SOUTH BEND — The comedian Sinbad doesn’t hide his frustration when he begins answering the obvious question: Where has he been the past decade?

“People say that all the time, and I’m like, ‘Man, I’ve never come off the road,’” the Benton Harbor native says by telephone from his home in Los Angeles. “I’ve never stopped doing stand-up. In today’s world, with TMZ and everything out there in an instant, if you’re not on a screen, somewhere people think you’re not around.”

With the exception of his role as an orderly in the little-seen 2002 Eriq La Salle film “Crazy as Hell,” Sinbad largely disappeared from film and television after 1998’s fourth installment of HBO’s 1970s-era soul music festival, “Summer Jam.”

That, however, is about to change.

The 53-year-old comedian, whose given name is David Adkins, recently guest starred on the FX Television series “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” will join the cast on a new season of NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice,” which premieres March 14, and has recorded his first hourlong comedy special in nearly 13 years, aptly titled, “Sinbad: Where U Been?” The special, which airs at 10 p.m. Feb. 21, is his first for Comedy Central.

“I had been talking to HBO for five or six years about doing another comedy special for them, but because I don’t do a brand of humor that they consider edgy enough, it just never happened,” says Sinbad, who returns to the region Sunday to perform at the Morris Performing Arts Center in South Bend. “To me, it’s always been about being funny. That’s when Comedy Central stepped up to the plate.”

The special, which was taped last month in Los Angeles, contains the kind of long-range storytelling that made Sinbad a comedy staple in the ’90s.

He riffs on everything from married life to the economy and even President Barack Obama, but he also insists that Sunday’s live show will be anything but a rehash of that same material.

“I don’t know where I’ll be at come Sunday,” he says. “I don’t have any one way of doing anything. Each show is different. You could come see me two days in a row and see two different shows. It’s all over the place. It changes. It mutates. It’s always going to be something new. That’s what makes it fun for me.”

Long before adopting his swashbuckling stage name, the son of Louise and the Baptist Rev. Donald Adkins says he knew he was meant to be an entertainer.

“Since I was 5 years old, I knew I wasn’t going to work 9 to 5,” Sinbad says. “I was going to be entertaining people in some way, but growing up in a small town like Benton Harbor, especially back in the ’60s and ’70s, there was no direct connection on how to do it.”

Sinbad was in the marching band and on the basketball team at Benton Harbor High School, and continued his basketball career at the University of Denver through the 1978 season.

He spent the next four years serving in the U.S. Air Force, but when he didn’t make the basketball team, he turned to comedy. He toured the comedy club scene until his break came on the popular television show “Star Search.” He appeared on the Ed McMahon-hosted talent competition nine times from December 1984 to February 1985, catching the eye of fellow comedian Bill Cosby.

Sinbad guest starred on “The Cosby Show” and was cast as Coach Walter Oakes in its spinoff, “A Different World.” By the ’90s, Sinbad was starring in films such as “Necessary Roughness,” “Houseguest,” “First Kid” and “Jingle All The Way,” and performing in a successful string of HBO comedy specials, including 1991’s “Brain Damaged,” 1993’s “Afros & Bellbottoms,” 1996’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and 1998’s “Nuthin but the Funk.” SClBThen he seemingly disappeared from the spotlight, culminating in 2007 with the death rumor that was circulated on Wikipedia.

“When I first hit, I was always on TV and doing movies and still working every week on stage,” Sinbad says. “Even though I stopped doing a lot of TV and movies, I was still onstage working. I made the mistake of thinking that people knew that.”
When Sinbad decided to return to Hollywood, a town with a considerably short memory, he faced resistance to a brand of comedy that he says is often mislabeled as “clean.”

“In Hollywood now, they think that means you don’t have any bite,” Sinbad says. “Then they meet you and it’s like, ‘Whoa this isn’t what I expected at all.’ It confused them. And if it confuses them, they don’t know what to do with you.”

That is at least part of the reason Sinbad will appear alongside ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Sharon Osbourne and Bret Michaels on next month’s “Celebrity Apprentice.” Filming for Donald Trump’s NBC reality show has already begun. Although Sinbad can’t divulge how many episodes he appears on, he did comment on his castmates and the show’s ringleader.

“There’s some cool people there,” Sinbad says. “And there’s some people who trip out. Donald Trump isn’t around too much. He’s sort of doin’ his own thing but he’s cool.”

Sinbad says he doesn’t consider such new-found exposure to be a comeback, because, he insists, he’s never gone anywhere. But it’s also clear he’s excited to have a comedy special on television again. Comedy Central will also release a DVD version of “Sinbad: Where U Been?” on Feb. 23 with an additional 45 minutes of never-aired material.

“It’s funny. It’s honest,” he says.“It just shows people what I do. It’s what I’ve always done – get up there and entertain.”

jbonfiglio@TheH-P.com