“I was Lil’ Magic,” Kim says. “I was such a little desperado. I was ruining dance recitals across Manhattan because I never could afford the costume, but I’d just show up. Much to the amazement and chagrin of the dance instructor. She couldn’t get rid of me.”
Keenen and Damon’s performances back then were less formal. As early as eleven and thirteen, Damon and Keenen often clowned around for the amusement of family and friends, pretending to be Wiz and Juju, two streetwise kids always trying to pull some sort of scam. Wiz and Juju would one day morph into Wiz and Ice, the two hustlers featured in one of In Living Color’s most enduring series of sketches, “The Homeboy Shopping Network.”
At the movies, Keenen and Damon often lapsed into Dickie and Donald Davis, two gay brothers, an early template for Antoine Merriweather and Blaine Edwards, the two flamboyant, effeminate film critics played by Damon and David Alan Grier on In Living Color’s “Men on Film.” On occasion, Keenen and Damon took a version of these characters out into the neighborhood.
“Me and Keenen used to walk around the Village as a gay couple,” Damon says. “Sometimes I’d walk up to other guys who were with guys and go, ‘You left your robe and toothpaste at my house,’ slap him, and just take off running. That just was something we did to humor ourselves.”
Although it’s perhaps not the most flattering anecdote, it’s worth putting it into some context. The Wayanses grew up less than a mile—a fifteen-minute walk—from the Stonewall Inn, the West Village gay bar that became ground zero for the modern gay rights movement in late June of 1969, when patrons rioted to protest repeated police raids. The event cemented Greenwich Village, particularly the West Village, as one of the main hubs of gay life in America. In the seventies, the gay population in the Village began moving north into Chelsea, lured by cheaper housing costs, beginning a massive gentrification of the neighborhood surrounding the Fulton Houses. For teenagers like Keenen and Damon, this manifested itself as the relatively sudden emergence of a previously closeted but now highly visible gay culture. To them, it was all very different, and different was just funny.
“It was a time when it wasn’t really acceptable to be gay,” says Damon. “But the West Village was super-gay.”
Keenen’s role within the family was often more fatherly than brotherly. Although Dwayne was older, Dwayne had an air of unreliability around him. Some who knew him have surmised he may have suffered from schizophrenia or autism, and he eventually developed a serious drug habit, and died in 2000. Keenen, on the other hand, was solid. He didn’t really drink, didn’t do drugs, and was a good student at Seward Park—at least until he took a job at McDonald’s to help support the family. As he put in more and more hours slinging fast food—he eventually became a manager there—his grades slipped from As to Cs. But, as often as not, it was Keenen who was buying Marlon and Shawn pizza for dinner, or ice cream after school, or a new bike around Christmastime. It was Keenen who took them to get their immunization shots. It was Keenen they turned to with questions about school, about sex, about anything. It was a family dynamic that stuck.
As Keenen got older and took on more responsibility, the rules around the house loosened. He certainly didn’t have to be home at six in the evening if he was working a late shift. During summer nights, he’d sometimes venture out to parks and parties beyond the neighborhood, to Harlem or the Bronx. New York City in the seventies is often painted as a dimly romantic tableau of crime, blackouts, and urban decay—and it’s worth mentioning that the elevated West Side Highway did collapse in 1973, just a few blocks from the Wayanses’ apartment—but that’s not all Keenen found in the streets beyond Chelsea.
“When I was a teenager, I used to go to parties in parks where people were just out there DJing,” Keenen says. Hip-hop was being born in those parks and in basements and in local rec centers, by guys like DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Busy Bee, Melle Mel, and Lovebug Starski. “I used to go and hear guys like Starski and Busy Bee. That’s what we did in the summer.”
Despite Kennen’s plummeting grades and his general indifference toward the idea of college, an uncle convinced him to apply for a United Negro College Fund scholarship, which he won. After taking time off, in June of 1976 he left for Tuskegee Institute, a historically black school in Alabama, and became the first in his family to go to college. At the time, he’d only been outside the New York area once, to visit his grandmother in South Carolina.
“I can’t explain the feelings of pride we had for him,” Kim said. “Keenen was always the pioneer. The day he left, we gave him a huge duffel bag full of care packages and letters telling him how proud we were. We thought he was some kind of king.” As he rode away from the Fulton Houses in a taxi, his siblings trailed behind him, running after the cab until they could no longer keep up.
3
“This Is the Place”
Tuskegee, Alabama, was a stark change from Manhattan’s West Side. A small city of about ten thousand people in the green hills of eastern Alabama, Tuskegee had already played an outsized role in African-American history by the time Keenen arrived in 1976. The college, founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington, was the site of pioneering agricultural research by George Washington Carver, who taught there for forty-seven years. During World War II, it was home to the training facility for the Tuskegee Airmen, the first squadron of black fighter pilots in the nation’s history. Invisible Man author Ralph Ellison attended in the thirties, Malcolm X’s future wife Betty Shabazz did the same in the early fifties, and civil rights icon Rosa Parks was born in the city.
Tuskegee’s recent history was grimmer, though. In 1966, civil rights organizer Sammy Younge Jr., a Tuskegee native and a student at the college, was shot in the back of the head by a white gas station attendant after an argument about using a “whites only” bathroom. Younge, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member who’d marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, and had been beaten and arrested while trying to register voters and integrate businesses, became the first black college student murdered during the Civil Rights Movement. His murderer was acquitted by an all-white jury, sparking angry demonstrations around the city.
In 1972, the Associated Press broke the story of a forty-year-long medical study at Tuskegee conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, tracking black men with syphilis. The research, intended to follow the natural progression of the disease if untreated, represents perhaps the most egregious ethical transgression in the history of public health in this country: Participants in the study were never told of their diagnosis or offered treatment, despite the fact that by 1947, penicillin had become a common and effective medication for the disease. More than one hundred study participants died, forty of their wives were infected, and nineteen passed the disease on to their children. The study contributed to a high and enduring level of mistrust that African-Americans, particularly in the rural South, had for both the medical community and the federal government.
All that notwithstanding, Keenen described his time in Tuskegee as a “vacation.” He was studying to be an engineer, and although he got good grades, that’s not necessarily where his focus was. (“God help the person who drove across any bridge I designed,” he said.) Most of what he was learning in Tuskegee wasn’t coming out of books.
“Being in a city that was predominantly black, I knew for the first time in my life what white people feel every day—that is, what it’s like to be in the majority,” he said. “You have no blinders on because you look around and the mayor is black, the police chief is black, and the janitor is black. You can take your pick: You can be anyone.” Although the city’s population had been majority African-American for a long time, it took a 1960 U.S. Supreme Court ruling to wrest power away from the dwindling white population, who had gerrymandered the city’s borders to disenfranchise black residents.
There weren’t many Tuskegee students from New York City or who’d even been there, so Keenen found himself to be something of an exotic creature on
campus. He’d frequently entertain friends with tales of the Big Apple, and slip into impressions of neighborhood characters. One day, one of the few other New Yorkers at the school, an upperclassman, approached Keenen with a little advice.
“Hey, when you go home you should check out the Improv.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a comedy club. Richard Pryor started there.”
On his next trip back home, he looked in the phone book, and found that the club was all of a twenty-minute walk up Ninth Avenue from the Fulton Houses. “The irony was it took me going two thousand miles away to find out about a club that was one mile from my house.”
Budd Friedman opened the Improvisation in 1963 in a space on the corner of West 44th and Ninth formerly occupied by a Vietnamese restaurant. It was on the rather run-down edge of the theater district, next to Dykes Lumber yard. It’s signature redbrick wall behind the stage wasn’t an aesthetic choice: When Friedman yanked out the mirrors and wall panels as he readied the club to open, there was the redbrick wall. Hiring someone to put up drywall wasn’t in the budget, so the brick stayed.
The place wasn’t much to look at, a few rows of tables, wooden chairs, a barely elevated stage, and a small bar. At first, the Improv was mainly a late-night hangout for Broadway performers such as Liza Minnelli and Bette Midler who occasionally got up on the microphone to sing. By the midsixties, comedians had begun to infiltrate. Robert Klein, Lily Tomlin, Dick Cavett, Rodney Dangerfield, George Carlin, and yes, a young Richie Pryor, among others, came there to drink and work out routines between musical acts. Friedman auditioned performers onstage and cobbled together each night’s lineup based on who was hanging around. No one got paid. The trade-off was simple: Comics got to try out material in front of an audience that might sometimes include agents, managers, and television bookers; Friedman got free entertainment. Danny Aiello, who’d recently lost his job working for Greyhound, worked as a bouncer at the door for $190 a week.
By the early seventies, the Improv had, somewhat accidentally, become the nation’s first comedy club. As the place grew in stature, more and more comedians hung around the bar, waiting for a chance to go on. Comics such as Richard Lewis, Andy Kaufman, Freddie Prinze, Jimmie Walker, Jay Leno, and Elayne Boosler became regulars, and Pryor filmed his first concert film, Live and Smokin’, at the club in 1971. The following year, another comedy club, Catch a Rising Star, opened on the Upper East Side, which both ended the Improv’s monopoly on the local comedy scene and validated its existence. By 1975, a third club, the Comic Strip, had opened a few blocks from Catch.
By the time Keenen arrived at the Improv in the late seventies, Friedman had opened a second Improv, in California, and had largely left the day-to-day management of the original club to a young former comic named Chris Albrecht and his assistant, Judy Orbach. Years later, Keenen described his first visit to the New York Improv as something like the culmination of a spiritual pilgrimage.
“I walk in the door and there’s all these black-and-white photos of all these great comedians up on the wall,” he said. “I was just like, ‘Wow. This is the place.’ I didn’t even see the [main] room. It wasn’t until you actually get past the door and go in the room that you go, ‘This place is a shithole.’ ”
Regular spots at the club were highly coveted, and the gauntlet a comic had to pass through was intimidating. It typically started on a Sunday: Prospective comics lined up outside the club—sometimes beginning that morning—in hopes of getting a “ticket”—i.e., the right to get onstage that night for five minutes to try to impress the club’s management. Orbach normally started handing out tickets from an ice bucket in the early evening.
“We handed out maybe fifty, and everyone who didn’t get one would come back the following week,” Orbach recalls. Comics who “passed” onstage could start hanging around the club in hopes of getting more stage time; though, particularly for a comic who’d only recently passed, there was no guarantee of that.
“If you were fairly new then you’d come in Tuesday through Thursday and the second show on Friday and Saturday night,” says John DeBellis, a regular during the mid-to-late seventies who later went on to write on Saturday Night Live. “But I was told by Elayne Boosler to come in every night for every show, just in case a regular act didn’t show up. So I’d be there for both shows hoping to get on.”
Albrecht was in his midtwenties then, but he carried himself with an authority beyond his years.
“Everybody liked Chris,” says DeBellis. “He’s really smart and you didn’t feel that crazy ambition from him. He just had a way about him that you could tell he was in charge without ever telling you he’s in charge. And he was amazing with women.”
Keenen was home from Tuskegee on summer break in 1978 the first Sunday he lined up with the other hopefuls. He was there at eight in the morning, and as others began to arrive, he gravitated toward a young black comic who’d moved to New York from Chicago a few years earlier: Robert Townsend. “We were the only two brothers standing in line,” Keenen said.
After waiting around all day, Keenen was blessed with a ticket. When he finally got onstage to do his five minutes, the feeling was surreal. It had been more than a decade since he first got chased home from elementary school and chanced upon Richard Pryor on television. He could always crack his friends up, and had learned to make his siblings laugh—or “die” if he didn’t. He’d spent countless hours sealed in his bedroom closet daydreaming about his future life as a comedian. But until he stepped on that small stage at the Improv, it had all been his secret, safely tucked away. If no one knew, no one would ever know his failure. Once he stepped out in front of that tiny crowd of drunken New Yorkers, the dream wasn’t just his anymore. It was public. It was a declaration of intent. He wasn’t just a funny dude on the corner who could always make his stoned friends laugh. He was an aspiring comedian.
It didn’t go well.
“I bombed terribly,” he said. Yet that didn’t fully encapsulate what happened that night for Keenen. “It was an out-of-body experience. I was standing onstage, but at the same time I was able to see myself. [There] was only about five people in the audience and [there] was . . . scattered laughter. Still, I was looking at myself like, You’re doing it. It was like I’d stepped into my dream—all those years and the feeling was as good as I thought it was going to be. I didn’t care about laughter at that moment because I knew I could do this.”
Keenen didn’t “pass,” but he started hanging out at the Improv every night. He took to studying the comics and their routines with an intensity he’d never brought to his college courses.
“I started to understand how you work a stage and tell a joke,” he said. “Also, me being a kid from the projects, my audience at the Improv was tourists and people from New Jersey—you know, all white. I had to learn to translate my experiences to a different group of people.”
By his third audition, Keenen nailed it. He was officially an Improv regular. Robert Townsend was immediately impressed with his new friend.
“One of his first jokes, he goes, ‘I’m from a family of ten kids. My father had stretch marks,’ ” Townsend says. “Even as a young comedian, Keenen was kind of a master craftsman. He knew instinctively how to set up a punch, deliver the joke, rewrite the structure, make it funnier.”
At the end of the summer of 1978, Keenen returned to Tuskegee, but flush from his experiences at the Improv, his college days were numbered. Now that he knew what he wanted to do with his life, now that he’d had a taste of it, the idea of studying to be an engineer felt like a waste of time and money. Or worse, a mark of personal cowardice. Albrecht had laid it out for him in stark terms before he left: “If you’re serious about this, you need to be here year-round.”
He knew this was going to be a difficult conversation with his parents. They’d always emphasized the importance of education and had beamed when he’d become the first person in the family to go to college a few years earlie
r. But when he returned home to New York later in the school year, he sat on the dryer in the family’s apartment one evening and explained to his mother he was dropping out. Marlon, then just in elementary school, watched the conversation unfold.
“My mother cursed Keenen out,” he recalled. “My mother said, ‘Boy, a standup comedian? I known you your whole life and you ain’t never said nothing funny. This shit is the funniest thing you ever said! You’re going to be standup comedian? Let me tell you something, boy: You better go out there and get your engineer’s degree and a job with some benefits!’ ”
Howell too tried to reason with Keenen.
“Son, you should finish school. Get the degree so you have something to fall back on.”
“I understand that,” he told his father. “But if I have a cushion that I know I can fall on, I’ll allow myself to fall. If I know there’s nothing but hard concrete, I’m going to do my best to stay standing.” His parents weren’t convinced. “I might as well have said I was going to smoke crack,” Keenen said. “But I knew deep in myself what I wanted to be. I knew I was going to do it.”
Becoming a regular at the Improv was an accomplishment for a kid who was barely twenty. Unfortunately for Keenen, it wasn’t the kind of accomplishment that came with a steady paycheck. He moved back into his family’s apartment in the Fulton Houses and got a job working the door at the club.
His first actual paying standup gig wasn’t a memorable one, or at least not memorable in the way he would’ve hoped. It had all the hallmarks of a disaster from the outset: He was booked to perform at a racquetball convention.
“It was me, by the juice bar, with a microphone, and racquetball courts all around me,” Keenen recalled. “People came to the juice bar [as] I was trying to do my act. Right at the punch line, the blender would go ‘Eeeeekkkk!’ or the PA would go ‘Court 3 is open.’ ” But even in this debacle, there was a lesson to be learned. “Distraction is the death of comedy. You can have the audience right there, the setup is going great, and just as you get to the punch line, a waitress puts a glass down—clink!—and it dies.”
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