Whether it's one of his highly rated HBO specials, a comedy club stage or a late-night talk show, comedian D.L. Hughley has never been shy about letting folks know how he feels.

Dom Imus?

"I think people got upset and it was a tempest in a teapot."

N-word ban?

"I think that our time would be better served doing things that would have more of an ancillary benefit than that."

"Studio 60"?

"I think we were a first-round draft pick who never lived up to our potential."

D.L. will be in Pittsburgh Saturday at the Carnegie Library Music Hall of Homestead as part of his 30-city "Unapologetic Tour."

The tour is based on his most recent HBO special of the same name.

We did a Q&A with the sometimes controversial stand-up who always makes sure Pittsburgh is on his tour schedule.

We know the tour is called "Unapologetic," but can a comedian ever go over the line?

A comedian can go over the line all the time, but it's not up to him to find the line. I don't believe in censorship and I particularly don't believe in self-censorship. I think you've gotta kind of do what you do and do what you're inner compass tells you to. The audience is going to be the arbiters of what's inappropriate to them. (He refers to a news story about a 4-year-old being suspended from school for sexual harassment for hugging his teacher and placing his head on her bosom.) How could I know all this stuff about society and take them seriously as far as being a compass for what's offensive and what's not. ... I just won't censor myself, and if people kind of don't dig what I'm saying they'll let me know.

Isn't that what happened when you were protested for calling the Rutgers women's basketball team ugly on Jay Leno's show? Did you take any of that to heart?

No. I think it was silly.

[He moves on to talk about Don Imus.]

I wonder how taking a show off the air that we didn't even know was on was some kind of civil-rights victory. I don't understand how that was. Don Imus will be back on the air in the next couple of weeks or months. He'll be bigger than ever because of the controversy. He didn't lose any money or any sleep so I don't know what that was all about. It was just more or less an exercise in futility.

How do you feel about the push to ban the N-word?

I think it's dumb. Richard Pryor and Martin Luther King existed around the same time but Martin Luther King never called Richard Pryor and said, "Could you stop using the N-word? It's making our struggle that much harder." And that's because Martin Luther King was trying to affect real change, significant change for the benefit of a people. Not esoteric change that really wouldn't change anything. I think even if you stop saying the N-word tomorrow, it wouldn't make schools better in our community, it wouldn't change the fact that 70 percent of our kids are born to single-parent homes, wouldn't reduce the AIDS epidemic in our community, it wouldn't stop people from going to jail. More black people die from not exercising and eating fried food than ever died from the N-word. You don't go to the doctor and he says, "Your cholesterol is down. Have you been using the N-word lately?"

Why wasn't "Studio 60" successful?

We had a brilliant pilot and then we disappointed the audience. They expected us to be funnier and expected us to be faster and expected us to kind of live up to the promises of the pilot and we didn't."

What do you plan to talk about on stage?

I try to keep my stand-up as fluid as I can, kind of connect it to what's going on now. The other day I turned on the TV and saw Ellen crying about the adoption of a dog or having to give a dog away. We in this society value things that in many parts of the world, they don't. In this country you can get away with killing a human being before you get away with killing a dog. We have our priorities really kind of juxtaposed. ... I never want to do comedy that doesn't have some kind of social component to it. I just stopped wanting to be on stage and make people laugh about nothing. That just doesn't appeal to me. What appeals to me are things rooted in truth.