Coles says she put together an extensive list of characters that she could do and gave it to the producers, but that didn’t get her more airtime. As the season wore on, she grew more withdrawn.
“There were some episodes that were very hard to watch because the only thing I was in was the final credits,” she says. “You have to sit there all week long, go to the makeup chair, and then be available to stand onstage and wave to the audience. I’ll never forget, one time, Tommy grabbed me and tried to make me dance a little bit. I was just so broken. You break a performer’s spirit if you don’t let them perform.”
Coles admits she never really tried to address the festering problems between her, Keenen, and Kim, never tried to clear the air, but she’s sure it wouldn’t have made a difference. She’d tried to assert herself with “Too-Too Ethnic” and was shut down. “I saw what happened when you fought, when you pushed back. It didn’t work so I stopped.” After a while, she says, “I sat in my dressing room and cried. I’m not a fighter.”
A persistent rumor also floated that something romantic had developed briefly between Keenen and Coles and when that soured, it further poisoned her experience. Both Keenen and Coles deny anything ever happened, but the mere existence of the rumor likely didn’t help. Another story had it that Coles had been approached by Keenen’s old friend and rival Arsenio Hall about doing her own show for his production company and that in even entertaining the idea, Coles appeared disloyal. At the time, Coles said, “I was under contract to Keenen. I respect him too much to ever pursue any work in conflict with In Living Color.”
At the end of the first season, Keenen told Coles she wasn’t living up to her potential and explained what he expected of her going forward. But shortly after production began on Season 2, Coles was fired.
“I remember getting a call either after the first or second week saying don’t come to work on Monday,” she says.
As Keenen explains it, “I didn’t want any dissension. I didn’t want negative voices. So, when I saw that kind of behavior I just nipped it in the bud.” He says her anger and disappointment “started to really affect her, and when it started to affect other cast members, that’s when she had to go.”
Coles agrees that by that time, she felt defeated and had completely shut down. But initially she wasn’t even told why she’d been axed.
“It took me two weeks to get him on the phone to say, ‘You didn’t look happy. You weren’t bringing your ‘A’ game,’ ” she recalls him explaining. “I said, ‘You didn’t let me do anything.’ He even said to me, ‘Why didn’t you fight? Why didn’t you do what some of the others did?’ People began to dance for him in that way. I never did. That was my downfall. I never kissed the ring. I didn’t know I had to.”
A couple years after she was fired, Coles was cast as one of the leads, alongside Queen Latifah, in the hit sitcom Living Single, a part she admits likely wouldn’t have happened if not for ILC. That, to her, felt like the silver lining on the storm clouds that engulfed her days on the show.
“I have since seen Kim Wayans and she has apologized to me for the way I was treated, so that was powerful for me,” she says. Coles has also had a reconciliation, of sorts, with Keenen. “When faced with it, years later, he said, ‘I had to let you go. I knew you were going to be fine.’ That might be a line or that might be the most gracious thing he has ever done or said to me. I’m grateful for it.”
A week before Season 2 premiered, the show won the Emmy for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series, beating out The Arsenio Hall Show, Saturday Night Live, and Late Night with David Letterman in the process. The award seemed particularly significant: The show was new, and Fox was barely hanging on as a fourth network. ILC had been a hit relative to expectations, but wasn’t even one of the top twenty most watched shows in prime time.
“The Emmy was validation of everything the show was trying to do,” says John Bowman, who along with Buddy Sheffield was promoted to head writer at the beginning of the new season. For Keenen, that they’d beaten out SNL and Arsenio offered a little extra relish.
The show returned with a bigger budget, which meant expanding the offices a little, and more money to shoot more complicated sketches, often away from the studio, on location. Fox also moved the show’s time slot again, this time to eight o’clock on Sunday night. This could have certainly been viewed as a vote of confidence, as the network clearly saw ILC as a show that could anchor the whole night. But eight was also considered “family hour,” which meant even stricter scrutiny from Standards.
Despite efforts to keep the writing staff from the first season intact, many left, including key contributors like Matt Wickline, who’d helped create Homey the Clown, and Sandy Frank, who left to work on a new show called The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, featuring a lanky rapper named Will Smith. The burnout rate among writers was high.
“Keenen was a difficult guy to please,” says Steve Tompkins, one of the Season 1 writers who stuck around. “It was hard to predict exactly what would push the right button for him, and it changed over time. Something that worked one week might not work the next week. You went through periods where you were either in his favor or not.”
Bowman liked working for Keenen, but “if things weren’t getting laughs he was like any other comedy boss—he doesn’t like it. He gets mad. The writers who tended to survive and thrive were thick-skinned and didn’t take Keenen’s criticisms to heart.”
Sometimes worse than Keenen’s scorn was his abject disinterest. He wasn’t necessarily the kind of boss who nurtured writers or developed personal relationships with them. You either could do the job and were useful or you couldn’t and you weren’t.
“Writers were fired if they didn’t produce,” says Bowman. “You were always aware of that.” There was something to be said though for his honesty. “Even though Keenen could be distant and aloof, he consistently rewarded talent.”
Sheffield says that although he and Bowman were head writers, “Keenen never really ceded the responsibility completely. The head writers would run the table, then we’d put together the best script and give it to Keenen and Tamara, and they’d make the ultimate decisions.”
As Bowman puts it, “Keenen’s hand is in almost every sketch those first couple years. He was involved with everything.”
Of the five new writers hired for Season 2, only one—Pam Veasey—was black. Along with two holdovers from Season 1, Kim Bass and Paul Mooney—plus Keenen and Damon—that made for a decent contingent, but they were still far outnumbered by the white writers. One new writer, Les Firestein, had grown up on the edge of Harlem and felt at home with black culture.
“A lot of stuff that would become grist for sketches was just kind of in the air,” he says. By 1990, hip-hop was everywhere. Newsweek put Tone Lōc on its cover under the headline, “Rap Rage.” 2 Live Crew were on the front page of the New York Times after their album As Nasty As They Wanna Be was declared legally obscene. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air debuted on NBC. Vanilla Ice—who may have struggled for credibility but was as good an example as there was of hip-hop’s expanding borders—topped the Billboard charts, the first rapper ever to do so, with “Ice Ice Baby.”
Even the venerable Saturday Night Live seemed to be acknowledging the shifting sands by introducing two new black cast members, Chris Rock and Tim Meadows, that fall. Hip-hop was seeping into everything. In early 1991, New Jack City, a violent, modern-day blaxploitation flick that starred Ice-T alongside Rock and Wesley Snipes, was a surprise box office hit that opened the door over the next few years to films like Boyz n the Hood, Menace II Society, and Juice. The week of New Jack City’s release coincided with the release of an even more influential bit of film: a video of LAPD officers viciously beating a motorist named Rodney King. Two weeks after the King beating, Latasha Harlins, a fifteen-year-old African-American girl, was shot in the back of the head and killed by a Korean grocery store owner. Los Angeles felt like a powder keg. Relations on the ILC set tho
ugh stayed mostly insulated from the outside world.
As Tompkins recalls, “That idea of it being white and black in the writers’ room wasn’t really an issue.” Well, not a major issue. “Anybody was entitled to pitch anything,” he says. “There were times when somebody would pitch something and Keenen would cock an eyebrow because it came down slightly on the wrong side of what was funny about something.” At those moments, he’d often mime playing a banjo in the middle of someone’s pitch, a nod to the classic redneck-sploitation flick Deliverance.
Adam Small was a new writer hired as part of a writing team with Fax Bahr. The two had been sketch performers together, and were known around the office by the collective sobriquet “FaxandAdam,” but during Small’s first week, his other half was honeymooning in Africa. Small, undeterred, was determined to make his mark and show off just how dark and brutal his humor could be.
“I came in the first day, the first thing I pitched was ‘Ghetto Children Action Figures,’ ” Small says. “They were little dolls but it was a thirteen-year-old gangbanger, a bullet-riddled Cadillac, a Korean liquor store owner dead, lying in his own pool of blood, a twelve-year-old pregnant gang sister.”
As Small’s pitch went on, the room got very quiet. Bass, one of the room’s black writers, winced. “But he didn’t give up on the idea,” says Bass. At least not yet.
“All of a sudden,” says Small, “everyone in the room started playing the Deliverance banjo. Keenen looks at me and goes, ‘Homey, we don’t go there.’ It was too race inflammatory on the first day. They didn’t know me. They didn’t trust me.”
On Les Firestein’s first day at In Living Color, Bowman took him aside to offer some advice. Firestein was a tall Stanford grad, with dark, curly hair and a warped sense of humor. He’d been an editor at the National Lampoon, but ILC was his first television job. Bowman, with his credits on SNL and Garry Shandling’s show, seemed like an old sage.
“If you’re an okay writer,” Bowman told him, “you should make half a million dollars a year. If you’re a good writer, you’ll make anywhere from three-quarters of a million to two million dollars a year.”
“What if you’re a great writer?” Firestein asked.
“Hmmm. Fifty thousand.”
Firestein quickly established himself as a force on the writing staff. He had a hand in many sketches and seemed to not only fit seamlessly into the behind-the-scenes culture of the show but reshape it in his own image.
“Weirdly, the show was my sensibility,” he says. “Obviously, I’m not black, but they’d really go for it with anything, which was my sensibility coming out of National Lampoon.” Virtually nothing, as Firestein sees it, should be off-limits as subject matter, and he offers what he calls a “horrible story,” to illustrate his point.
At the time, there was a popular series on ABC called Life Goes On that featured a main character with Down syndrome, played by Chris Burke, an actor with Down syndrome. “I’d written a sketch, I think called ‘Mongoloid Mobster,’ where the kid wanted to break out of being typecast and play a gangster. Keenen’s attitude was ‘We’ll do that sketch if he’ll be in it.’ ” The sketch never happened, but Firestein appreciated Keenen’s openness to something so seemingly beyond the pale.
Firestein brought that same no-holds-barred spirit to the show’s offices. Kim Bass recalls him bringing a bicycle in one day and organizing races around the office.
“You have to understand,” says Bass, “every corner is a blind corner, and you’re riding this bike as fast as you can. You don’t know if you’re going to run into Tamara or Keenen or one of the suits from Fox and break an arm. Someone said, ‘Les, somebody is going to get hurt.’ He said, ‘Yeah, that’s the beauty of it: It’s dangerous and we shouldn’t be doing it.’ ” He was talking about the biking, but it seemed to sum up Firestein’s attitude toward comedy too.
Other office hijinks included the procurement of wildly inappropriate exotic dancers to celebrate staff members’ birthdays.
“It started with my birthday,” says Bahr. “Les and Adam hired a stripper to come in during a pitch meeting.”
As Bass remembers it, this particular stripper “was very elderly. Maybe eighty years old with a feather boa, high heels, and everything. People were against the wall, either cringing or laughing. Poor Fax had no idea. He was completely ambushed.”
“It was incredibly embarrassing, weird and just horrible,” says Bahr. “Everyone felt terrible for this poor woman. She didn’t really strip, she got into a bikini and tried to give me a lap dance.”
The event was such a success that it became a tradition, albeit with a different kind of offbeat stripper every time: a three-hundred-pound drunken woman; a gay man in his midsixties, also inebriated; and for Keenen’s thirty-second birthday, two drag queens. “It was scary,” said Keenen.
This was the prevailing atmosphere. Not everyone enjoyed it with the same fervor. Pam Veasey, a petite, attractive black woman who’d worked briefly on the Nell Carter sitcom, Gimme a Break, had been so gung-ho to write for ILC that she’d camped out in the offices for hours without an appointment during the first season, begging for a chance. At the time, there weren’t any openings. When staffing began for Season 2, she was hired. That was the easy part.
“It was hard for the women cast members as well as the women writers,” she says. “You gotta hang with the guys and they didn’t pull any punches. When you got in that room, they let you know right from the start that this was a guys’ room. If you were too sensitive, take your purse and go. You had to be aggressive, you had to really try to fit in a room where a lot of crazy stuff happened.”
Veasey found a natural ally in the staff’s other female writer, Becky Hartman (now Becky Hartman Edwards). The two shared an office together and an outlook.
“Pam and I are pretty strong women,” says Hartman. “I was always a tomboy. I originally aspired to be a sportswriter so was used to being one of the only women. That being said, there certainly was an undercurrent of sexism or that sort of frat mentality a little bit. Pam and I would turn to each other for a sanity check or to vent.” Survival and acceptance in the writers’ room required an ability to give as good as you could get. “If you were a woman who could tell a really good dirty joke or defuse with humor if someone was being an asshole, that could help you survive.”
As Keenen himself has pointed out, “This was pre–sexual harassment and all that, so if you were a female writer, you had to be able to hold your own. It was a male-dominated business. The female writers put up with a lot of shit and got very tough very quick.”
The writers worked on thirteen-week contracts, which meant during a twenty-six-week season, there was an opportunity in the middle to make changes. Two new writers, Greg Fields and J.J. Paulsen, were added halfway through the second season. They’d have very different trajectories on the show and beyond.
When Fields came to ILC, he was already a veteran comedy writer with an impressive résumé. He’d written for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, with Sheffield on the reboot of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and had co-written the hit Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School. Fields grew up in Kentucky, where he was a star athlete, then worked as a standup for a while before getting his writing career on track. By the time he was hired for ILC, he was a little older than most of the rest of the writers, a little pudgy, and wore sweatpants and a baseball hat to work nearly every day.
“He was a very, very nice guy and a joke machine,” says Bahr. Fields, who died of a heart attack in 2002, was a laid-back, well-liked level head in the office who never seemed ruffled by the roller coaster of emotions that came with making the show.
“Greg had a really high-pitched voice and kind of seemed like a hillbilly,” says Firestein. “Unlike a lot of people on the staff, he had a family, so Greg’s attitude was different than a lot of people’s. He’d be like, ‘Can’t we just get this done?’ ”
Paulsen was a young comedy writer whose o
nly prior credit was on The Sweet Life, a vehicle for singer-turned-actress Rachel Sweet that aired on what was then called the Comedy Channel and later became Comedy Central. (Also on the Sweet Life writing staff: Jon Stewart, future Sex and the City producer/writer/director Michael Patrick King, and ILC writer Becky Hartman.) Firestein recalls that Paulsen’s introduction to ILC was rough.
“J.J.’s first day on the show was an all-nighter,” he says. “Like, you showed up at nine in the morning and left at eleven at night the next day.” The rest of Paulsen’s tenure wasn’t particularly noteworthy, and he lasted only the length of his thirteen-week contract. He continued to work in comedy for the next decade and a half, but his story has a grim coda: In 2009, he was convicted of beating his wife to death and sentenced to twenty-six years in prison. He was released in 2016, after serving seven years.
Firestein says Paulsen was “workmanlike” on the show but not overly productive. There were odd, colorful stories about him whispered on the set, some with a bit of a dark tinge to them. “You’re always surprised when someone murders someone, but this was the least surprised you could be in terms of all the people who were there,” says Firestein, who can’t help finding a twisted, off-color joke in all this. “It’s good that to the best of my knowledge the first and only murderer to come out of that show was a white guy. J.J. was the Jackie Robinson of that show.”
Several writers recall that, starting in Season 2, there was a concerted effort to create franchise-able characters. This wasn’t just marketing—it was survival. Starting with a completely blank slate each week wasn’t sustainable for a writing staff already working insanely long hours.
“You get to a point,” says Sheffield, “where you’re spending so much time on the show, you’re there late at night, you don’t have dinner with people and talk to them, you don’t watch other TV, you don’t go to movies, and you don’t do any of the things that trigger sketch ideas. If you’re not careful, you end up writing sketches about your own sketches because that’s all you ever see.”
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