As the season dragged on, the cast and writers grew increasingly weary. In the last few months of the season, the network ran four shows’ worth of repackaged, previously aired sketches, and even the new shows increasingly became a parade of franchise characters, many of whom were low on creative juice. There were multiple, not particularly funny Head Detective, B.S. Brothers, and Benita Butrell sketches. They even seemed to be running out of things to do with Fire Marshal Bill, who was put on a space shuttle in one sketch, and Homey the Clown, who was made a kindergarten substitute teacher. The show still had teeth—Keenen and Damon’s “Brothers Brothers on the $100,000 Pyramid” was among the hardest-hitting sketches the show would ever do; Tommy Davidson finally got his chance to roll out his Sammy Davis Jr. impression in a spoof of the hit film Ghost; Jim Carrey and Kelly Coffield did a very clever parody of Fatal Attraction as a soft-focus coffee commercial—but the show’s batting average was dipping. By the tail end of these long seasons, the writing staff simply didn’t have much left in the tank.
“[Fox] would come to us in the spring, when we’re winding down and everybody is on their last sprint to the finish line and say they want six more shows,” explains Firestein. “It’s like you’ve been pacing yourself for a 26.2-mile marathon and at mile 25, people say, ‘Can you run six more miles?’ ” Often, more shows meant the cast and crew canceling vacations or other plans. People got edgy. “All the petty grievances that were going on during the season, when you’re just going, I’ll just get to the end and then we’ll be on hiatus, when they’d extend the season, everyone would blow up at each other. They could hold it in for one more week but not four.”
Which might be one way of explaining perhaps the most entertaining bust-up in the show’s history, a showdown between Carrey and Keenen, over a sketch, that may or may not have nearly turned violent. The conflict stemmed from a sketch in which Carrey played Sergeant Stacey Koon, one of the cops accused of viciously beating motorist Rodney King. The sketch was filmed but shelved and Carrey was unhappy about it. He thought it was funny and timely, and that Keenen was shutting down his ideas, not giving him a fair shake. A few weeks later, Carrey’s Koon impression was written into a different sketch, but this time, in a small part, playing a foil to someone else. Carrey was furious.
Cut to the table read for the sketch. Keenen is at the head of the table, Eric Gold is on his right, and Carrey on the other side of Gold. The cast, writers, and other staff fill out the long conference room table. When it’s time for Carrey’s first line, he stands up, points his butt in Keenen’s direction, and reads his part from his ass.
“I’ve got his ass in my face, pointing at Keenen, and he’s moving his ass muscles,” says Gold, who at the time was managing both Carrey and Keenen. “Keenen’s a very dignified man, and by the way, about six-foot-four. He gets up, he’s ready to take Jim out. Jim gets up. He, too, is six-two or six-three and not afraid of anything. These guys are going to come to blows.” The room went silent.
Steve Tompkins remembers the sound of Keenen’s chair pushing back. “He was sitting there and everyone was kind of joking, but then all of a sudden, his chair went back and he stood up,” he says.
Gold says he put himself between Keenen and Carrey to defuse the situation. Keenen poked his finger hard into Gold’s chest several times and told him he better control his client. Then he stormed out of the room.
Firestein says the context is important. “Keenen and Jim had been grinding gears,” he says. “He was quashing some of Jim’s work that Jim thought was really good, and the more he complained, the more Keenen started using Jim as a utility player.” As Tompkins puts it, “There were days when the court jester, Jim, displeased the king and his head was on the chopping block. Jim wasn’t showing proper deference.”
Some have suggested that Keenen harbored resentment that Carrey, the show’s token white guy, was rapidly becoming its biggest star, though that’s probably unfair. Regardless, the idea of confronting Keenen in such a public way was unheard of.
“No one ever stepped to Keenen,” says Firestein. “Keenen ran a tight ship and was pretty well feared within the building. So nothing like this had ever happened, nothing even close. I remember Jim started doing it and there was no air in the room.” After Keenen disappeared into his office, Firestein says he was enlisted to play peacemaker. “Eric said, ‘If Jim doesn’t apologize, he’s going to be fired.’ ”
Carrey’s memory of the confrontation follows the contours of the aforementioned narrative with key exceptions.
“It wasn’t a Stacey Koon sketch,” he says. “It had nothing to do with that. I came up with a character—I don’t remember what the character was—but I’d written a sketch for it and Keenen canceled the sketch. Sometimes when you create a character, you get your nose out of joint if it doesn’t make it on the show. Keenen had relegated the character to one line in another sketch and I was pissed.” He also says he was actually sitting right beside Keenen. “When it came time to do my line, I took my time, got up from my seat, turned around, put my script on the seat, bent over, and said my line in Keenen’s face, through my ass.”
He doesn’t remember nearly coming to blows with Keenen, but the tension certainly made it a possibility. “I remember turning around and all the writers and cast were completely silent with their eyes downcast. I was taking my life in my hands, but I’m that way when I get my dander up. Less so now, but I’d say ridiculous things to people that could kick my ass. By all rights, I should be dead, because Keenen’s no one to trifle with.” He recalls Keenen simply getting up and walking out. Later, he was asked to see him in his office. “He was sitting there with his eyes bugging out of his head on the other side of the desk. He said, ‘Do you like this job?’ I said, ‘Yeah, man, I’m sorry. I was just angry, but I love this job.’ ”
Once Carrey apologized, Keenen says, “everything was cool.”
Some who recalled this incident remember it happening at the beginning of the fourth season, not the end of the third, but whatever the exact moment of the skirmish, it was a sign of the heightened tensions, fraying nerves, and disintegrating relationships. However, the story’s coda is comic and almost heartening. The incident provided fuel for Carrey’s breakout big-screen role. “That was the creation of the ass-talking for Ace Ventura,” he says. Yes, against considerable odds, talking out of his ass would become a classic Carrey signature after he incorporated it into the script for 1994’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. “The thing about it is, that’s where the best stuff comes from—extreme emotions, those moments where you’re set free either by anger or joy.” As silly as it is, he thinks there’s something a little profound in the act of bending over and letting your ass speak for you. “Talking out of your ass to me was the perfect expression of rebellion. It’s actually kind of a brilliant way of handling it. It’s as disrespectful as you get.”
As the season wound toward its close, another dismaying personnel issue loomed: Damon was planning on leaving the show.
Many speculated that the relationship between Keenen and Damon grew strained over the course of the show’s first three seasons. Circumstantially, there were things to point to. It was Keenen’s show but Damon was the first breakout star. Once new opportunities beckoned, Damon was less and less available. As one Fox executive puts it, “Keenen was trying to make a television show which was very valuable, and here was Damon negotiating to do fewer sketches by the day because he wanted to pursue a movie career.”
What’s more, a case can be made that Damon deserved a production credit and maybe even a share of the show’s profits, but instead had been signed to a series of—as he remembers them—not particularly lucrative short-term contracts. It was easy to blame Fox for that, but at a certain point, couldn’t the show’s creator do something about it?
“At the end of the day, Damon was working for Keenen,” says Firestein. “That’s a hard thing to sort out when your brother is saying, ‘This guy is making so much m
ore money than I am,’ or ‘My brother has to approve my raise.’ That’s tense.”
One person who worked on the show for a long time felt “Keenen suffered an enormous amount of sibling rivalry with Damon” and was jealous of Damon’s natural talents. But Gold, who managed both brothers, saw it the other way around.
“Damon was always much more envious of Keenen,” he says. “I’ve found that Keenen was a selfless, incredibly paternal, loving head of the family. Keenen only wanted the best for Damon at every single point. At every single point of conflict, it was Damon who always seemed a bit removed. Long after the show, you had Keenen, Marlon, Shawn, and Kim. Damon’s the one who’s not always involved. He was the black sheep. He was always a problem.” Gold admits that he and Damon “have had [their] issues,” and Damon fired him several times. “But I’m not saying this in a prejudicial way. I’m just saying as I remember it.”
Some think it’s all a lot of smoke and no fire. Most everyone agrees the brothers and the entire family were incredibly close, closer than your average family. Keenen denies any sort of jealousy or rivalry. “Damon and I are in different lanes,” he says. “If you look at our careers, you can see that. I’m more behind the camera, he’s more in front. Damon is a stronger performer than I am. I am a stronger creator than he is. When he broke out, I was happy. I knew he was a star, that’s why I hired him. There’s no competition. That was the goal—for all of them to become stars.”
According to Damon, it was simply time for him to leave. He was in the process of finishing Mo’ Money and had offers and ideas in the hopper for more films. “Keenen’s manager was my manager,” he says. “Keenen’s lawyer was my lawyer. Both were telling me, ‘It’s time to go. You’ve got a movie career.’ ” All the way back to his initial contract negotiations for the pilot, Damon never felt valued by Fox. He says the company always treated him like Keenen’s little brother. “I had no allegiance to the show because of how I was treated. There’s no commitment to me, so why should I be committed to them? That was Fox’s fault. They were thinking out of allegiance to my brother, I wouldn’t go. They were playing the family card.”
But Joe Davola recalls a phone call from Rupert Murdoch asking him to help convince Damon to stay: “Rupert called me up ready to shovel money into Damon’s hands to have him stay.”
Ultimately, it may not have been money Damon really wanted. “I thought my love for my brother trumped everything and show business would never come between us,” he says. “If Keenen would’ve said, ‘Hey Damon, I need you to stay,’ I gladly would’ve stayed. But Keenen didn’t say that, so I thought I had his blessing.”
To judge by the heartfelt send-off Keenen gave him at the end of the season’s final episode, he did. As the cast and crew gather onstage, Keenen announces, “It’s a very bittersweet moment here on In Living Color. We want to say goodbye to one of our cast members, Damon Wayans, on his way to a superstar movie career. We had great times and of course we wish him the best. Come back and visit sometime. Love you.” With that, Keenen kissed his younger brother on the cheek and embraced him warmly at center stage. The camera pulled back and then followed Damon as he walked through the backstage area, out the door of the studio, across the parking lot, and into the night.
28
“It Just Seemed Like Nothing Was Ever Going to Be Funny Again”
A crowd gathered outside the East County Courthouse, a bland, municipal building in Simi Valley, California, on April 29, 1992, awaiting the verdict in the trial of the four police officers who’d been videotaped beating Rodney King at the side of highway a year earlier. The court announced at 1:00 p.m. that the jury had reached its decision. At 3:15 p.m., the “not guilty” verdicts were read in the courtroom, and not long after, the four police officers made their way from the building, through the assembled throngs. It was a chaotic scene, with bystanders screaming “Racists!” and worse at the cops, and sheriff’s deputies keeping the crowd from attacking Sergeant Stacey Koon. Boyz n the Hood director John Singleton heard the verdict on the radio in his car. He was on his way to the set of his next film, Poetic Justice, but instead drove straight to the courthouse and joined the angry protestors. Shortly after arriving, he was interviewed by a news crew.
“The judicial system feels no responsibility to black people—never has, never will,” Singleton told them. “By having this verdict, what these people have done is they’ve lit the fuse to a bomb.” In light of what happened next, Singleton sounded prophetic, but it didn’t take a prophet to sense the mood in Los Angeles.
Black residents had felt under the LAPD’s thumb for a long time and at the mercy of a justice system that was, at best, indifferent to their plight, or at worst, actively against them. There had been no accountability for officers when Eulia Love, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two, had been shot eight times and killed after a dispute over a gas bill escalated into a physical confrontation. When a Korean-American grocery store owner gunned down fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins, the killer was sentenced to probation, community service, and a five-hundred-dollar fine. Now the idea that video evidence of cops kicking and clubbing a black man wasn’t enough to compel a jury to convict them was too much for some in the black community in Los Angeles to take.
The city exploded into three days of rage and mayhem. Looting was rampant, white and Latino motorists were dragged from their cars and beaten, sections of the city were set ablaze. Firefighters were attacked and shot at when they attempted to respond. Police were unprepared, and in many places forced to retreat. In Koreatown, which police had abandoned, Korean-American shopkeepers organized into armed security squads to defend their businesses. Much of the anarchy was captured by news crews and beamed to the rest of the country and the world. Viewers watched in shock as shopkeepers exchanged gunfire with looters, and a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, was pulled from the cab of his truck and beaten within an inch of his life by a black mob. It was chaos.
On the first night of the riots, Paramount urged Arsenio Hall to cancel his show. Tim Kelleher, who was a writer for Arsenio then and later for In Living Color, says Paramount closed their lot at noon and told everyone to go home. While he and his fellow writers were packing up, the show’s production team delivered a memo.
“They said, ‘We’re doing a show tonight, everyone has to stay, no one is allowed to leave,’ ” Kelleher recalls. Arsenio ventured with a camera crew into the heart of the city and urged calm. The only guest on the show that night was L.A. mayor Tom Bradley. “It was just Arsenio and Tom Bradley with no audience. There was a dusk-to-dawn curfew. I remember driving home that night, all the windows were smashed, and at that point it just seemed like nothing was ever going to be funny again. You just couldn’t make jokes and we didn’t probably for a couple weeks.”
National Guard units were deployed on the second day of the riots, but the havoc and bloodshed continued. That night, as chance would have it, was the series finale of The Cosby Show, and NBC abandoned its round-the-clock riots coverage to broadcast it. Ratings for the show had dropped over the course of the previous few years, and particularly in this context, Cosby’s moralizing tone and the Huxtables’ image as white America’s favorite black family seemed a relic from another era.
When an uneasy peace was finally restored, the toll was shocking: Fifty-five people had been killed, more than two thousand injured. Entire neighborhoods looked like they’d been carpet bombed. Property damage was near one billion dollars.
At the time of the riots, ILC had completed filming on the third season. The cast and crew were on hiatus. When they returned at the end of the summer, the shadow of what some called the L.A. Uprising still hung around like a pall.
A little over a month after the riots, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show. This wasn’t just a typical politician sitting down with a talk show host shilling for votes. (Though, to be sure, it was that too.) Clinton had sewn up the Democratic nomination for president the night b
efore. Of all the places one might expect to see him the following night, sitting in with Arsenio’s band, playing saxophone in a pair of dark Ray-Bans, wasn’t one of them.
During the episode, Clinton spoke to Arsenio about the L.A. Riots but not in the law-and-order terms politicians running for office might be expected to mouth. Instead, he seemed to grasp—on an emotional as well as historical level—that the riots were the culmination of years of bitterness and frustration. He spoke of residents who, “day in and day out, they trudge through their lives, they live in substandard housing on unsafe streets, they work their guts out, they fall further behind, nobody even knows they’re there until there’s a riot.” The appearance helped cement a lasting connection between Clinton and African-Americans. But his appearance on the show was also another indication that Arsenio—and by extension, Keenen, Spike Lee, John Singleton, and others—weren’t feeding a niche market. They were playing in the big leagues. In much the same way ILC’s Super Bowl special had been a statement about the show’s reach, Clinton’s Arsenio turn was confirmation that what once was fringe was now mainstream.
Ratings didn’t always reflect that reality. ILC’s had been strong through the first three seasons, averaging around twenty million viewers. By the standards of today’s bifurcated television market, those are huge numbers, but for the 1991–92 season that only made ILC the forty-eighth most popular show on television. (Although, it’s worth noting it was third among black viewers.) Some of this comes down to the fact that Fox was still struggling to gain a foothold in some markets, where it was relegated to UHF feeds with spotty reception. But despite middling Nielsen numbers, ILC had the highest Q-rating of any show on TV. Q-ratings measure the audience’s familiarity with and good feeling for a program. Essentially, the highest ratings go to the shows that the most people know and like, regardless of whether they watch every week. They’re a good measure of a show’s influence. ILC may have begun to show cracks in its creative foundation at the end of Season 3, but as the staff was reassembled for Season 4, it had never been more popular or influential.
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