“We were having fun with gay culture because we put them in the power seat,” he says. “Those characters were calling everyone out. They’d take a very straight situation and make everybody gay.”
Despite the criticisms, the characters were a hit among actual gay men. “To this day,” says Damon, “I get ‘two snaps up’ if I go in an area where there are gay people.” The sketches were so popular that they were played on loops in gay bars around Los Angeles. “At this place called Revolver on Santa Monica Boulevard, they’d have ‘Men On’ night,” says Damon. “Sunday nights, they’d all dress up as the ‘Men On’ guys.”
As Grier saw it, there was a disconnect between older, more conservative members of the gay community, who often headed gay rights organizations, and younger gay people, who were happy to see a version of themselves, even a wildly exaggerated one, on television. “Those characters,” says Grier, “the real key was they were comfortable with who they were. There was no hatred or anything like that about the writing or from our point of view. But the weird thing is, today, you couldn’t do that.”
Keenen agrees. In today’s culture—where gay marriage is the law of the land, gays can serve openly in the military, and living life as a gay man or woman has been normalized to a degree almost unimaginable in the early nineties—the sketch likely wouldn’t fly. And with more than twenty-five years of hindsight, Blaine and Antoine sometimes seem like relics from another era.
The final “Men On” sketch of the season begins routinely enough with Blaine and Antoine making jokes about several network shows including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Golden Girls, and Perfect Strangers. At one point, Damon is laughing and quite obviously struggling not to break character, which was somewhat unusual for the show since any on-screen fumbles could simply be re-shot, but less so for the “Men On” sketches.
“We’d never tell each other what we were going to do,” says Damon. “In rehearsal we’d rehearse it one way, but I knew David had stuff in his hip pocket and he knew I’d have stuff in my hip pocket. When it was time to shoot, we’d start trying to surprise each other and make each other laugh.”
Grier makes a quick inside joke—“I just thought I heard a chicken!”—but Damon pulls it together. A few moments later Blaine is knocked out cold when a piece of falling equipment conks him on the head. When he comes to, he’s lost his campy affectations. It’s as if he’s had the gay knocked right out of him. He wonders aloud why he’s wearing these ridiculous clothes and angrily brushes Antoine’s hand off his shoulder. Antoine is so distraught that he faints. The bottom of the screen tells viewers that this sketch is also “To Be Continued.”
The characters’ continued existence seemed to hang in the balance. No doubt, with the controversy they courted, retiring Blaine and Antoine would’ve been the path of least resistance. As the entire cast and crew filled the stage, fruity island drinks in hand, to wave goodbye to the audience and end the season, the show itself was at a high point, but also a moment of transition. Those cliffhangers seemed to be as much about the direction of ILC’s future as they were about the fate of its signature characters. Resolving Homey’s and Blaine and Antoine’s conflicts would be simple enough, but answering the deeper questions about the show’s heart and soul was going to take time.
21
“If You Don’t Bring Your A Game, Other People Are Happy to Do It”
Jamie Foxx was late. Five comics were slated to perform at the Laugh Factory as a final showcase for In Living Color, and he was supposed to be the first. The show wanted new cast members, and Foxx, who’d been performing at the Comedy Act Theater since moving out from Texas and already knew the Wayans siblings, looked promising.
“Jamie was a singer who did comedy just to get onstage so he could sing,” says Keenen. “I watched him from the very beginning and always thought he was funny.”
But Foxx was blowing the audition. It was time for him to go on, and nobody knew where he was. The showcase started without him. When he finally arrived, he found Tamara Rawitt. She was frantic.
“You’re late! What are you doing? You’re supposed to be here early! You were supposed to be first!”
“Oh, damn,” Foxx replied. “Can I just go up last?”
“Yes, you have to! We’ve already started!”
Foxx didn’t oversleep. He wasn’t stuck in traffic. He knew what he was doing. He felt he’d flubbed the improvs at an earlier audition—“I just wasn’t catching the right shit,” he said—and wanted to ensure the standup portion went right. Which for him meant performing last.
Still, once he arrived and surveyed the crowd, he got nervous. He was an experienced standup but mostly played black clubs. This audience was mostly white people. He started thinking about tinkering with his act. He consulted Shawn and Marlon Wayans, who convinced him to “just do it like you do in the hood.”
Onstage, Foxx swaggered and charmed. In one bit, he played Wanda, a bold, aggressive, hypersexual woman who seems to be the only one who doesn’t realize she’s ugly as sin. The bit had been born from some onstage ad-libbing.
“I said, ‘All the good-looking ladies, clap your hands,’ ” Foxx recalled, “and then, ‘Now, all the ugly ladies, let me hear you make some noise.’ And it was quiet. All the ugly ladies was like, ‘Hey, he ain’t talking about me.’ I said, ‘Ain’t that a bitch?’ ”
Keenen had invited the entire writing staff to the Laugh Factory for the auditions. Most were floored by Foxx. He did impressions, characters, standup—he could even sing. Fax Bahr recalls Keenen asking the writers afterward whether they thought Foxx was worth hiring. “We were all like, ‘Oh my god, yeah. He’s insane. He’s so good.’ ”
The whole idea of adding new cast members was in many ways a function of the show’s success. New players could pick up the slack as the existing cast took advantage of their new film and standup gigs, and ward off complacency.
“A lot of the people brought in were brought in to make the original cast work harder,” says Les Firestein. “The idea was There are people waiting in the wings. If you don’t bring your A game, other people are happy to do it.”
Rawitt: “You needed new characters at the table, new things for the writers to write for. You have to replenish the well, otherwise it runs dry.”
This round of casting was even more competitive than the first time. Among the also-rans were Margaret Cho and Ellen Cleghorne, who’d already appeared in bit parts on ILC and was soon cast on SNL. One of the final five at the Laugh Factory was a Korean-American actor named Steve Park, recognizable from his memorable role as the grocery store owner in Do the Right Thing. He considered a spot on ILC a “dream job,” but wasn’t a standup and was concerned about auditioning.
“I remember coming in with a boom box,” he says. “I did this thing making fun of Asian stereotypes, this whole Bruce Lee bit. I was doing bad lip-syncing so I had dialogue coming out of the boom box.”
Bringing in Park would broaden the palette of ethnicities that the show could parody. The shooting death of teenager Latasha Harlins by a Korean grocery store owner in March 1991, less than two weeks after the Rodney King beating, highlighted the growing tensions between the African-American and Korean-American communities—something Lee had captured in Do the Right Thing. And wherever there was tension, there was infinite potential to cut that tension with humor. “The instinct was right to hire Steve,” says Firestein.
The final addition to the cast was the least surprising but most controversial. Keenen had been grooming his brother Shawn for a spot in the cast since the show’s beginnings. Keenen plugged Shawn into a few sketches in Season 2, mostly as a supporting player, and encouraged both Shawn and Marlon to develop their writing skills.
“They knew that when they were ready, I was going to guide them along,” says Keenen. “Marlon and Shawn used to sit in a room with John Bowman and just write, in preparation for the day they got their shot.”
Shawn felt like he’d paid his due
s. He’d been doing standup since he was sixteen. He’d been the show’s DJ, he’d worked as a production assistant, he’d been a writer trainee.
“I never wanted to rush into it,” he says. “I’d learn how to write sketches and what the whole creative process was about.” His best training, though, was mostly just hanging around his siblings. “I was around Damon, sitting in his dressing room while he wrote. Sometimes I’d be a sounding board.”
Fairly or not, there were plenty at the show who felt that Shawn’s ascension, preordained though it may have been, was a case of Keenen putting what was best for his family ahead of what was best for the show.
“Keenen’s primary motive was to get his family into the limelight,” says Tommy Davidson. “That doesn’t make him a bad person and that doesn’t make it a bad idea. Unless you’re me.”
Davidson had struggled from the beginning to score with breakout characters and recurring sketches. The competition for screen time often left him playing second banana roles. Now, not only was there more competition, but one of those he’d be competing with was another sibling of the guy making all the decisions. “You have a group of people that have been together for three years, [thinking] if they work their ass off, then eventually they’re going to succeed on this show. Every year, you’re going back trying to get your sketches on. Then they bring in somebody new and you go, ‘Well, fuck.’ ” Davidson admired the love and commitment the Wayans siblings had for each other, but he’d been busting his ass and believed he “had a lot more talent than the majority of the family members.” None of that seemed to matter. “That’s called nepotism.”
Keenen doesn’t buy this criticism: “If you look at the show, everybody gets off. It doesn’t become The Wayans Show. The truth was I was utilizing the ones who worked hardest, who came up with ideas.”
In between managing the delicate egos of his cast and running the show, Keenen was also trying to build his own career. He’d never made a secret of his desire to make movies and, between Seasons 2 and 3, figured he had a chance to get back to it. He carved out time to go to London, to work on the film he’d written and which he was set to produce, direct, and star in, Lloyd of London. He was to play a D.C. cop in England working with a British detective on solving a series of murders and robberies. Aleta Chappelle, Fox’s head of casting, helped cast the film, bringing in British comedian Lenny Henry to star opposite Keenen. The project had problems though. Universal wasn’t willing to cough up the kind of budget to make Lloyd of London into an effects-heavy, high-gloss action flick in the mold of Lethal Weapon or, incidentally, The Last Boy Scout. And there were rumors Keenen’s script needed considerable work. Faced with these issues and a tight schedule that exacerbated all of them, it fell apart.
“It shut down right before rehearsals were going to start,” says Chappelle. “They just never could do it for the budget it was supposed to be. It shut down on a Friday and rehearsals were supposed to start Monday. I’ve never been on a project like that.”
For Keenen, it was a lesson in obligations and priorities, and not necessarily a happy one. “I had to walk away from the movie because I had to go back to the show,” he says. “Universal was very upset. We were in pre-production but too much time had gone by in the prep and decisionmaking. If the movie had gone over even a couple of days, I’d have been in conflict at the show, so I had to let it go. But it was a project I was really into and so was Universal. Those were the sacrifices you had to make.”
As he returned to ILC, the show needed some freshening up. The first season had really only been half a season, thirteen episodes spread across a few months, but Season 2 had been twice as many episodes and twice as long. The cast, crew, and writers were fried.
“We had to re-staff every season because the grind was staggering,” says Tamara Rawitt. “You were like in the witness relocation program when you came to work on the show. You’d stay there sixteen hours a day, four months at a time, and didn’t have time to go to movies or watch TV. We had to drain people’s brains to get all that stuff on the air every week.”
Paul Miller had been directing the show since the pilot and was an experienced, steady hand. But by the end of the second season, he says, he and Keenen had “drifted apart.” He felt Keenen wanted to “step back from the day-to-day operations of the show,” in order to take advantage of other opportunities. Keenen had production deals and a movie career to nurture. “I think he was looking for me to step in and fill that void,” Miller says. Instead, Miller left. Morris Abraham, a veteran director of talk shows, took over for a short spell before passing the mantle to Terri McCoy, who’d been Miller’s associate director since the pilot.
The show lost both head writers after Season 2—John Bowman began working with comedian Martin Lawrence on creating the sitcom Martin, and Buddy Sheffield left to start his own show, a kids’ variety series called Roundhouse—although Sheffield continued to contribute on a freelance basis. J.J. Paulsen left with Sheffield to work on Roundhouse. Paul Mooney had floated out of the show’s orbit during Season 2—much later, he’d float back in—and Kim Bass’s contract wasn’t renewed. The writers brought in to replace them were a mixed bag. Michelle Jones was a young black woman who’d been answering phones at the Hollywood Reporter when she was hired. Harry Dunn had been writing, producing, and editing movie trailers. Fred Graver was a buttoned-up ex–National Lampoon editor who’d spent six years writing for David Letterman. Larry Wilmore was a former standup whose only previous writing experience was penning jokes for Rick Dees’s television talk show, Into the Night. Wilmore was excited to even get a meeting with Keenen.
“It was a big break for me,” he says. “We talked about our standup war stories and I spent my time just trying to make him laugh. We hit it off.”
Rawitt also hired a charismatic Los Angeleno named Michael Anthony Snowden to be a writer’s trainee. Snowden, a skinny twenty-one-year-old who wore glasses and looked a bit like Spike Lee, had never really written anything. He’d originally been discovered at a local hip-hop club and was asked to audition for the Fly Girls’ TV spinoff as a dancer. He convinced the producers to let him submit sketch ideas instead.
“He wasn’t a traditional writer at all,” says Rawitt. “He was a hip-hop dancer, but the kid had wattage and street cred for days. He was wickedly funny. I brought him to Keenen and said, ‘This is a guy who’s going to make the room rock.’ ”
Snowden had a baby daughter at the time, and no one to watch her while he was at work, so he frequently brought her into the office. “She’d crawl around and all the girls in the office always watched her,” he says. “She actually learned to walk at In Living Color. That’s where she took her first step.”
Snowden was learning too. Just before his first pitch meeting, some veteran writers told him that as a trainee, he was only supposed to listen, not actually pitch ideas, so Snowden came into the room, sat at the opposite end of the table from Keenen, and kept quiet. Each writer took his or her turn to pitch five ideas. Then Keenen turned to Snowden.
“What do you have?”
Snowden looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“Where are your pitches at?”
It was at this moment Snowden looked around the room and noticed the other writers stifling their laughs. Rather than admit he’d been the victim of a practical joke, Snowden stalled for time.
“Can you hold on? I’ll go get them.”
“Hurry up,” Keenen said. “Don’t make me regret hiring you.”
Snowden ran back into his office, jumped over his baby daughter playing on the floor, grabbed the newspaper, scanned it, and quickly improvised five ideas. One was good enough to make it into the “packet” that week.
“I guess Keenen was impressed by the way I did that,” he says.
It was the first time Snowden set himself apart from most of the show’s writers in Keenen’s eyes. It wouldn’t be the last.
22
“All I Remember Is the Lay
er of Desperation That Hung in the Air”
Spike Lee grew up in Brooklyn and particularly early in his career, the borough was his muse. The Brooklyn that Lee sketched in Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, and Jungle Fever—which were released in the summers of 1989, 1990, and 1991, respectively—was one where racial strife both threatened and reinforced community bonds. Straying across the wrong intersection into a different neighborhood filled with different people and different cultural norms carried with it the implicit potential for violence. In August of 1989, almost exactly one month after the release of Do the Right Thing, Yusef Hawkins was shot to death in the predominantly Italian-American neighborhood of Bensonhurst. He and three friends had come to the neighborhood to answer a used car ad. There, they were set upon by a white mob.
Seventeen months later, the Reverend Al Sharpton was preparing to lead a protest march through Bensonhurst alongside Hawkins’s parents, when an Italian-American man thrust a steak knife into his chest. Sharpton had been leading similar marches through Bensonhurst since Hawkins’s death, calling for justice and, in the views of his critics, fomenting discord and further violence. As the trials of Hawkins’s assailants progressed, Sharpton had warned that without guilty verdicts on murder charges, the jury “would be lighting a match to the end of a powder keg and telling us to burn the town down.” “The clouds of violence,” he said, “are over New York City.”
Sharpton’s agitating had helped topple mayor Ed Koch, who was defeated in a primary by the man who became the city’s first black mayor, David Dinkins. Now it had gotten Sharpton himself stabbed. The wound was serious but not life-threatening, and after Sharpton was taken to a nearby hospital, Dinkins appealed for calm, promising that Sharpton echoed those sentiments. But one of Sharpton’s associates, Alton Maddox, contradicted Dinkins immediately.
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