Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  Keenen admits, “I didn’t want the show to continue without me,” but the network immediately began making plans to do just that. Marlon says Fox offered him “a bunch of money” to stay on, but he refused. “At the time, I had a nine-hundred-dollar rent and seven hundred dollars in the bank, so I left with nothing. But at the end of the day, that’s my brother.”

  Damon also had financial reasons to think twice about following his brother out the door. “I’d just made the deal to come back and they were paying me seventy-five thousand dollars a sketch,” he says. He’d only shot a handful of those sketches when Keenen “decided we’re leaving. So not only was I surprised, I was pretty upset because this was my comeuppance.” Once Keenen quit, Fox upped the ante. “Fox said, ‘We’ll give you two hundred thousand dollars extra per show to take over as executive producer.’ ” It was the equivalent of offering Damon a gold-plated dagger to plunge into his older brother’s back. Damon refused and walked out alongside Keenen and Marlon.

  As Keenen notes, “That was a huge sacrifice. It was like, You going where and you want me to do what? But my family is a family. Come one, come all, leave one, leave all. So, I didn’t have to say anything. Everybody said to themselves, ‘If he’s not here, I don’t wanna be here even if you’re gonna pay me this kind of money.’ Damon, we laugh about it to this day. He was pissed. But he was my brother.”

  Kim and Shawn were under contract for the season and Fox wouldn’t release them. “We all wanted to leave,” says Kim. “We were heartbroken. We didn’t see how you could remove the creator of a show, a show as specific as this, a show as sensitive in a lot of regards as this, and just expect to stick somebody else in there and everything is going to be hunky-dory.”

  Kim was right about the enormous challenge of doing the show without the guy who’d created it. That said, Keenen had been gradually ceding day-to-day responsibilities to the three co-producers, Les Firestein, Pam Veasey, and Greg Fields, so in some sense, there was a succession plan. But the reins didn’t automatically pass to them.

  “The network was struggling with, ‘What do we do?’ ” says Veasey. “We didn’t want them to bring somebody from the outside in. Myself, Les, and Greg said, ‘We want to be the people to step up and carry on with the show.’ It was difficult to convince the network. I remember going through a lot of tap dancing on that. We showed them the sketches the three of us were responsible for writing. We argued that we had been there. We were like, ‘If you want it to be as close as possible to what exists, let us run the show. We are from Keenen’s school of thought. He taught us.’ ”

  Firestein thought the decision to continue without Keenen was “bizarre.” “You’re basically pulling the heart out of the show, and what you have left is a zombie,” he says. “We were missing half our pieces, but Fox wanted us to do the same thing.” Once Fox asked them to, though, his only choice was to carry on or to walk away from his own contract, “which at that point, I didn’t feel like doing.”

  “I actually went to Keenen when he was leaving and asked how he felt about the three of us continuing without him,” says Firestein. “He was like, ‘You guys should do what’s good for you. This is between me and Fox.’ So, I felt like I had his blessing. I’ve seen Keenen since then and dealt with him and we’re fine.”

  From Fox’s standpoint, separating Keenen from the show wasn’t as simple as changing the locks after he stormed out. Keenen had been an executive producer with an ownership stake in ILC. And while Fox may have been well within their contractual right to air In Living Color: The First Season, whether Twentieth Television could sell ILC’s rights to FX (Fox’s new cable channel) for whatever price they deemed was fair was less clear-cut. Keenen and Gold claimed this was “self-dealing,” and threatened a lawsuit over it. After meetings with lawyers and depositions, a settlement was hammered out. While the exact terms remain confidential, Fox bought Keenen out of his share of the show—most people I spoke to put the figure around or just above five million dollars, though one person had it as high as twenty million—and a formula was devised for repackaging future compilations of sketches and episodes. “I didn’t want them to take my work and mix it up with shitty work produced after me and present it as my work,” Keenen says. Ultimately, however, Fox was free to do with the show more or less what it pleased. And while many questioned the long-term syndication value of a rude, irreverent, of-the-moment sketch show, time has mostly answered that question. ILC was a staple of FX when the network launched in 1994, and for years was nearly inescapable on the channel. Reruns continued to air on its sister channel FXX until 2017. As of the fall of 2017, two upstart cable networks, Aspire and Fusion, were, somewhat ironically, using the show to plug holes in their own schedules: The former was airing reruns six days a week for between two and seven hours a day; the latter, three times a week for up to six hours a day.

  Reactions to Keenen’s departure varied among the cast. Kim and Shawn were essentially being held hostage to their contracts against their will. Others, like David Alan Grier and Kelly Coffield, felt a loyalty to Keenen and a disillusionment with the direction the show seemed to be headed. Carrey was grateful for the opportunity Keenen had given him, but in interviews around that time made it clear he was ready to turn the page.

  “Keenen and I butted heads against each other,” Carrey told the Los Angeles Times in March of 1993. “He was going off and doing other things and I felt the ship needed a captain. His heart just wasn’t in the show anymore. You can’t do a show like that halfway.”

  The show’s longtime editor, Kris Trexler, says he was considering walking out with Keenen, and recalls Carrey as one of the leading voices keeping the show on track. “Jim said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a show, let’s rally, let’s stick together and keep it going.’ He was great.”

  Newer cast members, like Wentworth and Jamie Foxx, were distressed with the drama around Keenen’s exit, but also just looking to get on with it. Feelings among the writing staff and the crew similarly ran the gamut. It was on Firestein, Veasey, and Fields to patch all this together into a cohesive show. It wasn’t easy. “We didn’t want audiences to think, Ugh. They’re gone so the show’s a dud,” says Veasey. “We were hoping we could keep what existed, what was so special about In Living Color, alive.”

  As the revamped production team got their bearings, they relied some on sketches produced before Keenen’s exit but which had been put on the shelf for later. “We always had a lot of sketches in the bank,” says Firestein. “But remember, the sketches in the bank are the sketches we don’t feel are great, otherwise they’re not in the bank. Generally, it’s stuff that’s just okay.”

  Once the initial shock of Keenen’s exit wore off, the show actually ran more smoothly without him. Keenen was, as Kevin Berg described it, a “bottleneck” that made the production inefficient. He was fickle, ornery, stubborn, and rarely punctual. Lots of time was wasted waiting for him to be available to make a decision. When he did make decisions, it often meant more work—a sketch that everyone else liked needed to be rewritten, a new set needed to be built, new props needed to be located because the ones used in rehearsal were distracting. Many writers felt like the job immediately got easier without Keenen. Fewer late nights, less unpredictability.

  “It freed up the creative process somewhat because Keenen had very strong opinions about what we should and shouldn’t do,” says Bill Martin. “He had an encyclopedic memory of every pitch he ever rejected. So, there was a certain sense of, Oh, all that stuff we didn’t think he was going to like, let’s pitch it now! It definitely was a bit of a spring awakening creatively because we could try anything.”

  On the other hand, after more than seventy episodes, Keenen more or less knew what he was doing. His whims may have annoyed the writers and producers, but collectively his whims were the show’s vision. If ILC was an inefficient machine under Keenen, it was inefficient by design.

  “For all the aggravation of his bottlenecking,” says Ke
vin Berg, “his bottlenecking was for a reason. I love the people who were there after he left, but some sketches that aired he never would’ve aired. We did some things that Keenen would’ve said, ‘Don’t shoot that. It’s not funny.’ ”

  Beyond his creative role, Keenen was also a figurehead that gave the writing staff cover to do more racially charged humor. Since the show’s earliest days—when Keenen had told Fox in no uncertain terms that he didn’t need consultants from the NAACP or the Urban League to validate his blackness—Keenen always served as a buffer, protecting the largely white writing staff from charges of racism or, at the very least, insensitivity. But now, without his imprimatur, some writers felt more exposed.

  “However aloof he might have been, Keenen was the voice of the show,” says Mike Schiff. One question hanging over the show now was “Could we still get away with things on a racial level without Keenen as our shield?”

  A couple of weeks after Keenen’s departure, Los Angeles Times critic Howard Rosenberg seemed to answer that question: “If TV’s ethno-insults were confined to remnants of the past perhaps they would be more bearable. But they’re not. The cleanup of stereotypes has not been complete—witness, for example, the ridicule that African-Americans are relentlessly subjected to on Fox’s black-produced, increasingly unfunny satirical series In Living Color. The justification here appears to be that bashing one’s own is acceptable—a sort of family affair—even though in this case the TV audience laughing at the black bashing is substantially non-black. Of course, In Living Color also targets other minorities such as people with disabilities and gays, and recently presented a particularly offensive, stereotype-feeding sketch about gays in the military showing mincing males in the barracks.” (The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation protested the latter sketch.)

  Kim Wayans noticed a change in tone on the show almost immediately. “Keenen was able to get away with stuff as a black man in charge of a show like this, determining what’s okay and what’s not,” she says. “That was no longer there. Now you have people giving you sketches to perform that you actually find offensive. Because now it’s not you making fun of your own culture, it’s somebody else who’s not of your culture making fun of it and telling you that this is funny. It wasn’t.”

  To be fair, the writing staff had five African-American writers on it, including one of the co-EPs, Pam Veasey, and the sketches produced during the second half of the season, if anything, were milder and took fewer chances with explicitly political or racial humor. But it was a problem of perception. When David Alan Grier plays Silky, a seventies-era pimp who’s been cryogenically frozen for two decades, in “Forever Silky,” his stereotypical portrayal—“Bitch, where’s my money!”—is certainly no more offensive than any number of similarly stereotypical parts in earlier seasons (or similar roles in Hollywood Shuffle and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, for that matter). “The Black People’s Show” skewers the lack of opportunities for African-Americans in Hollywood by making fun of black actors playing raisins and intergalactic hookers; the tone is nearly identical to “The Black People’s Awards,” which was produced during Keenen’s tenure. Similarly, Kelly Coffield’s amiable racist Sheila Peace is no more bigoted than she was in Season 3. What had changed was the context.

  “I was on the show almost from the beginning, so I don’t think my material changed,” says Firestein. “I don’t think any of the other long-term writers’ aesthetic or taste changed. I don’t think it became making fun of black culture. We may not have had the guns to execute as well as we used to. Stuff isn’t quite as funny because maybe the performers weren’t as charismatic.”

  Perhaps the most pressing issue during the second half of Season 4 was that there were barely enough cast members to cast the sketches. Marc Wilmore, who’d begun appearing in scattered sketches at the end of Season 3, was suddenly on-screen a lot more. T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh and Ali Wentworth became more high-profile players. David Alan Grier and Jamie Foxx became stars. Still, they were shorthanded.

  Even before Keenen’s departure, the show began using more so-called “day players” to play smaller supporting roles simply because the main cast started to see such parts as beneath them. After he left, reliance on these day players increased even further; a few, like A.J. Jamal and David Edwards, were given short “tryout” contracts.

  “I was there to do a job,” says Edwards, a standup from Washington, D.C. “They just told me what to do. ‘Hey, we need you in this sketch.’ I wish they would’ve used me more. I remember being sad because I really wanted to make people laugh and they just weren’t using me the right way.”

  Edwards had a seven-week contract, but never felt he was given a chance to prove himself. The gig carried a certain status though, and he sometimes invited one of his closest friends to come hang out backstage, a fellow standup named Dave Chappelle. “He used to come to the set,” says Edwards. “He’d hang out and watch some of the tapings, hang with me in the dressing room, because we watched In Living Color in high school, and here I was on the show. It was a great moment for me, for bragging rights.”

  Eric Gold recalls that Chappelle “wanted to be on that show more than anybody, begged to be on,” and says he probably would have been eventually if the show had stayed on the air longer. Edwards wasn’t invited back after his seven-week run. Later in the year, he was cast on MTV’s The Real World, and shortly after became infamous as the first person ever evicted from the cast’s house.

  Jenifer Lewis also had a short run on the show around this time, but she arrived with a little more cachet and was the star of several sketches. Lewis brought with her a handful of characters from a one-woman cabaret show she’d been developing. T. Faye Griffin says she and her writing partner, Al Sonja Rice (who’s name is now Al Sonja Schmidt), were assigned to be Lewis’s personal writing staff.

  “All we did was cannibalize what she was already doing, the characters she walked in the door with,” says Griffin. “We didn’t really create anything new for her, we just customized for In Living Color’s style.” Lewis’s characters worked pretty well on the show, but there was a sense Lewis was auditioning ILC, as much as the other way around, perhaps fishing for a deal of her own from Fox. In the end, she didn’t stick around.

  Kim and Shawn were obligated to be on set but made no secret of their displeasure at being there. Some describe them as being “on strike,” but they were more dragging their feet than actually refusing to work. The two occasionally played supporting parts in sketches, but had mostly stopped trying. In a sketch poking fun at the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World, Shawn is barely even going through the motions, muttering his lines with evident disinterest.

  “I was angry,” says Shawn. “The soul of the show was gone.”

  As Kim puts it, “The whole spirit had walked out the door. It was a bunch of scared people left trying to save a sinking ship. Nobody really knew what they were doing. The show felt adrift and desperate. It was no fun going to work anymore. I didn’t want to be there.”

  It was an impossible situation. Kim and Shawn were perhaps justified in their resentment at being forced to perform for the company their brother just had a very public falling-out with, but on the other hand, the show needed warm bodies. Most people sympathized with their protest, but Kim and Shawn half-assing it was having an evident effect on everyone else’s work too. “They’re not that good as it is,” says Marc Wilmore. “We’re not dealing with Laurence Olivier and Kate Hepburn here.”

  The producers kept trying to use them. A script for a new Benita Butrell sketch made the packet one week, but when Kim read it, she found it offensive and racist. “I refused to do it,” she says.

  Berg had to deal with the situation. He walked down the hall and knocked on the door of Kim’s dressing room. Kim was in there with Kelly Coffield. “She refused to come out of her dressing room to do the sketch,” says Berg. “That was her way of saying, ‘I’m done.’ ” Berg felt caught in the middle. He’d bee
n with the show since the first season, had been promoted up the totem pole, and this was where it had gotten him. “I had to say, ‘Look, if you’re not going to do the sketch, you’re in breach of contract and officially suspended from production. Feel free to go.’ She was sitting there with Kelly and they were just crying. I was like, ‘This is crazy. This is not something I want to do.’ ”

  Kim wouldn’t budge. “They were like, ‘If you don’t do it, we’re going to hold you to breaching your contract. I was like, ‘Do what you have to do.’ I had to get lawyers and all that stuff. Eventually, we wound up settling out of court. I was released from my contract but not without some drama.”

  The behind-the-scenes turmoil and even Keenen’s eventual departure didn’t necessarily dent the show’s cachet among the hip-hop community, at least not immediately. Gang Starr, Onyx, Arrested Development, Digable Planets, Naughty by Nature, Mary J. Blige, Pete Rock & C. L. Smooth, and the Pharcyde all performed during Season 4. Digable Planets appeared on the show before their first album had even been released. It was a big deal for the group.

  “It got the needle off zero,” says Ishmael Butler, one of the group’s MCs. “The show came from a hip-hop point of view. It was fast, it was streetwise, it dealt with current subjects that didn’t necessarily have to cater to white audiences. It was a good look.”

  Arrested Development performed right around the time when all the drama with Keenen was going down, but the group’s front man Speech says none of it spilled into their experience there. “The vibe was very positive,” he says. With or without Keenen, ILC was important to the rap world. “It literally introduced hip-hop to a large segment of the American population. Hip-hop wasn’t fully vetted yet. A lot of people weren’t convinced it was going to last. They thought it was a fad. The show was a great platform to legitimize this art form, to get our music out to the entire world.”