*Comedian Cedric the Entertainer is living up to his name. One of the hilarious stars of the new film "Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins," with Martin Lawrence, Ced is already working on several new movies, prepping for a new television show and launched his own production company, A Bird and A Bear Entertainment.

      In "Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins," which opened this past weekend at # 2 with $17.1 million, Cedric plays Clyde, Roscoe's (Lawrence) very competitive kin. The film also stars comedians Mike Epps and Mo'Nique - just adding to the comic crew.

      "Mike Epps and Mo'Nique, they've got these really big personalities," Cedric said of dealing with a cast of comics. "And Epps will go off on some crazy tangents. It was definitely hard. We tried to encourage each other, but that's a mark of a comic; to make another comic laugh. I tried to get Martin to break on camera."

      Cedric told reporters of how working with Lawrence, Epps, and Mo'Nique was a lot of fun, not to mention working with other co-stars James Earl Jones, Michael Clarke Duncan, and Nicole Ari Parker, but he also mentioned how endearing the film was to him.

      "I was raised in St. Louis, but before that, in a small town called Caruthersville, Missouri, which was very reminiscent of where we shot this movie," he said. "When you go to a small town, you're a star for maybe an hour. You come back and then it's right back to, 'Go get some wood for the fireplace.'"

      Furthermore, the film features some funny lines and some hilarious physical comedy, including hardly friendly family competitions. Cedric recalled one particular scene that pitted him against the pretty fit Lawrence in an obstacle course.

      "Ideally when you're reading in the script, it seems funny," he said. "And then you show up and it's an obstacle course and you're saying, 'Hey, where's the movie magic?' It was like an 80-yard obstacle course and we had to do it five, six times because they gotta (film) your feet, then they had to see your face."

      Cedric explained that Lawrence was actually pretty competitive on the course and joked about trying to convince him to slow down.

      "I mean, we're just shooting a movie, man," he told him.

      Doing quite well on the big screen with this film and roles in "Barbershop" and its sequel, and in last year's critically acclaimed "Talk to Me" with Don Cheadle, Ced is working to come back to the small screen. He shot the pilot for a sitcom on the ABC network just before the Writers Guild strike and hopes to resume production soon.

      "It's a very funny family situational comedy," he described. "I'm very excited about it. As soon as we get this writers' strike done we can get back to it. I'm looking forward to going back to television. I have small kids and the last films I've done have been three months in Ireland, three months in Vancouver, three months in Shreveport so I was just missing a lot of life. Plus, it's the opportunity to put some African-American faces on television, but the idea was for me to be at home where I can just go to work and be a part of my kids' lives."

      The new TV show has him as a responsible, hard-working dad, too. Cedric plays an insurance man who's provided for his family for 15 years when his wife, played by Regina Hall, makes her hobby into a major money-making business.

      "[My character] has a small insurance agency in Inglewood and my wife's hobby is as an urban Martha Stewart. She blows up and becomes the breadwinner. And then people think I'm some 'Kevin Federline' or something. It's the story of me being a man where people perceive I'm being taken care of."

      Ced has also started work on the film "Back to School," a remake of the '80s Rodney Dangerfield flick and he also begins work on "Cadillac Records" this March. "Cadillac Records" follows the rise and fall of the legendary Chicago blues label Chess Records - the record company home of music legends Muddy Waters, Etta James, and Chuck Berry.

       "This movie, in a way, is about the start of rock and roll," Ced said. "There are a couple of really great things in the movie. One, you see that the Rolling Stones and all these guys in showbiz were very inspired by the guitar play of the great blues singers. The Rolling Stones admit that they named themselves after one of Muddy Waters' hit records. So you get to see how people are inspired by music. And I think that, along with Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, it's interesting to see when things popped up, when they popped into pop culture. We always want credit, but this is an opportunity to show these things."