-LESS comedy tour to New Orleans’ newly-renovated Orpheum Theater this Friday, January 22. But what does it mean when a movie star goes on a comedy tour?

“It’s stand-up. I’m telling jokes,” explains Wayans. “People haven’t seen me do stand-up, especially in New Orleans. This will be my first time touching base there. I’ve been doing really well all across the U.S. Now I’m finally coming to New Orleans, and I’m expecting the same results. I know, from watching the Saints win the Super Bowl, that nobody enjoys better than the Who Dat Nation. Boy, they get down. So I can’t wait to go there and hear them laugh.”

Of course, this won’t be the Scary Movie and White Chicks star’s first trip to the Big Easy. Wayans has spent enough time around New Orleans to have a favorite restaurant and a favorite dish. One that he finds particularly… attractive.

“I spent some time down there after Katrina and I spent some time down there scouting for a movie. But sometimes I’ll just go down there,” he says. “Honestly, I’ll go to Nola Restaurant. I’ll fly in just to go to dinner, then I’ll fly out. They have this buttermilk fried chicken. I swear, I could probably have sex with it. I would go home with that chicken. I wouldn’t get it pregnant because, obviously, you can’t do that. But that’s not to say that juices wouldn’t happen.”

“I’ll even be mad when I see other people eating that chicken,” he adds. “It’s like ‘yo, why you eating that chicken? That’s my girl, that’s my lady.’”

Wayans only recently jumped into the world of stand-up comedy in 2010, a full 22 years after he made his first film appearance as a pedestrian in his older brother Keenen Ivory Wayans’ blaxploitation parody I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. While Wayans has spent the past few years refining his stand-up chops, he’s also still going strong as an actor and writer, having launched his Haunted House franchise–a sort of reboot of the Scary Movie concept–in 2013. He’ll keep that genre spoofing streak alive when his next film, Fifty Shades of Black, hits theaters on January 29.

“When I saw [Fifty Shade of Grey] and read the book, I was kind of disappointed,” notes Wayans. “I was hoping to learn something, but I found out that this guy has basic sex. I was like, ‘I did some of this stuff in high school!’ So I thought it’d be funny to take it to the next level, and have Christian Grey be black and make him rich, and make him a very bad lover. I used all my high school experiences and threw them in the movie.”

Despite his newfound love of stand-up, Wayans shows no signs of slowing down in the movie biz, though he is planning to tweak his approach a bit. (“I’m probably going to take a break from parody for a while and just do some regular comedies,” he says.) In a lot of ways, the stand-up game is only helping him get a better grasp on the very things that made so many of his comedic films hits in the first place.

“Stand-up is a god,” he says. “When you do stand-up, it allows you to see what’s funny and what’s not funny. What’s appropriate and not appropriate. Who your audience is and what can offend who. It shows you how you can sell that joke so that everybody laughs. So it preps you for when you do movies. It’s instantaneous, so you see the reactions. With movies, you don’t get to hear the laugh for a year. Sometimes a year and a half.”

But at the end of the day, Wayans is just happy when he’s making people laugh any way he can. And if that means keeping his dramatic acting talents under wraps (he was great in the 2000 cult classic Requiem for a Dream), then so be it.

“Making people cry is one thing, but I love the joy of making people cry laughing,” he says. “I want people to be hurt. I want their stomachs to hurt, I want their ribs to hurt, I want their cheeks to hurt. I want them to leave the movie theater, or leave my show, like they just got in a fight. Like they gotta go home and ice.”

“It’s easy to cry,” he adds. “We’ve got a lot of issues. If you’re black in America, you want to cry everyday. But the beauty is when people can give you that little break from reality that lets you fly off and be a kid again.”

Marlon Wayans will perform at the Orpheum Theater on Friday, January 22. Tickets for the show are available here. His upcoming film, 50 Shades of Black, is set for release on Friday, January 29.