Just as the first season’s writers had discovered, Keenen wasn’t enamored with the idea of using In Living Color as a platform to expound on the evils of racism and the problems with American society unless it was going to be funny. Tompkins says it was usually the white writers “chomping at the bit to write sketches that were really edgy and controversial and kicked up some dust. But Keenen, Damon, and Kim, they lived the black experience. They didn’t need to spend one more day fighting that battle.”
For Tompkins, his experience at the show improved considerably once he came around to this realization. “Keenen wasn’t out to make the most biting satire or the most insightful condemnation of the black experience in America. He wanted to do big, goofy, fun characters, like Carol Burnett.”
Many of the recurring characters that debuted in Season 2 reflect that reality: David Alan Grier’s Al MacAfee is a dimwitted high school teacher; Jim Carrey’s Dickie Peterson is an adolescent social outcast masquerading as vigilante law enforcement; Keenen’s Frenchy is an unfiltered Rick James wannabe based on the character Keenen had created years earlier when he raided Eddie Murphy’s wardrobe; Kim Wayans’s Lil’ Magic is a desperately ambitious, wildly ungifted child actress based on her younger self; Damon’s Head Detective is a sight gag—he’s literally just a head, with hands and feet. These were big, broad characters the audience was invited to laugh at, not with. Arguably, the most memorable of the show’s shooting gallery of goofballs was Jim Carrey’s Fire Marshal Bill.
Fire Marshal Bill is a fire chief whose fire safety demonstrations inevitably involve making things explode. He’s been burned so many times that he doesn’t flinch at the prospect of catching fire again. Judd Apatow, who was close to Carrey back then, recalled seeing Carrey doing a version of Fire Marshal Bill onstage at the Comedy Store around 1988 or 1989.
“He started doing the burnt-guy face and complaining about how all of the electrical outlets weren’t safe,” Apatow recalled. “It was a great thing to witness.” (Interestingly, Apatow and Carrey remained close collaborators while the latter worked on ILC. “Judd was my opening act on the road,” says Carrey. “We’d write together. We might have written a couple of things for In Living Color. I’m not sure they got on, but I remember writing with him.” David Alan Grier also recalled that Apatow “used to hang around In Living Color and try to pitch jokes.”)
In an interview with writer Nelson George back in 1991, Carrey seemed to recollect the same night at the Comedy Store that Apatow did, saying, “Fire Marshal Bill is the product of a strange mood I was in at two in the morning at the Comedy Store. I was onstage and started showing different fire violations in the club. A writer saw me, and began building a character around this.” However, during an interview with Bob Costas that same year, he also traced Fire Marshal Bill to a character in a proposed sketch called “The Make A Death Wish Foundation” that “didn’t pass the censors, so we weaseled it in another direction.” More recently, Carrey explained the original “Make A Death Wish Foundation” sketch: “It was a foundation for kids to get their posthumous wish, what they want to do after they die. I was the dead kid that wanted to go to Disneyland. So I’d be on rides with some celebrity or something, just flopping back and forth as a dead person, Weekend at Bernie’s–style. I had that [Fire Marshal Bill] face for that character.”
When the sketch got cut, he was commiserating with Bahr and Small—whom Carrey calls “one of the funniest human beings ever to walk the Earth”—and showed them the face he had for the sketch. “It looks like a burn victim,” he says. The three of them began riffing until Fire Marshal Bill was born.
Carrey says that at its heart, the inspiration flowed from Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau. “The funniest thing was the Peter Sellers thing—the so-called expert that’s always hurting himself. That concept is always funnier because you’re making fun of someone’s ego.”
Still, there were issues. “The first time we did it,” says Bahr, “when Jim came out of makeup, the Standards guy was like, ‘No way.’ It was disgusting. They made him really tone it down.”
The Standards Department weren’t the only ones with reservations. “I personally never cared for that sketch,” says Sheffield. “We had a kid who worked on the lot who was a burn victim. He was horribly disfigured. When they first brought that sketch in, I said, ‘Go pitch it to that kid. If he thinks it’s funny, we’ll go for it.’ Nobody ever pitched the idea to the kid, but I was just trying to make a point by suggesting it.”
The sketch was an immediate hit with viewers, however. It comes off as so cartoonish that it’s hard to believe anyone would take it seriously enough to be upset. In fact, some did. The National Fire Protection Association wrote to Fox chairman Barry Diller asking that Fire Marshal Bill be removed from the show. A representative from the Saint Barnabas Burn Foundation complained that the show was “spotlighting dysfunctional behavior.” William Schultz, president of the New Jersey Fire Prevention and Protection Association, asked for the character to be discontinued and an apology to burn victims from the network and the show. He warned that younger viewers would model Bill’s behavior. “Children are going to be injured, they’re going to die. It’s going to come true, like fire waiting to happen.” Local politicians in New Jersey pressured the show to reconsider the character.
Fox, for their part, mostly held firm. But as Sheffield recalls, “Every time one of those sketches would air, we’d get calls the next day from fire marshals around the country and they’d say, ‘Kids are sticking knives in electrical outlets,’ or whatever it was that Fire Marshal Bill had done the night before.”
Most of the complaints found their way to Fox President Jamie Kellner. “Whenever you do comedy where you’re really going for it, you’re going to get people who get upset,” he says. “I was in contact with one of the senators from New Jersey on a number of occasions because of Fire Marshal Bill. They were not pleasant calls.”
The denunciations from outside groups seemed to have the opposite effect than intended. Fire Marshal Bill was one of the show’s most popular characters, as well as one of its most utilized. The show did eleven separate Fire Marshal Bill sketches during the series’ run.
“That was the character that put me over the top and gave me a film career and everything else,” says Carrey.
Another character introduced in Season 2 that caused considerable hand-wringing was Damon’s handicapped superhero, Handi-Man. On its face, Handi-Man just seemed patently offensive: He walks with a palsied limp and slurs his speech. When he declares “Up, up, and away” and flies out a window, he simply keels over and falls out of it. Damon knew it could work though.
“The fact I was born with a clubfoot gives me license to do that,” he says. “I’d done it in my standup special on HBO, talking about how as a child I got into a lot of fights. I wasn’t tough, I was just defending myself.” In the special, he makes the point that you’ll never find a handicapped bully. “From that came the idea of ‘What if there was someone to protect those people, like a Handi-Man?’ ”
Bowman, who helped write the first Handi-Man sketch, says he’d had a similar idea at SNL. “But the Saturday Night Live version was a bit more tragic and didn’t work,” he says. “With Damon, because it was a really great performance, it did.”
Still, the network smelled trouble. They covered their asses by screening the sketch for a disabled rights group.
“They loved it,” says Sheffield. “When, in the sketch, he kicked that guy’s ass for using the handicapped parking space, they were all over that. They said, ‘It’s about time we had a hero!’ Even though a lot of people would look at it and say, ‘My god! This is horrible to make fun of a handicapped person like that,’ they thought it was great.”
Damon felt vindicated: “When I know I’m operating from a good place, my conscience is clear. Handicapped people want somebody to make jokes about them but in a respectful way. What’s more respectful than making them superheroes?”
Although many of the newest characters leaned toward the broad, the silly, and the easily franchise-able, the show didn’t turn its back on politically charged material. Multiple Homey the Clown sketches in Season 2 brought the same reliable mix of angry black militancy and rank absurdity, and four different Brothers Brothers sketches grew more barbed as the season progressed.
There were hard-hitting new ideas too. “1-900-YT-GUILT” gave Damon a chance to break out his Farrakhan impression again, this time as an operator at a phone service that white people call to be browbeaten for their internalized racism. The sketch plays like a Paul Mooney standup bit come to life. Later in the season, “My Dark Conscience” worked similar themes, lampooning recent films like A Dry White Season and A World Apart, which attempted to tell the story of black suffering in Apartheid-era South Africa through white eyes. Playing like a commercial for an art film, the sketch features a narrator who makes the point explicit: “My Dark Conscience, a true story of the pain of watching somebody else suffer, and wanting to do something about it, but not really wanting to get involved, and then feeling a little guilty about it. Sort of.”
These were still, arguably, what ILC did best—holding up a warped fun-house mirror to society’s even more warped ideas about race. But many of these sketches became part of a long-running wrestling match with Fox’s Standards Department. “They were always afraid of whatever black content the show had,” says Bowman. “Using their own white liberal judgment, they found a ton of stuff offensive. Keenen would really have to push them into it.”
Few probably realized that many of the most racially incendiary sketches were written, at least in part, by white writers.
“They never publicly acknowledged the writers a whole lot,” says Sheffield. “They didn’t really want it known that most of us were white. That wasn’t good for the show’s image. We could understand that. We were able to get away with a lot because we were working under Keenen’s aegis. He put the black stamp of approval on it.”
19
“We Got a Problem. I Want the Other Girl.”
Rosie Perez was run ragged on In Living Color. In addition to choreographing the Fly Girls—with increasing help from her assistant, Arthur Rainer—she was also charged with choosing the music they’d dance to, and eventually she directed their segments too. She was also building her own acting career. She had a significant role in Jim Jarmusch’s 1991 film Night on Earth, and leads in both 1992’s White Men Can’t Jump and 1993’s Untamed Heart. On the weekends, she’d often be clubbing in New York.
One night, at a pop-up club called Carwash, she saw Leaders of the New School performing. The group featured a charismatic rapper named Busta Rhymes, who stalked the stage like a linebacker looking for someone to hit. His delivery was equal parts gruff, forceful, and goofy, and kept the audience on edge. Perez was blown away, and struck with an inspiration: These guys should be on the show. So should Public Enemy, KRS-One, and Queen Latifah. There weren’t really any other shows—certainly none on in prime time—that showcased live hip-hop. In Living Color could be that show.
She took the idea to Keenen, who, she says, was lukewarm on it. Other producers were too. Musical guests cost money and they didn’t have a lot of that to go around. Perez persisted. She pestered. Finally, Keenen caved.
“He goes, ‘All right. Book them,’ ” she recalls. “He was like that. If your idea sucked, it didn’t make the grade,” but if he trusted you, he’d give you a chance to prove yourself. He told her she had one shot at this. (Keenen, for his part, insists that live music “was always part of the plan” for the show.)
Perez immediately approached Leaders of the New School, but the group was still ironing out the details of their record contract. They couldn’t do anything until that was sorted out. She called other record companies. None wanted to let their established acts be the first to appear on what was then still a pretty new show. Eventually, she settled on a Los Angeles–based rapper named Def Jef. He closed out Episode 11 of Season 1 with a performance almost no one remembers.
Perez worried she’d blown her chance at this, and begged Keenen for another. When she promised she could get Queen Latifah, he was sold. Latifah’s roof-rattling performance of “Mama Gave Birth to the Soul Children” at the end of the first episode of Season 2—while Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav danced with the cast onstage—was proof Perez’s idea was a good one. It didn’t go unnoticed either. “After her performance,” Perez said, “every hip-hop act wanted to be booked.” That second season included performances from Monie Love, KRS-One, 3rd Bass, and the original apple of Perez’s eye, Leaders of the New School. The season’s musical highlight was Public Enemy’s three-song medley (“Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” “Buck Whylin’,” “Fight the Power”) that closed out an episode in April. With Ice Cube onstage alongside them, the performance felt like an event, and, in retrospect, a defining moment for the show. Hip-hop was still considered dangerous then, particularly artists like Public Enemy and Ice Cube, who were openly contemptuous of authority—be it corporate, governmental, or otherwise.
“They were the most controversial rap group at the time,” Keenen said of Public Enemy. “Everybody was afraid of them but everybody loved them. For me to have the opportunity to break that door down was great.”
Their appearance was the equivalent of Keenen throwing down his marker and choosing sides. It went a long way toward cementing the show’s central place in hip-hop culture.
“In Living Color was one of those shows where we all grew together in the middle of that artistic renaissance,” says Public Enemy’s front man Chuck D. “The Wayans understood that black people could get some eyeballs in prime time. They felt like they could get away with [having us on]. It worked and was greatly appreciated.”
In Living Color was drawing more than twenty million viewers on its best nights, and by the middle of the second season, Keenen wanted to build on his success. He signed a contract with Fox in late 1990 to produce new films and television shows. One of his first ideas was Kick It with the Fly Girls, an ILC spinoff, hosted by Shawn Wayans, that would feature live music and dancing.
“I wanted to take the Fly Girls to the next level,” he says. He envisioned them making pop albums, going on concert tours, maybe even launching their own fashion line. As Lisa Marie Todd puts it, “I jokingly say we were the Spice Girls before the Spice Girls.”
All of this, Keenen realized, would require more hands—or feet—on deck. A decision was made to undertake a well-publicized, heavily marketed search for a new Fly Girl, someone who could not only dance but sing. It’s easy to see how nowadays, in the age of The Voice and So You Think You Can Dance, this Fly Girl talent search would’ve become a reality show in and of itself. Eric Gold, who helped orchestrate it, admits it was a “stunt.”
“The Fly Girls were hot,” he says, “so we decided to use it to drive awareness and publicity.”
At the New York audition, thousands of girls waited in a line that wrapped around the block. Keenen realized that auditioning them all would be a logistical nightmare so, according to Perez, he started going through the line and eliminating the ones who were, in his parlance, “busted.” Not all of them took being dismissed based on their looks in stride. One took a few swings at Keenen before being escorted out by security.
On the second day of the New York auditions, Perez recalls seeing a “curvy, heavyset, big-ass beautiful girl” from the Bronx named Jennifer Lopez. “She wasn’t the best dancer,” as Perez writes in her memoir, “but definitely had an immense amount of star quality and a stunning face.” Perez insists she told Keenen repeatedly, “That’s the girl,” and that Keenen didn’t agree. She says he called her “chubby and corny.” At the Los Angeles auditions, a brunette named Carla Garrido stood out.
The plan was to announce the show’s choice at a televised event. Keenen insists that, contrary to what Perez claims, Lopez was always his first choice. At the event, though, he did somet
hing exceedingly out of character: He had the Fly Girls vote on their new member.
“I let what normally was a dictatorship become a democracy and the votes were not in Jennifer’s favor,” Keenen says. The Fly Girls chose Garrido. “We were on national TV when it happened, so I couldn’t do anything except accept the votes.”
Deidre Lang, one of the original Fly Girls, says Keenen seemed to be giving Lopez a lot of attention during the auditions, but she and a few other dancers already knew Garrido. Carrie Ann Inaba says, “Carla just seemed like she fit into the group really well.”
Gold believes there was already a sense among the Fly Girls of Lopez’s potential star power. Garrido seemed like less of a threat. “Jennifer was better by far,” he says. “Keenen called me right afterwards and said, ‘We got a problem. I want the other girl.’ So, he ordered me to get Fox to put Jennifer under a holding deal, to hold her for a year until he could put her in. That’s what we did.”
The show also had a brief flirtation with bringing on male dancers. Several dance crews were invited to audition to be so-called Fly Guys. Tre Hardson was dancing as part of a four-man, L.A.-based crew called 2 Four 2 back then and already knew Perez. “Rosie was like our big sister,” says Hardson. “She created the opportunity for us to compete. We had to make up a routine and go against different crews from L.A. We won.”
The first thing 2 Four 2 was asked to do was dance alongside Jim Carrey’s Vanilla Ice impression. The musical parody killed—in large part because Carrey was a dead ringer for Vanilla Ice—and the troupe was back a few episodes later, dancing with the Fly Girls during one segment and again at the show’s close. But that was the sum total of it. The Fly Guys wouldn’t be a lasting addition to the show.
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