Eventually more paying gigs materialized, often opening for musicians, at clubs like the Village Gate. The money typically stunk, but Keenen was soaking up the experience like a sponge. The Improv was like a graduate seminar in standup in those days. Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, Larry Miller, Robert Wuhl, Joe Piscopo, and Bill Maher were regulars. Guys like Robin Williams and Rodney Dangerfield would stop in to work on material. Sitting in the club, waiting to go on, the conversations were about comedy. Did you see my set last night? That premise was great, but why didn’t the punch line work as well as it should have? Why don’t you try doing it this way? Comics traded standup tips over drinks, recommended movies to each other, analyzed Tonight Show sets, tried out material on each other. When the club closed, the comics would continue the conversation at cheap, all-night eateries like the Green Kitchen or the Market Diner. When they weren’t at the club, they’d get together and play poker or touch football.
Keenen hung around the club often and sometimes played on the Improv’s softball team. (DeBellis’s scouting report: “Really smooth but couldn’t hit.”) He felt very much part of a community.
“There was a great camaraderie in the clubs back then,” Keenen said. “Part of why I think that generation prospered like it did is because we all looked out for each other. If you were a new comic and you did a bit and Jerry Seinfeld had a bit that was similar, he wouldn’t have to say anything. I’d come up and go, ‘Yo, you can’t do that. That’s Jerry’s bit.’ What that did is that forced everyone to be individuals.” Those who didn’t adhere to this code were ostracized. “It was a brotherhood,” he said. “That’s what really helped create my voice.”
Like in any community—particularly one largely populated with wildly insecure, occasionally drug-addled neurotics who measured their self-worth in a combination of belly laughs and career advancements—there were rivalries, jealousies, and fights. But the stakes, relatively speaking, were still low then. The comedy industry was in its infancy. The goal for most of the comics at the Improv was—best case—a shot on The Tonight Show. Other paths forward were just beginning to suggest themselves—Gabe Kaplan, Freddie Prinze, Robin Williams, and Jimmie Walker had all recently graduated from the clubs to network sitcom deals, and Saturday Night Live had also started up in 1975, just a few blocks away—but opportunities were few and far enough between that cutthroat, knife-in-the-back competitiveness was relatively rare. Keenen was well liked and even those who weren’t blown away by his act felt that he had something intangible.
“His standup was okay, but my ex-wife used to say he was the best-looking guy she’s ever seen,” says DeBellis. “He had a huge smile and an infectious laugh. It would draw you in.”
Keenen’s comedy progressed but the cultural gap between him and the mostly white audience sometimes felt unbridgeable. Albrecht, then the club’s manager, was a consistent sounding board and mentor for Keenen, often dispensing pearls of advice before or after a set.
“One night, Chris goes, ‘When you go on, I want you to say I and me. Never say yours and ours,’ ” Keenen said. “ ‘The more specific you are, the funnier you’re going to be.’ ” Keenen made the adjustment and noticed a difference. “I realized that if I were to come on and say, ‘All of our mothers do this,’ then people would sit back and go, ‘Well, I don’t know if my mother does that.’ But if I say, ‘My mother does this,’ then people either go, ‘Yeah, my mother does that too!’ or, ‘Your mom is funny!’ ” With time, Keenen’s comedy became broader, smoother, more inclusive.
The New York comedy scene represented nearly as big a cultural whiplash for Keenen as decamping for Tuskegee had been. There were few black comics, and the ones there tended to congregate around each other. Keenen and Robert Townsend felt an instant kinship. Both had grown up poor—Townsend on Chicago’s West Side—but they were decidedly different people. When Keenen first visited Robert at his apartment in Queens, he could see that immediately.
“He invites me over and lays out wine and cheese,” Keenen said. “I didn’t know if he was classy or gay. And it was different kinds of cheese. I didn’t know where to start. The only cheese I knew was the government block.”
As a kid, Townsend’s mother shielded him from neighborhood gangs in Chicago by keeping him inside, where he spent lots of time in front of the television, honing impressions of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Bill Cosby. As a young man, he worked as an actor in Chicago, performing with the city’s Experimental Black Actors Guild, then enrolled in college, first at Illinois State University and then at Hunter College in New York. Like Keenen, he eventually quit school to follow his dream of being a performer. In New York, Townsend worked and studied with the Negro Ensemble Company, and occasionally scored acting work in commercials. But his frustration with the opportunities available to him as a black actor convinced him to give standup a try.
“I just loved performing,” Townsend says. “I had gone to see an all–black and Hispanic version of Julius Caesar. Some of the actors had the language down and some sounded like they came off 125th Street. I crafted my first [standup] routine based on that. That started me as a comedian, but I was never a pure standup. I was doing characters.”
Unlike Keenen, who “passed” at the Improv quickly, it took Robert longer. Keenen did his best to help.
“He schooled me on how to work the system,” Townsend says. “He was like, ‘Ask for this spot, not that spot.’ ‘Show up at this time, not that time.’ By the time I worked Keenen’s system, I got in.”
Robert returned the favor by sharing what he’d learned as a struggling actor.
“It was a good exchange,” said Keenen. “He taught me the business of acting and I taught him the business of comedy.”
The friendship wasn’t simply transactional. These were two guys in their early twenties who’d already made it far enough from their humble beginnings to be imbued with a sense of possibility that outstripped what any clear-eyed, sober assessment might promise. They were funny, handsome, smart, and confident that those qualities would be enough to shrug off all the forces conspiring to crush their ambitions.
“We just clicked,” says Townsend. That said, he was occasionally startled at what made Keenen laugh. “I’d visit him in his neighborhood in Chelsea and he’d have his friends try to rob me. He wanted to see what [I] was gonna do. He thought that shit was funny. His sense of humor can be twisted.”
There were so few black comics in New York in this era that if you ask one of them how many there were, they’ll usually start naming them. Let’s see, there was Keenen, Robert Townsend, George Wallace, John Ridley, Barry “Berry” Douglas, that crazy dude Maurice who used to do an impression of Humphrey Bogart on cocaine . . . Certainly, you could count them on your fingers and still have a few fingers left over to hold your cigarette. So when a new one emerged, the others heard about him.
In 1978, Keenen was working the door at the Improv, when a short, skinny black guy—a kid, really—walked up and stuck out his hand.
“Hey, I’m Eddie Murphy. I thought I was the only funny black man in New York. Now I see there are two.”
Keenen had heard about Eddie. He was barely seventeen and cocky as hell. He’d mostly been performing in clubs on Long Island, near where he’d grown up in Roosevelt, but carried himself like a guy poised to take Manhattan. Keenen liked him right away and helped get him an audition at the Improv. Silver Friedman, Budd’s ex-wife, had recently won control of the club in their divorce, and was running the Sunday tryouts.
“Silver was different from Budd or Chris Albrecht in that she wanted clean humor,” Keenen said. “It wasn’t that Eddie was dirty, but he was young.” His material at the time, Keenen explained, revolved mostly around “boogers and farts and doo-doo. So he goes on and he does his booger set. Silver is horrified. She’s like, ‘I don’t allow toilet humor in my club.’ ” Keenen cajoled Eddie to try again the next week, but counseled him to leave out the booger-related material.
“He comes back and the next set is his fart stuff. He comes offstage and he’s really proud of himself because he didn’t do the booger stuff and he still killed. Silver just looks at him and goes, ‘I don’t chew my cabbage twice,’ and walks away.” Keenen tried to convince Eddie to come back a third time, but the younger comedian had had enough of the Improv.
Eddie tried his luck across town at the Comic Strip.
“He was a fucking riot,” says Richie Tienken, one of the Strip’s co-owners. Eddie became a regular there and, within a few months, asked Tienken to manage him. “I turned him down. What the fuck did I know about managing?”
Eddie asked again. And again. Tienken didn’t understand his insistence. Eddie explained that he’d been complaining to his mother that everyone he met was trying to screw him over. She asked if he trusted anyone, and he realized Tienken was the only one. So Tienken relented. “I said, ‘So if we fuck this up, we can blame it on your mother?’ ”
Townsend started working as part of an all-black improv comedy group called the Kitchen Table, alongside friends he’d met at the Negro Ensemble Company: Reginald VelJohnson, Angela Scott, Melvin George, and Pam Jones. They’d typically practice sitting around the kitchen table—hence the name—at Scott’s fifth-floor walkup on the Lower East Side. According to George, they were the only black comedy team in New York at the time. They’d sometimes get late-night spots at the Improv, Catch, and the Strip, but failing that, they’d set up in Washington Square Park, where they’d often perform alongside legendary street comic Charlie Barnett. (“Not with him, near him,” Scott says. “Because Charlie always commanded the biggest crowds.”) Their comedy leaned absurdist. They did a musical parody of “Send in the Clowns” called “Send in the Clones.” There was a spoof of McDonald’s called “McMama’s,” and send-ups of various television shows and commercials.
“Because we were an African-American group, we were considered a novelty,” says VelJohnson, who later starred in Die Hard, Crocodile Dundee, and as the father on the ABC sitcom Family Matters. Still, they were careful not to lean too hard on race. “We happened to be African-Americans who were funny, but we didn’t play on the fact that we were African-Americans trying to be funny. We were funny first.”
Through Townsend and the Improv, the members of the Kitchen Table met Keenen. When Scott was first introduced to him, Keenen was working the door at the club.
“He wasn’t a warm, fuzzy bunny, let’s just say that,” Scott recalls. “Onstage, he was funny, fun, accessible, animated. Offstage, the opposite.”
At least, initially. Keenen was shy, which was sometimes interpreted as standoffish, though as Scott got to know him, he warmed up. Within a few months, Scott, George, VelJohnson, Townsend, and Keenen were hanging out regularly.
“After the Improv closed, we’d all hop into Melvin’s car and go on up to M&G’s, a soul food restaurant on 125th Street,” says Scott. “I’d be on Keenen’s lap, and then we’d peel out like clowns at a circus, running inside trying to get fried chicken or the last mac and cheese.”
These comics became a support group within the larger New York comedy community. When one of them got a good Friday-night spot, did a good set, got a callback for an audition, they were all buoyed.
“It wasn’t a matter of being competitive,” says George. “You have to remember this was a time when there were no blacks on television.” Once Good Times and What’s Happening!! went off the air in 1979, the only predominantly black major network series left was The Jeffersons, until 1984 when The Cosby Show premiered. “There was just no black representation on TV, so if somebody got a break, we were happy for them.”
George would often visit the Wayanses’ apartment, where Keenen’s youngest brothers, then just in elementary school, would initiate him into the family’s kill-or-be-killed comedy culture.
“Shawn and Marlon used to make fun of me because of the way I dressed,” he says. “I always wanted to have a job where I had to wear a suit. Comedy was my job, so I dressed for it. But it wasn’t just your normal suit and tie. I had a tuxedo jacket, a ruffle shirt, bell-bottom slacks. Shawn and Marlon always made fun of what I was wearing, saying I just got off the clown shift, and my pants were made from the curtains hanging in the window. Every time I went over there, they lit into me.”
By 1979, Townsend was booking a lot of commercials. With the income, he began buying professional-grade video equipment. Soon, he had cameras, lights, microphones, and converted a part of his one-bedroom apartment in Woodside, Queens, into a small soundstage. One of the first things he decided to film was the Kitchen Table. Keenen, who until this point hadn’t been a part of the comedy troupe, came along and suggested that his younger brother Damon come too.
“Damon was working at Smiley’s Deli at the time,” Townsend says. “I remember Keenen saying, ‘We gotta get my baby brother involved. He’s really funny and can do characters.’ ”
There was no grand plan around filming that day. No one was thinking about making a pilot or a “sizzle reel” or sending out the tape to agents or entertainment executives. The main thought was simply We’ve got this camera equipment, we’ve got this improv group, wouldn’t it be fun to see ourselves on tape? The group got together once to rehearse, then met again at Townsend’s apartment and turned on the cameras.
“We were just having fun,” says Scott. “We were trying characters out that we’d later bring to the stage.”
Still, even in these relaxed environs, a vague hierarchy emerged.
“Keenen would say, ‘Melvin, you’re this guy. Angela, you’re this girl—go!’ ” George explains. “Then we’d improv. Then Bobby would go, ‘Okay, let’s do it this way: Melvin, you’re this person. Angela, you’re this person. Reggie, you’re this person—go!’ Then we’d act that scene out.’ ”
VelJohnson was particularly impressed with Keenen. “He was always the one who had ideas for bigger things,” he says. “I was in awe of his ability to manage and put together comedy bits. I saw him as a leader, as the great innovator.”
Still, the major revelation from the day spent filming in Robert’s apartment was neither Keenen nor Robert. It was Damon.
“He was brilliant,” says Scott. “Genius.”
“He was so damn funny it made me insecure,” says Townsend. “That’s your baby brother!? He’s working at a deli?” Townsend asked. It wasn’t just Damon’s first time performing on camera, it was his first time performing anywhere. “He had this hat he stuffed with paper and was a Jamaican dude on the corner acting crazy.” He had other characters too: a gay film critic, a neighborhood hustler who, along with his brother—played by Keenen—sold stolen goods from the back of a truck. “All those characters he’d eventually do on In Living Color, I saw in my apartment.”
The Kitchen Table didn’t last much longer. But a seed was planted in that Queens apartment, and even though nobody knew then what it might grow into, there was a feeling that something important had transpired. As Keenen later told an interviewer, “After we did it, we thought, Damn, we wish we could do this all the time. In the back of my head, that always stayed with me.”
4
“Richard Was a God, So We Were Just Lucky to Be in His Orbit”
New York City was a strange place in the late seventies. Yes, there were blackouts, subway trains covered in graffiti, and a crime spike across the city. Each day seemed to bring a grim new harbinger of doom: Son of Sam. Fires rage across the South Bronx. A helicopter crashes into the top of the Pan Am building. A Turkish bathhouse burns to the ground. But it was also a time of reasonably cheap rents and seemingly infinite possibility. Artists, performers, musicians, and comedians could afford to live in parts of Manhattan. It was the era of CBGBs, Martin Scorsese, Max’s Kansas City, and Woody Allen. Disco, unfairly dismissed because of its connections to various fringe subcultures—gay, black, drug—was congealing into something harder, less polite.
Keenen recalls walking by a record store in Chelsea arou
nd this time and hearing “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, blaring from speakers inside. The song was simple: three MCs dropping rhymes over the backing track of Chic’s “Good Times.” But for Keenen, there was more going on. It was as if someone had taken the sounds, the energy, the feel of those summer nights that he’d begun soaking up in parks and parties across Harlem and the Bronx and distilled them onto vinyl. The amazing thing wasn’t so much the song itself—even though it would become the song that would introduce much of the world to hip-hop—but that some person, some record company thought it was worth preserving this tiny corner of culture for posterity. It had value.
“They were playing it on the turntable,” Keenen says. “We were staring at it because it was like, This is the shit that was in the streets and now it’s on a record. This shit is real now. It was magical.”
Damon was even more of a hip-hop diehard. In December 1978, he saw Grandmaster Flash at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem—incidentally the same ballroom where Malcolm X had been assassinated thirteen years earlier. “I was there when Flash first spun a song called ‘Hot Shot,’ ” Damon said. “Just ‘Hot shot, hot shot, hot shot,’ for about an hour. But it was the first time we ever saw that, so it was fly.”
When Saturday Night Live debuted in 1975, it seemed to capture something ineffable about seventies-era New York. The Tonight Show had relocated to California three years earlier, leaving the city, once a hub of the entertainment universe, bereft of any real presence on television. Yet, with the Improv and Catch cooking, and the Comic Strip recently opened, New York’s comedy scene was thriving. When SNL started its first season that fall, it had a scrappy, underdog quality. The studio looked lived-in, the sets like something salvaged from the basement of a local community center. As the show’s creator Lorne Michaels explained in Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, it was all intentional.
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