Rather than commit to a future of sitting in audition waiting rooms with the same ten black actors, competing for parts none of them really wanted, in late 1984, Keenen and Townsend began to write.
Sometimes they’d meet at Townsend’s house, sometimes at Keenen’s. They were a study in contrasts: Townsend sitting calmly with a yellow legal pad, Keenen in constant motion, pacing, doing push-ups and pull-ups, as they’d riff. Even when Keenen finally sat down, the energy was buzzing through him. “His foot is always shaking when he thinks,” says Townsend. “We do the different characters, talk it all out. We tussle over the best joke. We just sit in the room for hours, making each other laugh.”
It was informal. In some sense, they were just picking up the thread they’d started unspooling with the Kitchen Table, which they’d continued with on their ride out from New York City to Los Angeles. As Keenen recalled, “We didn’t know how to write a movie. We just went with the things we did know. We’d lay out pieces of clothing that represented different characters. We’d set up a video camera and then improvise. Whenever we’d switch characters, we’d put a hat on or a scarf or whatever. Then we’d watch it back. Stuff we thought worked we’d write down. What didn’t work, we discarded.”
Townsend had about twenty-five thousand dollars he’d saved from acting jobs, which they poured into the project. One of the first things they wrote was adapted from Townsend’s standup, a sketch about a black acting school where white instructors teach black actors to speak jive and “walk black.” Over a weekend in late 1984, they filmed a vignette of Townsend playing detective Sam Ace in a black-and-white film noir spoof called “Death of a Break Dancer.” Keenen played the immaculately coiffed murder suspect, Jheri Curl, and Damon had a small part as a murder witness. The following weekend, they shot a Siskel and Ebert send-up called “Sneakin’ in the Movies.”
It felt like they had something, and the two began crafting a largely autobiographical story—of a struggling young black actor making his way in Hollywood—that could pull their various sketch ideas together into a coherent film. Then they ran out of money.
It wasn’t clear how they might solve this problem. They certainly weren’t going to make much money doing standup. Unless you were already a star, the pay on offer at places like the Comedy Store was more cover-your-gas-money than finance-your-independent-film. Keenen and Townsend had made significant inroads in Los Angeles’s comedy scene, they had reasonable credits on their résumés, but people weren’t yet showing up just to see them.
Beyond that, there was always a sense that they were outsiders. As black comics, it wasn’t exactly that they weren’t welcome at the Comedy Store, the Laugh Factory, or the Improv, but they were clearly guests. The small community of black standups was growing and getting more assertive but didn’t really have a room of its own. That was about to change.
8
“Anybody Who Was Anybody Went There”
Sitting in the darkness of the Comedy Store, Michael Williams wasn’t laughing. It was the mideighties, and Williams had been working as a concert promoter and event manager but was disenchanted with that life. He seemed to always be making money for other people, never himself. He needed a night out to clear his head. But at the Comedy Store, he felt out of place—a black man listening to white guys tell jokes for other white guys. Hell, he knew guys funnier than this. In fact, he’d seen one of them, a short, paunchy black comedian named Robin Harris, in this very room a few years earlier. But the audience didn’t like Harris back then, didn’t get him. Rumor had it the club’s owner, Mitzi Shore, told Harris he was “too black” for the Store. So, guys like Harris didn’t get much work there, or at any of the other big Los Angeles clubs, like the Improv or the Laugh Factory. If they did, it was only the shitty spots, and they often catered their routines for their audience, which was, like tonight, overwhelmingly, almost oppressively, white. The situation wasn’t much different than it had been in New York a decade earlier: Sure, if you were Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy, the waters parted for you at any comedy club, but what about the younger comics, the guys on the way up, where could they work? Where could they learn? Not here at the Store, thought Williams.
He left that night no happier than he’d arrived, but with the seed of an idea. A few months later, on August 5, 1985, that seed was planted at the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and Vernon Avenue, in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, when Williams opened his own club, the Comedy Act Theater. (Two weeks later, it was uprooted and replanted a few blocks away, on West 43rd Street, after a disagreement with the owner of the original building.) He hired Robin Harris to emcee that first night and brought in seventeen other black comedians, including a tall, light-skinned air force dropout and recent Star Search finalist who performed under the name Sinbad. The club filled a void in the landscape of the city’s comedy scene almost immediately.
“The very first show, we sold out,” says Williams. “The second week wasn’t so great. Then I moved to the new location, and it took approximately four weeks before I was sold out every night.”
The Comedy Act felt different than places like the Store or the Improv. It was looser, louder, more freewheeling. A DJ, usually comic Ricky Harris, brought comedians to the stage with their own theme music. The audience came to laugh—or, if they weren’t laughing, they wrestled the show away from whoever was onstage. Heckling was the norm, and if you couldn’t handle it, you weren’t going to last at the Comedy Act. Most in the audience thought they were funnier than the comedians onstage, and a few were. Much as in clubs on the infamous chitlin’ circuit, or the famed Apollo in Harlem, the vibe was interactive.
A lot of this was down to Robin Harris, who became more than just the club’s regular emcee—he was its id. He was thirty years old then, but Harris’s approach to comedy was decidedly old school and down home. He was both conversational and confrontational. He roamed freely through the club’s tables, subjecting patrons to withering barbs. Anyone foolish enough to head for the bathroom during his set found themselves with the spotlight turned on them, and Harris picking them apart, head to toe. He was quick and cutting, yet somehow charming enough to get away with it.
“Robin would talk about you, your mother, your father, and your baby, and you’d still love him,” says Williams. The Comedy Act became known as “Robin’s house.” During the first month it was open, Damon Wayans and Robert Townsend came in together. Harris brought Damon onstage to do a set, and Damon made the mistake of dissing Harris in his own house, asking the audience, “Doesn’t that guy look like a black, ugly Eddie Murphy?” Harris heard the comment and returned to the stage.
“They played ‘the Dozens’ and Robin destroyed Damon,” says Williams. “Damon just stepped into something he couldn’t get out of. By the time Robin was finished with him, he was dumbfounded. He didn’t know what to do but stand there, hold the mic, and listen.”
Harris’s legend quickly spread, and the club’s spread with it. Because black comics had been so marginalized, just finding enough to fill the lineup each night was a challenge at first. Williams teamed comics up into improv groups and let some go on more than once a night. “A lot of comedians got on every single week whether they were good or not simply because I needed people,” he says.
By 1986, the previously strange and unfamiliar smell of opportunity began to waft through the club. The ground was just beginning to shift in Hollywood. The Cosby Show had debuted in 1984, and although some dismissed the show’s story of an upper-middle-class black family living in a gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone as a fairy tale that mostly served to reinforce the up-by-the-bootstraps laissez-faire economic ideologies of Reagan-era conservatives, that was both a little harsh and perhaps beside the point: It was the number one show on television and would be for the rest of the decade. Meanwhile, Eddie Murphy’s first four films had made more than four hundred million dollars at the box office. Arguably, the biggest stars in both television and movies were black comics. No wonder
the industry was suddenly curious about whether these successes could be repeated, and if so, with whom. The Comedy Act offered a pool of potential answers. Agents, managers, and bookers started to find their way there. Young black casting agents like Robi Reed, Aleta Chappelle, Eileen Knight, and Jaki Brown were regulars.
“It would be hard to say you’re a casting director—especially a black casting director—and not live there,” says Chappelle. The club became a magnet for black comedians and ground zero for black entertainment in Los Angeles. On any given night, the crowd might include Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, Magic Johnson, or Mike Tyson. Tommy Davidson, who arrived as a young comic from Washington, D.C., in 1988, first met Damon, Keenen, and Townsend there.
“Anybody who was anybody went there,” Davidson says. “That was the talent pool.” He compared the vibe to Harlem’s famed Cotton Club. “It was the hottest black comedy showcase in the country.”
Perhaps more important than the high-wattage young black celebrities hanging out at the Comedy Act were the no-wattage struggling comics the club gave stage time to. Some like Davidson, Martin Lawrence, Cedric the Entertainer, D. L. Hughley, Bernie Mac, and Jamie Foxx would become household names, but just as important were those like Don Reed, Ajai Sanders, Rusty Cundieff, John Henton, Michael Colyar, and Myra J, for whom the Comedy Act offered a first step toward a solid career.
Eddie Murphy was so taken with the vibe at the Comedy Act that he essentially tried to recreate it for an HBO standup special called Uptown Comedy Express in 1987. (Interestingly, the young HBO executive who bought the special was a guy who’d recently quit his job at ICM: Chris Albrecht.) The Uptown Comedy Express lineup included several so-called “friends of Eddie”—Arsenio, Townsend, Chris Rock—along with Marsha Warfield, the former Richard Pryor Show cast member who’d recently scored a part on NBC’s hit sitcom Night Court, and Barry Sobel, a manic club comic who was the show’s only white performer. The audience included Magic Johnson, Paul Mooney, and Eddie himself. Eddie’s uncle, Ray Murphy, emceed the show in a manner that Robin Harris would’ve recognized. The set was styled to resemble the Comedy Act too, but the locale had its own significance: The special was filmed at the Ebony Showcase Theatre, which was founded in 1950 by Nick Stewart, best known for playing Lightnin’ on the controversial but pioneering TV series The Amos ’n Andy Show. The Ebony gave black actors and directors a place to do the kind of work they couldn’t do elsewhere, but by 1987 it had fallen on hard financial times. “That production helped shine a light on and preserve that unique history,” says Warfield. Eddie staging the special there helped keep the lights on at the Ebony for another five years.
While most of the comics on the Uptown Comedy Express special were known quantities, Chris Rock was still a relative newbie. Eddie had seen him performing a late-night set at the Comic Strip earlier in the year and taken an immediate interest. A few days after they met, Eddie invited Rock to come with him to Los Angeles. It was Rock’s first time on a plane. Upon arriving, they went to the Comedy Act. Commercials for Uptown Comedy Express tagged Rock as “Eddie Murphy’s protégé,” but while Eddie was hugely helpful, it was another comic who really mentored him.
“I learned how to do standup from Damon,” Rock said. “When I was in the clubs, he was like the only hip black guy doing standup, and he was really nice to me. He took me under his wing, let me eat with him. I was just a kid. I learned more from Damon on how to be a comedian than any other person out there.”
Black comedy wasn’t taking over the world in the late eighties, but in comparison to the first half of the decade, the playing field was much more open. On the surface, this early blossoming of opportunities seemed sudden. It felt a little like the Comedy Act had created this moment, virtually out of nothing. But that discounts a lot of very deliberate work that had been going on quietly behind the scenes for years.
“It just so happened that at the time, the previous efforts of people like Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, Flip Wilson, and Bill Cosby to get black people in support positions like agents, managers, hairdressers, whatever, had come into its own, so that the Comedy Act could draw people looking for talent who could book talent,” says Warfield. When Redd Foxx insisted that “soul food” be brought in to eat on the set of Sanford and Son, when Richard Pryor demanded that NBC hire Paul Mooney, inroads were being made. “It’s because there was a Flip Wilson Show and a Richard Pryor Show and Redd Foxx saying ‘We need black caterers!’ ‘I need somebody to do my hair,’ ‘I want an agent,’ ‘I want a manager,’ ‘I want an accountant,’ that these kinds of things now became possible for other kids coming up. You had young agents from big agencies who could go find a pool of talent and take it back to Beverly Hills.”
The vibe at the Comedy Act was an outgrowth of a long history of black comedy and variety shows, but there was also a new energy afoot. Hip-hop, initially a marginal subculture, had begun to crash into the mainstream. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” had been a Top 5 hit on the Billboard R&B charts in 1982. The Fat Boys’ first two albums had sold nearly a million copies, and the group was featured in one of the earliest promos for MTV. Run-DMC’s 1986 album, Raising Hell—spurred by their landmark collaboration with Aerosmith, “Walk This Way”—was a massive crossover hit. Six months later, in November of 1986, the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill became the first rap album to top the Billboard charts. Suddenly, the floodgates opened and in poured Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, Eric B. & Rakim, Kool G Rap, 2 Live Crew, and Too Short.
A series of rapsploitation films piggybacked on the music’s rising popularity. First, there was 1983’s Wild Style, then came the Harry Belafonte–produced Beat Street; Breakin’; Krush Groove, which was directed by frequent Richard Pryor director Michael Schultz; and the Sidney Poitier–directed Fast Forward. The films featured cameos and performances from early rap stars including Afrika Bambaataa, Kool Herc, Busy Bee Starski, Grandmaster Flash, Doug E. Fresh, Run-DMC, Kurtis Blow, LL Cool J, the Fat Boys, and Ice-T.
None of this was happening in a vacuum. Race relations in America have often been categorized as a slow march of progress, but that slow march often seemed to be crawling in the eighties, if not moving backward. In 1985, Philadelphia police dropped two bombs on a house occupied by members of the black liberation sect MOVE, killing eleven people, including five children. No criminal charges were filed against the police. A roll call of deadly violence by NYPD officers against African-Americans—among them, Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpurs, Edmund Perry—dominated headlines in the middle of the decade and went consistently unpunished. A group called the Red Guerrilla Defense set off a bomb at the Police Benevolent Association offices in New York, in retaliation for the Stewart and Bumpurs killings. When Bernhard Goetz, a white commuter, shot four black men who’d approached him on the New York City subway brandishing a screwdriver and asking for five dollars in 1984, not only was Goetz acquitted on all but one minor charge, he became a vigilante folk hero in certain circles. Two years later, NYPD officers tried to apprehend a black man named Larry Davis, on murder charges. Davis shot six white police officers and then eluded capture for seventeen days in New York. During the manhunt, Davis became a vessel for the rage of the city’s black community. Tenants of the building where he was finally captured could be heard chanting “Lar-ry! Lar-ry!” as he was led away in manacles. The beating death of a black man by a white mob in Howard Beach, Queens, in late 1986, and the (ultimately false) allegations the following year by a fifteen-year-old African-American girl, Tawana Brawley, that she’d been raped by four white men, served to further polarize the city and the country at large.
Of course, listing the most divisive incidents that occurred over a few years is no more an accurate barometer of the country’s racial strife than listing the steps forward—Harold Washington became Chicago’s first black mayor in 1983; Mike Espy became Mississippi’s first black congressman since Reconstruction in 1986; the same year, Martin Luther King’s bir
thday became a national holiday, and the United States imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa (although it had to override President Reagan’s veto to do it)—is a genuine reflection of growing comity. There were less symbolic, more tangible measures: According to one study, in the mideighties, black poverty was on the rise in the nation’s fifty largest cities, and overall poverty rates among African-Americans were roughly 20 percent higher than in the population at large (in 2016, they were about 10 percent higher). Even more alarmingly, incarceration rates for African-Americans in 1986 were 543 percent higher than for whites. Sure, there were signs of progress, but the Melle Mel–voiced chorus of Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” was perpetually apropos: “Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge / I’m trying not to lose my head.”
9
“We’re the Black Pack, Homey”
Lincoln Perry was an educated man. He wrote a column for the pioneering black newspaper the Chicago Defender. He was a classical music devotee. But in public life, he was Stepin Fetchit, a lazy, ignorant fool, who walked around with his eyes half shut, his mouth half open, speaking in a molasses-thick mumble. Stepin Fetchit was the first black movie star. He earned and lost a fortune playing essentially the same role—often billed as “The Laziest Man in the World”—in dozens of films, mostly during the twenties and thirties. Perry frequently found it useful to inhabit his Fetchit persona off-camera. He let directors think he was illiterate, so they wouldn’t bother giving him a script. That meant much of his film work was improvised, which allowed him to build his roles into more than they’d been on the page. Whenever famed studio boss and producer Darryl Zanuck asked him to do something, he’d tell him he had to check with his manager, Mr. Goldberg. There was no Mr. Goldberg. Perry managed himself.
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