W. E. B. Du Bois observed something similar more than a century ago. In his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote about the “double consciousness” with which African-Americans grapple. They could never avoid seeing themselves “through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Paul Mooney described this double consciousness as having “one self for the master and one self that’s ‘just between us.’ ” That created a tug-of-war for guys like Pryor, Chappelle, and Keenen, who struggled to balance those two selves.
Not long after Chappelle’s Show fell apart, Chris Rock got a call with an offer to do a show just like it. “They offered me a ton of money, just an insane amount,” Rock explained in 2008. He took the offer seriously enough to go back and watch Chappelle’s Show on DVD. “I put in Season 2 and was like, ‘There’s no way I’ll ever do a sketch show again.’ It was so funny.” Sketch shows are best done by comics on the way up, people without much to lose. Pryor had way too much to lose. Keenen and Chappelle didn’t—at least when they started. Once they did, they were gone. “The next guy to do a sketch show can’t be me,” Rock continued. “It’s got to be some young kid that doesn’t know any better.”
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“How Does In Living Color Fare in a World of Key and Peele?”
In Hollywood, a good idea never really dies. Once any television show or film achieves even a modicum of success, you can bet there are already teams of people scheming to figure out how to take that idea and repeat it, reboot it, copy it, set up a sequel, or spin it off into ten more projects. In Living Color is no exception.
Both during the show’s run and after its cancellation, there was talk about spinning off some of the more popular characters—Fire Marshal Bill, Wanda, Homey the Clown, Blaine and Antoine from “Men on Film”—into movies. “We tried,” says Keenen. “There was going to be a Homey the Clown film.”
This was years after the show had ended, and the Homey film was well into preproduction. At the same time, Keenen, Shawn, and Marlon were trying to get another film, White Chicks, off the ground. “We pitched White Chicks and there was a bidding war that ended with Sony making the best offer,” Kennen says. This created problems with Fox, which was developing the Homey film. “The guy who was at Fox at the time got pissed and pulled the plug on Homey the Clown. We were two days before shooting Homey.”
As Damon recalls, “We got close. I wish we would’ve done it. I wish we still could do it.”
Talk of and steps toward adapting other characters oscillated, with some getting farther along than others. Rumors of a Fire Marshal Bill movie stayed just rumors. Carrey says it wasn’t physically doable. “Fire Marshal Bill, you can only do it for a minute and a half until my face would literally go into convulsions,” he explains. Nonetheless, the lost opportunities aren’t without their bright sides: In Living Color’s characters have thus far avoided the ignominious silver screen fate that befell such Saturday Night Live mainstays as Stuart Smalley, Pat, and Mary Katherine Gallagher.
Efforts at rebooting the television show itself, though, came perilously close to happening. By 2011, the legal issues between Keenen and Fox regarding syndication and charges of self-dealing had long been settled, and there was enough water under the bridge that both the network and the show’s creator believed there was a way to make their relationship work again. That Keenen and Fox would want to revive ILC wasn’t shocking. The original show had only grown in stature in the nearly two decades since it disappeared. Carrey, Foxx, and Jennifer Lopez were A-List movie stars; Rosie Perez, David Alan Grier, and Tommy Davidson were stars as well; and even once-lowly writers like Larry Wilmore and Colin Quinn had become household names. And it wasn’t as if America had sorted out all those pesky issues regarding race that once bedeviled it. The first black president was a symbolic marker for racial progress, but also seemingly an incitement for those who nostalgically recalled a simpler (read: whiter) time. It was the age of Obama but also of Hurricane Katrina, Oscar Grant, birtherism, Mel Gibson, Fox News, the War on Terror. It was a time when a massively popular black rapper—one who’d famously proclaimed to a national television audience that a white president didn’t care about black people—could interrupt the Grammys to protest a white pop star receiving an award he believed should’ve gone to a black pop star, and the black president would call him a jackass for it. MADtv had closed up shop in 2009, and SNL still struggled to integrate black comics into the show. (At the time, Kenan Thompson was the only African-American full cast member, and the show had exactly zero black writers on a staff of more than twenty.) Surely, the thinking was, there could be a place for ILC in this landscape.
The initial plan was to make two specials. Assuming all went well, Keenen expected that Fox would pick up a full season of the show. The original cast members would do some sketches early on, but with the idea of introducing audiences to a new cast, who’d take the ball and run with it.
It didn’t pan out as Keenen or Fox had expected. The show struggled to find the kinds of cast members Keenen was looking for. As he explained during a 2013 radio interview, “The talent pool is different. There’s a lot of funny guys out there now but they don’t do characters, sing, act. They do one thing. You look at a guy like Jamie Foxx: Jamie is super talented, doing drama, singing, comedy, standup. Those are the kinds of people you need to put a show like that together.”
One of the biggest complications proved to be securing the participation of the original cast. Most had agreed—in theory—to do something for the new show. Turning that into reality was tricky, and cast a pall of uncertainty over the production.
“There were rumors among the cast: ‘Is Jim Carrey really coming? Is it going to be David Alan Grier?’ ” recalls Josh Duvendeck, who was hired as one of the new cast members. “No one confirmed it because no one wanted to set that standard if they weren’t going to be able to follow through.”
The main issue with getting the original cast committed was money. According to multiple accounts, the offers Fox made to them were insultingly low.
“They were going to give me $2500 to do two specials,” says Damon. “They wanted me to do a Homey sketch and a ‘Men On’ sketch, plus they wanted to own any new characters I created. I knew that when they started promoting it, it’s going to be as if I’m in it throughout the show. I couldn’t allow myself to be used like that. I can’t work for $2500. I’m not going to let you disrespect me like that.”
Carrey was willing to do a guest appearance but says Keenen found “studios aren’t as generous as they used to be. That stuff was a lot of work if you’re not going to get a payoff.” None of the original cast members, besides Keenen, ended up filming anything.
Keenen himself had changed some since the original show, but according to Les Firestein, whom he’d brought in as a writer and producer for the reboot, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “Keenen was much nicer,” says Firestein. “He’d explain to people why he didn’t want to do something. He didn’t play as fearsome a role on the reboot, and as a result he was less feared, but that may have also made people less productive.”
Maronzio Vance, a comic who was hired as a writer on the reboot, feels the kinder, gentler Keenen was pulling punches in a way his younger self never would have. “He didn’t want to make fun of anybody anymore,” says Vance. “He was like, ‘That’s mean.’ He didn’t want to go dark. I’m like, This show is based on being dark and fucked up and making fun of people. But he was older now. He had perspective.”
As the staff worked on assembling a pilot episode, they were acutely aware of a looming presence, just overhead. Two former MADtv cast members, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, were on the floor above them developing their own sketch show. “Key and Peele were on the third floor, we were on the second,” says Vance. “It was weird. Key and Peele were the new kids on the block doing sketch about race and social issues. They could’ve bugged our room. We could’ve
bugged theirs.”
Firestein says they didn’t talk much about Key and Peele around the production offices, but their presence seemed to underline a pervading issue. “The shows are different but the question is How does In Living Color fare in a world of Key and Peele?”
The production fell seriously behind schedule—Fox’s senior VP of television production Joel Hornstock called the process “interminable”—and was way over budget, but eventually eight to ten sketches were produced. The cast members and writers’ opinions on whether any of it was actually funny are mostly just conjecture. None of them ever saw the final pilot, and the writers didn’t even see the sketches filmed. The set was closed to them.
One cast member, Milton “Lil Rel” Howery, says one thing he did see was the intro Keenen did for the entire show, which he says basically reenacted his acrimonious departure from ILC two decades earlier. “Fox couldn’t have been happy with that,” he says. “It was Fox telling Keenen he was never going to work on the network again. I was sitting there like, Oh, man. That’s how we’re going to kick this off?”
It’s not clear whether Keenen intended it as a barbed joke—much like Richard Pryor’s monologues about NBC during his run on The Richard Pryor Show—or whether it was just a sign that Keenen had given up on the reboot at that point. After the tape week, there wasn’t even a wrap party.
By the end of April of 2012, the pilot was finished and the production office closed. For all the disagreements Keenen and Fox had over the years, they saw eye to eye on this one: The pilot was going nowhere. It had been time-consuming and expensive to produce—“I think it wound up being just under four million dollars,” says Firestein—yet it felt lacking.
“It stunk,” says Hornstock. “Who knows which incarnation I saw because it never had a final final, but it was terrible. It was embarrassing and it cost all those millions of dollars.”
Publicly, Keenen said he thought the pilot was good, though he may have just been being polite. Ultimately, he didn’t see how the series could sustain itself. “It’s one of those things where the bar is set so high and if you can’t reach that, you gotta let it go,” he says. “If I’d been doing another sketch show with a new, young cast, it would’ve been fine. But once you called it In Living Color, and you’ve got all these former cast members who are icons that you’re gonna be compared to, you can’t fuck with that.”
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“It’s That Moment When It All Ignited”
David Alan Grier and Jim Carrey were sitting around the set of In Living Color one day early in the show’s run, talking to kill the downtime typical on any television production. The show had recently debuted and was a hit—or at least a hit for Fox, which was still struggling to be taken seriously as a fourth network. Grier had grown up steeped in the Civil Rights Movement, having earned a master’s from the Yale School of Drama and played Jackie Robinson on Broadway. Yet it was Carrey, a Canadian high school dropout, who seemed to intuitively grasp the importance of what they were engaged in.
“This is history,” he told Grier.
Grier didn’t see it. Maybe the decade he’d spent as a struggling black actor had hardened him, made him cynical. “You’re fucking crazy,” he said. “This isn’t history. This is just another sketch show. After we’re canceled, six months later, people will have forgotten about In Living Color.”
People haven’t forgotten In Living Color—at least not entirely—but assessing its legacy is tricky. Many of the cast have gone on to huge Hollywood careers. The show’s writers and producers ran or at least had a hand in practically every significant comedy on television in the last twenty-plus years, including The Simpsons, South Park, Seinfeld, The Bernie Mac Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Daily Show, The Office, Cheers, Chappelle’s Show, Friends, and Saturday Night Live.
“In Living Color was a show that opened the doors to America, to look behind the screen of what [people] think is going on in the black mind, as opposed to what’s really going on,” says Kim Wayans. “People were surprised by how one culture perceives another and vice-versa. It wasn’t just about black culture and how we see things, but also about how [white people] see things in relation to us. It opened up dialogue, and whenever you open up dialogue about things that were once taboo, it’s a step forward.”
In a very tangible way, Keenen and In Living Color helped to force open doors that had previously been barely cracked within Hollywood. “Keenen and I were like the first soldiers stupid and courageous enough to believe we can do it,” says Robert Townsend. “Now people take it for granted that a person of color can write, direct, produce a movie or TV show. Back then, it was never heard of. Being a black writer-director-producer was like being a black quarterback in football. There weren’t many of us.”
Les Firestein, who went on to a long career in television as writer and producer, working with Drew Carey, Wanda Sykes, Norm MacDonald, and Jon Stewart, believes that ILC helped prove there was a potentially huge market for black entertainment. “There are a lot of people like Chappelle, like Key and Peele, that have to look back to this show as a form of Jackie Robinson,” he says. “It was kind of the comedy equivalent of rap music, where you had something that jumped cultures and went widespread in America.”
There’s an obvious through line from ILC to MADtv, The Chris Rock Show, Chappelle’s Show, and Key and Peele, but that only tells a fraction of the story. The entertainment landscape for the two and a half decades after the show debuted looks vastly different than the two and a half decades before it. Television and film are completely unrecognizable from what they were in the eighties. The playing field may still not be level for minorities, but people like Shonda Rhimes, Kenya Barris, Lee Daniels, Ava DuVernay, Issa Rae, Jordan Peele, and Donald Glover have found a way to tell a diverse array of distinctly African-American stories. The fact that black rappers and singers like Drake, Kanye West, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé are among the biggest stars on the planet is probably less meaningful than the fact that white ones like Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Eminem, and Adam Levine are often just as marinated in hip-hop culture. Even country music adopts a hip-hop pose these days. What was once so fringe that In Living Color was one of the few places a kid from rural Iowa could discover Public Enemy, has now taken over. Hip-hop is mainstream American culture. The astounding success of Hamilton, a hip-hop Broadway musical about the country’s decidedly un-hip-hop founding fathers, seems like a final Rubicon crossed.
In the course of one generation, hip-hop culture has changed America. The final weight of its impact won’t be tallied for a long time. But whatever hip-hop did to America, In Living Color was a part of it. Not just in spreading the music from urban America to the suburbs, the exurbs, and beyond, but in introducing one culture to another, in giving us permission to point at each other and laugh.
During his years on the show, Buddy Sheffield occasionally returned to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi where he’d grown up. When friends and relatives discovered he—a white boy from the Old South—wrote for In Living Color, they’d inevitably rave about it. “Some of these people weren’t the most open-minded,” says Sheffield. “I thought, Well, if nothing else, for thirty minutes a week, I’ve got these people sitting down and loving a bunch of black people.” That’s not nothing.
“It’s hard to look at it in a vacuum and say what In Living Color did for black performers,” says Marsha Warfield. “It’s a continuum.” The period in the late eighties and early nineties that spawned In Living Color, Do the Right Thing, Boyz n the Hood, Coming to America, Arsenio’s talk show, Public Enemy, and Tupac was an inflection point, a moment in time when the weight of two hundred years of history could no longer prevent the giant aircraft carrier that is American culture from turning. “That whole time was part of an evolution that got us to where we are now,” says Warfield. “Nobody could’ve predicted a quote-unquote small show like In Living Color on an off network would explode. It anchored a whole new world not just for
black entertainment but for entertainment period. It deserves its own place for being part of that revolution and evolution.”
In Living Color wasn’t just swept up in this sea change, it was an instigator for it.
“It was all happening at once,” says Tommy Davidson. “It was a renaissance period for urban entertainment. It’s that moment when it all ignited, all came together. Out of that came Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, House Party, Run-DMC’s ‘Walk This Way,’ Yo! MTV Raps. It was an explosion, and here we are now in the commercial age of that renaissance. Back then, it was new. Now, you can’t sell a Sprite or an iPad without it.”
Hip-hop—not just the music, but the culture—has been, in Keenen’s eyes, “the bridge between black and white” in America. In Living Color helped construct that bridge. “I’d argue with anyone that Obama is the culmination of hip-hop,” Keenen said in 2015. “That culture, that generation is what brought our nation together.” Politically, we may have entered a post-Obama era, but culturally there’s no going back. The country may be split into warring factions that seem to have nothing in common, but that’s not true. What’s left of monoculture in our increasingly bifurcated media world is a hip-hop-infused coalition that In Living Color helped assemble.
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