Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  A version of this argument would repeat itself again and again throughout Keenen’s stewardship of the show, but his vision rarely wavered. It wasn’t that he didn’t want sketches to take bold stances. But that was always secondary. “It was about being funny,” he says. “It wasn’t about trying to be important. That was a battle I’d have at times with writers. They wanted to have a message but it wasn’t funny. If you can get something in there, go for it. But until it’s funny, I can’t care.”

  John Bowman, a handsome, ex–Harvard Lampoon editor who’d written for Saturday Night Live and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, joined the writing staff a few episodes into the first season and seemed to grasp Keenen’s perspective immediately. “Keenen always insisted that you not come across with a political or racial point of view,” he says. “Sometimes the white writers would come up with a hard-hitting thing that took a racial attitude and Keenen would say, ‘No, no. That may be politically correct but it’s not funny. All you’re doing is trying to incite people, you’re not trying to make them laugh.’ ”

  Keenen was smart, educated, and engaged with the world, but as a comedian, he was an unrestrained populist. Big laughs weren’t dismissed because they were broad. Clever wasn’t always funny. “My philosophy has always been the audience will decide,” he says. “I’ll do something and if the audience doesn’t laugh, I don’t keep it because I’m not making stuff for myself. I’m not trying to be self-indulgent. The overall intent was always to be funny, and not just inside funny.”

  Ajaye and Douglas were dismissed halfway through the season without acrimony. “We were let go with a good recommendation,” says Ajaye. “We weren’t really writing to the sensibility he wanted, we weren’t getting a lot of stuff on, so why should he keep us?”

  Mimi Friedman and Jeanette Collins were also let go midway through the season, for similar reasons. The duo consistently struggled to strike the right tone in their writing.

  “We were the only women on staff,” says Friedman. “We wrote a couple things that were more, I don’t know, post-feminist, but it was not the right forum for it.”

  The writing staff was in constant churn. After Bowman joined, another Harvard Lampoon alumnus, Steve Tompkins, followed. Tompkins had submitted three sketches to the show, two of which were eventually produced.

  “The sketch that got me the job was called ‘The Michael Jackson Mr. Potato Head Toy,’ ” says Tompkins. It was a commercial parody for a Mr. Potato Head featuring different noses, chins, and lips to construct Jackson at different stages of his career. “The joke that got me hired was after you assemble Michael exactly the way you want, the guy in the commercial goes, ‘Hmm, something’s not right,’ then grabs the potato peeler and peels it white.”

  He also submitted a Cosby Show parody in which the Fat Albert gang shows up at the Huxtable house and shakes down Dr. Huxtable for money. When he arrived at the Fox lot for his first day of work, the crew had already built the set for the sketch. It was ultimately aborted. “The reaction to In Living Color had been so overwhelmingly positive that I think Keenen got cold feet about taking down Cosby because we never did,” says Tompkins. “In the first season, we talked about it a lot but nothing ever seemed to push the right button for Keenen. All we ended up doing was a Pudding Pop commercial parody [in Season 3]. We never really targeted Cosby at all.”

  Writers who worked on the show in later seasons also recall a hands-off policy—or at least a kid-glove policy—regarding Cosby. One says that there were three public figures explicitly off-limits: Martin Luther King Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., and Cosby. Another recalls Cosby calling Keenen to ask him not to do a sketch about a well-traveled rumor that Cosby had gotten caught getting a hand job under a table. Keenen insists he never went easy on Cosby. As hard as it is to believe now, back then, he says, there wasn’t much ammunition. “Cosby didn’t get a pass,” he says. “Most everybody had some scandal or some way they put their foot in their mouth. There wasn’t anything on Cosby.”

  Whatever the reasons, Keenen’s decisions were, for the most part, the final word on the show’s creative direction. People’s impressions of him seemed to fall at opposite ends of a spectrum. Some found him funny, thoughtful, and self-confident. To others, he was arrogant, standoffish, and sophomoric. Most, though, ultimately respected his vision for the show. He wasn’t a screamer or a tantrum-thrower, but he could be a tall, quiet, intimidating force. He felt he knew how to best run the show and took others’ input to a point then didn’t brook dissent much past that.

  “It was a dictatorship,” Keenen admits.

  As Eric Gold puts it, “Keenen was a benevolent dictator. He wore his authority pretty well. You have to be a benevolent dictator because you can’t do these shows by committee. He was the final word and sometimes people liked the final word and sometimes they didn’t.”

  Joe Davola was in the slightly uncomfortable position of having to deliver the network’s notes to Keenen on each week’s episode during that first season. Delivering notes is always delicate—few showrunners really want the creative input of the “suits”—but in this case, Davola sensed an extra layer of discomfort.

  “The first time I had to deliver notes, Keenen was ready for war,” says Davola. “So the way I did it was I hiked my pants up to my stomach, walked in, and went, ‘Whitey’s here!’ Damon and Keenen were on the floor cracking up. I defused the situation.”

  One thing few questioned was Keenen’s understanding of the mechanics of comedy. Some might say he understood it more as an engineer than an artist, but the fact is to run a show like this, an engineer may be more useful than an artist.

  “Keenen is one of the true geniuses of sketch comedy,” says David Alan Grier. “Meaning, you do a scene, it’s all flat, and Keenen says, ‘If you pick up your pencil, look to the right and say the same joke, it’s gonna work.’ You trust him, you do it, and it kills. Most people don’t know comedy. They can’t fix it. You stumble on a great joke, you don’t know why it’s great. But Keenen had that ability. I’ve been acting over thirty years, there’s maybe two or three people like that.”

  The near-constant search for new writers—particularly new black writers—led Keenen to bring in Paul Mooney midway through Season 1. Mooney had been Richard Pryor’s writing partner, he’d had a small part in Hollywood Shuffle, and was a bona fide comedy legend, as he’d almost certainly be the first to tell anyone within earshot. A tall, undeniably handsome man, he carried himself with an almost regal air, and had an indignant, withering, unapologetic take on race relations that informed not only his comedy, but his entire worldview. White people had “the complexion for the protection,” and black people had every right to be pissed off about it. His jokes were less jokes than provocations. “Being a black man in America is like being the fucking boogeyman,” he said in one of his bits around that time. “And frankly I’m tired of being the goddamn boogeyman. I get on the elevator, white people hop off. I walk down the street, white women grab their fucking purse automatically. Makes me feel guilty I didn’t snatch the shit.” He was famous for his confrontational late-night sets at the Comedy Store. He relished audience members walking out. He was completely unfiltered.

  “Mooney was brought in as a grenade,” says Rawitt. “He’s sort of bulletproof when it comes to wearing it out loud and saying anything. I think it was Keenen’s own amusement and perversion that had Mooney around just saying incendiary, racist things.”

  According to T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh, “When word got out that he was coming to the show, there was panic among the white writers.”

  Buddy Sheffield, who was one of those white writers, says Mooney was “hardly ever there. He’d come in and out. He’d come to the table sessions. About all I remember him doing is sometimes somebody—or me, in particular—would pitch an idea and he’d say, ‘Oh, no, homey!’ ”

  Kim Bass, a black writer who joined the show’s staff around the same time as Mooney, says that “when Paul was at the writ
er’s table, we’d be discussing a topic, and when it got in his wheelhouse, everybody waited to see what Paul was going to say. He had that booming voice: ‘Oh, I’m gonna go there, homey!’ ”

  Mooney was definitely not just another staff writer, and from the moment he got there, Keenen gave him special treatment, although not necessarily the kind anyone else would’ve envied. He told Eric Gold to put Mooney in the “worst office we have.”

  “There’s a shitty office underneath the stairwell,” Gold told him.

  “Put him there.”

  When it was lunchtime, Keenen made sure no one took Mooney’s lunch order. The idea was to keep him agitated.

  “Paul is funniest when he’s angry,” says Keenen. “If you look at his act, whenever Paul would do TV, he’d never be funny because he’d have to try to be nice. When you’d see him in the club and he was pissed, he was brilliant. I wanted that energy out of him.”

  Therefore, as Gold recalls, “Keenen kept having everybody fuck with Paul Mooney.” Mooney’s frequent response to all this would stand as his most significant contribution to the show: “Oh, homey don’t play that!”

  Although Mooney never wrote any sketches, in a roundabout way, he was responsible for the creation of one of ILC’s most enduring characters, Homey the Clown.

  “It’s funny because people will attribute Homey to Paul but in the wrong way,” Keenen explains. “Paul didn’t come up with Homey. Paul was the inspiration for Homey. Homey is Paul Mooney. Instead of an angry comedian, he’s an angry clown. He’s a guy whose job is to be funny but he’s the antithesis of that.”

  Matt Wickline, one of the show’s writers, conjured the idea for Homey after watching Mooney around the office. Damon, who played Homey, added elements of a character called the Angry Comic that he’d been doing in his standup.

  “The voice of Homey is from the Angry Comic,” says Damon. “Basically, he comes out and goes, ‘Good evening, Whitey. Or would you prefer Ofay white devil cracker honky trash? A very funny thing happened on my way down here tonight: I killed three white people. I guess you had to be there. You would’ve been dying.’ That was Homey’s voice.”

  In the first Homey sketch, he’s performing at a children’s birthday party, but when a little girl asks him to “Do a silly clown dance,” he refuses to “degrade” himself. “I don’t think so. Homey don’t play that,” he says, smacking the child with a weighted sock, and coining a catchphrase in the process. For a magic trick, he takes a dollar from one kid, folds it up, and puts it in his pocket. “Let’s get something straight, kids: Homey may be a clown but he don’t make a fool out of himself.”

  “Homey,” like “The Wrath of Farrakhan” before it, was a sketch that ticked all the boxes for ILC. It’s undeniably silly, but Homey’s sense that the white world is against him, however exaggerated, is funny because of the nugget of truth at its core. As the character developed over the course of the coming seasons, Homey often felt like an alternate mouthpiece for Keenen and Damon to express their frustrations with the show, with Fox, with their own careers, and with the wider world. Homey the Clown was, in some sense, In Living Color’s aggrieved, outspoken id.

  In the second Homey sketch, later that first season, Homey is entertaining carnival-goers with a well-dressed, blond-haired ventriloquist dummy he calls “Mr. Establishment.”

  “Now tell the nice people how you’ve tried to keep Homey down,” he says.

  The dummy answers: “Well, I’ve structured society in such a way that men like Homey face nearly impossible odds of achieving any sort of educational opportunity. Therefore, they’re unable to obtain gainful employment, thus forcing them to resort to an alternate source of income. Sooner or later, they just end up in jail, just like Homey!”

  “Now let’s show the nice people how Homey gets back at Mr. Establishment.” With that, Homey thrashes the doll, bashing it repeatedly into a table.

  Much like Mooney’s humor, the joke here is less a joke than a truth packaged as an incitement. Underneath the grown man in a clown costume holding a dummy is a historical grievance answered with furious violence. To play that for laughs takes some insidious genius. Keenen may have known, as he’d told David Steinberg, that if he aired his politics too nakedly they’d “come across as angry,” but here, he figured out how to dress them up in a bright red wig and floppy clown shoes, and slip them onto prime-time television.

  “The Brothers Brothers Comedy Hour” pulls off a similar trick. As the sketch’s intro tells viewers, the Brothers Brothers, played by Keenen and Damon, are “the most nonthreatening black men on television.” It’s a Smothers Brothers spoof, but both brothers here are named Tom (“We’re both named after our uncle,” Keenen crows), and their deceptively upbeat songs and banter offer a harsh commentary on the entertainment industry’s regressive racial mores.

  “The networks want blacks but they don’t want them real,” the pair sing, “so Oreos like us get a hell of a deal.” The song echoed Hollywood Shuffle’s central conceit. “It’s hidey ho, as I pick out my ’fro/We all play the same parts, no matter the show/The guys are all pimps and each chick is a ho/If we just sell out we’ll be rolling in dough.”

  Later Brothers Brothers sketches were even more vicious, often calling out offenders by name. Interestingly, just as Homey the Clown was conceived by a white guy, Matt Wickline, the main writer behind the Brothers Brothers was also a white guy, Buddy Sheffield, who’d worked with the actual Smothers Brothers on a short-lived reboot of their Comedy Hour in the late eighties. Even though he wrote the sketches, Sheffield says he was also just responding to what his boss wanted. “Keenen,” Sheffield recalls, “loved to make fun of what black people call Uncle Toms.” (Sheffield, whose brother David wrote for Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live and co-wrote Coming to America, jokes that he and his brother may be the only “two white guys from Mississippi who have NAACP Image Awards.”)

  Neither Keenen nor Damon actually sings in the Brothers Brothers sketches, they lip-sync to prerecorded tracks. A rumor persists that the voices on the recordings belong to the actual Tom and Dick Smothers. But Tom Rizzo, ILC’s longtime music coordinator, says he had only forty-five minutes to record the music for the first sketch, and “there was no time to find a singer.” Both voices, he says, are his.

  Although not every sketch was a searing deconstruction of contemporary ideas on race and culture, it was these sketches that seemed to cement the show’s subversive reputation. “In Living Color,” wrote Joyce Millman in the San Francisco Examiner, “is the most politically aware show in prime-time. With its scathing social satire, it plays like a Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for the 90s . . . In Living Color is so frank about racial issues that it’s often downright anarchic.”

  A big part of making the show each week was the delicate dance with Fox’s Standards and Practices personnel. Though, according to Don Bay, who ran the Standards and Practices Department for Fox, officially Fox didn’t even have a Standards and Practices Department at that point.

  “I was, at that time, a behind-the-scenes consultant,” says Bay. “Fox management wanted to establish Fox as an edgy broadcaster compared with the older, more staid networks. They didn’t want to admit a Standards person was employed.”

  To Keenen, Tamara Rawitt, and the rest of the show’s creative staff, that was a distinction that held little significance. Scripts needed the approval of the Standards department, and one of their reps was always in the booth during tapings. “It’s literally somebody standing backstage,” says Keenen, “coming to you saying, ‘You gotta do it again. You can’t say that.’ ”

  It was a daily frustration but particularly, in the wake of the Terry Rakolta/Married with Children imbroglio, the higher-ups at Fox took the Standards Department seriously.

  “Standards and Practices reported directly to me,” says Jamie Kellner, Fox’s president. “They have to get every sketch and tell us whether we can put it on the air. There have been stations that lost their lic
enses because they put content on that was deemed inappropriate. This is not an issue you take lightly. This is a red-hot line into your office.”

  In some cases, this led to pretty comic horse-trading—“Take out two ‘bitches’ and put in one ‘ass,’ ” as Damon puts it—but at times, as Buddy Sheffield notes, the negotiating was less reasonable.

  “Sometimes Damon would have a certain line and the censor would say, ‘Oh, no. You can’t do that,’ ” says Sheffield. “So Damon would then come up with something worse than what he said the first time. Then they’d do a third take, and by that time, it would be absolutely vile and the guy would say, ‘Let’s just go back to the first one,’ which is exactly what Damon wanted.”

  One sketch that became a flashpoint during Season 1 was “Bolt 45,” a commercial parody of Billy Dee Williams’s Colt 45 malt liquor commercial. In it, Keenen, as Williams, plies his date, played by Kim Coles, with Bolt 45, which he tells viewers has “five times the alcohol content of your average stout beer, so it gets any lady in the mood for what I’m after.” Once Coles’s character passes out, the commercial ends with Williams swinging her legs open, about to take advantage of her. It’s not hard to imagine the Standards Department would’ve found this casual depiction of date rape objectionable. Coles herself wasn’t particularly happy with it.

  “I remember being very uncomfortable because he had to pick me up, open my legs, and climb in between,” she says. “I’m married and knew it would make my husband uncomfortable too.”

  The Standards Department insisted on several cuts and Keenen obliged, but as he explains, “the person responsible for actually putting the tape on air put the wrong one on, so it aired in its entirety. [Fox] got really pissed.”

  The incident has always been chalked up to an innocent mistake, but it may not have been. Kris Trexler, the show’s longtime editor, was often tasked with making last-minute edits to sketches on extremely tight deadlines, so it wasn’t uncommon for him to create multiple edits anticipating the Standards Department’s objections. But his loyalty was to Keenen. With the “Bolt 45” sketch, he hints that he may have taken the opportunity to prove it.