I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up

by D. L. Hughley

  The audience just erupted, and Will was paralyzed. There was nothing he could say, but I can’t imagine this kind of thing was appreciated. The show was like one big family, but I already had a family and I didn’t need another one. I even refused to let my kids visit the set despite how much they were dying to meet the Fresh Prince. LaDonna thought that was petty. She thought everybody would love the kids, but she thinks everybody loves everybody anyway. But from my perspective, my children are my children and my responsibility. I heap love and praise on them. I didn’t want to expose them to the industry, and particularly people who make a living pretending to be somebody else. I don’t mean Will, I mean actors in general. Their gig is to pretend to be someone that they’re not. That’s not only a skill set, it’s a character flaw.

  Will would make everybody come into the office to do cheers and that kind of stuff, but I wouldn’t do it. I would get the script, go sit in the bleachers, and read it. Obviously my attitude didn’t endear me to the higher-ups. After a while they started playing music between scenes so I couldn’t talk. They thought I was being insolent, and I thought I was doing my job and being funny. Maybe there was some truth to both of our sides.

  The last straw was one day when I was doing introductions. When it came time for me to introduce Alfonso Ribeiro, his father told me to roll the R’s. I didn’t, because I couldn’t. The producers thought I was being a dick, but I really couldn’t pronounce it. That gave them the excuse they wanted to fire me.

  One month later, Will called me back himself. “Come on, D.L.,” he said, “I want you to come back.”

  I knew that meant that whoever replaced me had been horrible. But the experience had been needlessly shitty for me, too. “No, man,” I told him. “They treated me fucked up.”

  “Just give it a try.”

  I knew that if the star of the show was calling me back, then no one else really had the power to fire me. After that, I could do whatever I wanted. I wasn’t taking a lot of shit, but I had insurance. The experience really soured me on getting my own show, which is purportedly every comedian’s dream. But I always wanted to do a late-night talk show, not a sitcom.

  Sure enough, the opportunity presented itself. NBC’s Later was going through guest hosts, and I threw my hat into the ring. The network execs were hesitant. They said that they couldn’t understand me because I talked too bad, so my manager set up a meeting simply so they could hear me speak. As I was chitchatting about my recent experiences moving into a white neighborhood, my manager slammed his hand on the table. “Fuck that,” he said. “You got an idea for a series here. They’re going to let you guest-host this, that’s fine, but I’m going to get you a series.”

  And that’s exactly what he did.

  The way we pitched The Hughleys was by telling the executives stories from my life, and that strategy worked. Every network bid, and we ended up going with ABC. We shot the pilot, and it got picked up for a full season. In many ways it was like a traditional sitcom, although in our case everyone was everyone else’s wacky neighbor because of the differences in race.

  After the first season, we were doing really well and we thought we were going to get renewed. While I was waiting to hear, I found out that another new ABC show called Sports Night had gotten its order in for another season. An Aaron Sorkin series, Sports Night was critically acclaimed, but it just wasn’t doing well ratings-wise. ABC renewed it as a token of goodwill to Aaron, who’s a brilliant writer (and who I would later work with on Studio 60, as I mentioned).

  I had lunch about this time with Jamie Tarses, then head of ABC’s entertainment division. She was talking about Sports Night but wasn’t letting me know shit about The Hughleys. “We’re the number-one new comedy on ABC,” I reminded her. “Am I gonna get picked up?”

  I guess that’s not the typical Hollywood approach, to flat-out ask an executive like that. “I can’t guarantee you,” she said, “but I’d be shocked if you weren’t picked up. You know how it is.” She started to explain the process.

  “Jamie, I’ve been a nigger for a long time. It’s just new to you.” I was used to living on the periphery, living as an afterthought. It wasn’t surprising that a white show that we were outperforming would get picked up, and would get decided upon first.

  Eventually, though, we did get the order for another season. But before we could start shooting, there was another major problem for me to address. I had created the show, and I was the producer. As the producer, I was privy to the show’s budget—and I saw that everybody was making more money than me. I had no idea what was happening, but that didn’t make sense to me. The show was The Hughleys. It was my show about my life, and I needed to make more money than everybody—not the other way around.

  My lawyer called the network and told them that I was too sick to go to work. I wasn’t coming in until the budget was adjusted in a way that made more sense. The network said no. They said they couldn’t pay me more, so sure enough I didn’t come in to work. They could have made it happen if they just gave me what I wanted. But instead, they gave me something I didn’t really want.

  The Cadillac Escalade had just come out, and everyone knows black men like Escalades almost as much as we like smoking crack and raping white women. The next morning, sitting in my driveway was a brand-new Escalade. At first I couldn’t believe that the network thought that would work. Then I realized that for some other people, it had worked. Don King made a career out of moves like that. He would show up to meet poor, black athletes with a briefcase full of money and a contract. They would get the money if they signed on the spot—but the contract had a stipulation that the briefcase of money was a loan to be paid back. So sometimes, flashy bribes worked.

  This wasn’t one of those times.

  I kept the Cadillac but never drove it. ABC ended up taking cash from everybody who was making more than me and gave me a pretty big raise. My illness miraculously cured, I returned to work. This was the era when audiences started getting more and more divided, and they didn’t really know what to do with a show like The Hughleys. It wasn’t a black show but it wasn’t a white show, either. That caused a lot of drama, which is not a good thing for a comedy.

  Of course we had creative differences, but that’s part of the process. It’s those kinds of arguments that drive you crazy at the time, but you look back upon them fondly. The writers kept wanting to put me in a dress on the show, and I kept saying no. That battle I won. They wanted me to chase a chicken, and ain’t no way in the fuck that I’m chasing a chicken. For that one we compromised and my costar chased the bird around. They had a musical episode, and they got me over on that one. We did the whole song and dance, literally. But at the end I got to hold up a sign that said THE WHITE MAN MADE ME DO IT!

  We moved to TGIF, ABC’s family night that featured Full House and Step by Step, but we were an edgy, urban show. On the one hand, our “Why Can’t We Be Friends” episode was shown as part of an army department’s racial-sensitivity training. On the other hand, I got death threats because we did a show about guns, and people didn’t like what we had to say. This was before Twitter and Facebook, so people couldn’t contact you directly. You had to go out of your way and read the message boards to find out that someone was calling you a nigger.

  People got upset with us all the time. We had a Christmas episode, and the story flashed back to when I was a little boy and the first time it snowed in L.A. I dreamt that Santa Claus came, and we had Isaac Hayes playing St. Nick. Later in the story, my son had the same dream and Isaac Hayes came back. The posts were immediate: “My children woke up and they asked me if Santa Claus was black!” What can you tell people like that? Of course Santa Claus is not black. He’s not Jesus. But Santa isn’t white, either. He’s not real.

  For four years, working on the show was a struggle. I don’t mean there was more bad than good, because there wasn’t. One of my writers put it best: “There were too many people making an easy job hard.” I had the best crew, the
best support people; people I’m very close to to this day. I loved coming to work to see the people, but I despised the process. It drained me and took everything out of me.

  I’d always kind of thought of myself as a freethinker. And as bright as I thought I was, they just didn’t agree. They would humor me, smile, and then do whatever the fuck they were planning on doing. There wasn’t a discussion; it was a placating, patronizing situation. From what we ate to what we wore, we would have these internal skirmishes that made me feel like a child.

  No one made it harder than the president of the studio that produced The Hughleys. George was gay, but specifically that very bitchy type of gay. He wanted me to change the way I pronounce my name. He thought Hewg-lee was too hard for marketing, so I should pronounce it Hew-ley. He wanted to cover the birthmark on my cheek. Whenever George wanted me to not do something, he would act as if it didn’t come from him but from the network. It took me a while to figure out that game. I was hands-on, so I would go to the writers’ meetings and the table reads. If I got a note from “the network,” I would tell the director or the writer why I wanted to do things differently from their note.

  “What note?” they’d ask.

  “Didn’t you just tell David to move the sofa?” I said, or whatever it was that week.

  “No …”

  The problems kept coming whenever group decisions had to be made. In one episode in particular, my character’s son was supposed to have a crush on a girl who was his babysitter. When it came time for casting, I thought one girl was stunningly beautiful. Not only did little boys have a crush on her, but this here big boy did, too.

  Yet according to “the network,” she was too dark. George thought that wasn’t beautiful. I was like, “Why am I arguing with you to decide what’s hot? You’re gay. When I see that girl, I want to fuck her!” They brought a lighter woman in, and it killed me. I knew that that dark, gorgeous beauty had heard the same thing a million times before, and my show was just the latest in a long line of unfair and outrageous rejections.

  When I started to grow my hair out, George didn’t want me to. He wanted me to cut it and kept telling me so. I did the smart thing: I got a doctor’s note saying that I had alopecia, and that my hair was covering up my bald spots. George wanted to look at my scalp. He just wouldn’t let my haircut go. Week after week, he wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let it go. It was constant snide, bitchy comments from him. In September 2001, we were doing a table reading. Out of nowhere but as usual, George asked, “Why do you do your hair like that?”

  I lost it, like for real. I didn’t just lose my temper; I lost my fucking mind. I jumped up and slapped that table. “Goddammit!” I screamed at him. “I’ma fuck you up!” I literally chased him out of the building. If I’d have caught him, I would have beat the shit out of him. Security had to get involved.

  That was a bad day.

  To George’s credit, he ended up apologizing. He said if he had to do it all over again, he would never have handled me that way. I can’t imagine what the look on my face was like when I was chasing after him, but let’s just say that I imagine it wasn’t very family-friendly.

  But there’s no way a show like The Hughleys could be on network TV today. The culture won’t allow it. Before cable, some of the biggest TV stars were black. Emmanuel Lewis, Gary Coleman, and Redd Foxx were huge celebrities for all Americans. At one point, Sherman Helmsley was the highest-paid actor in television. Now TV has become very divided and myopic. We don’t all watch the same type of shows, and we don’t all have the same popular culture. It’s more segregated than it’s ever been before, with very, very micro audiences. Those were probably more turbulent times politically and socially, but people were more accepting from an entertainment standpoint.

  Nowadays, the black community can be our own worst enemy with regard to entertainment. The NAACP will declare something a “stereotypical” show, say that they don’t want to see those types of images—and basically get a whole crew of people fired. After two years on ABC, The Hughleys moved to UPN. UPN was in many ways a black network and part of the growing segregation of television. One show that the network had green-lit at the same time we were on was called The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer. The title character was a slave who was smarter than everybody in the room. Nobody got the point.

  To produce a show that “makes light” of slavery was regarded as such a blunder that the series is held up to ridicule to this day. But if humor is based on the absurd, is there anything more absurd than the idea that one grown man can own another grown man? The very premise is preposterous. Though slavery has been over for more than a century, 1998 was apparently too soon to poke fun at it. Yet while Europe was still coming to terms with the Holocaust, Americans were laughing at the bumbling Nazis in Hogan’s Heroes. Desmond Pfeiffer was so controversial that it was taken off the air after less than a month. The network never let it breathe and never let it grow.

  I had to deal with the same kinds of issues over the four-year run of The Hughleys—as if there wasn’t enough to deal with from the studio. Every season, they would roll the show out and the media would come and ask us questions. They had these up-fronts in New York and in Los Angeles. Many times it was more like I was being interrogated and asked to defend myself. There was one particular black Los Angeles Times reporter who just didn’t like the way that I was portraying things, and we developed a very antagonistic relationship, arguing with each other. It was always “Why is this black?” and “Why is this not black?” with him.

  It was the same thing with NAACP president (and former congressman) Kweisi Mfume. I got into it with him and with a lot of other civil rights people. Their position was that we had to “protect” what images people see on the screen in an entertainment. My position is that the NAACP should concentrate on making thing better through civil rights and not through what entertainment we see. I don’t know of any NAACP board members or civil rights leaders who ever wrote scripts. They have as much business telling me how to write a sitcom as I do telling Kweisi Mfume how to petition the government.

  What do civil rights leaders have to do with art? What do they have to do with perception? Art by definition is supposed to make people uncomfortable. Art, true art, by definition is open to different interpretations. I remember when Gabriel Byrne played the devil in End of Days. If Denzel Washington had played the devil, there would have been mayhem. “Why a black man gotta be the devil?” Well, why can’t a black man be an actor? Or a writer, or an artist, or whatever? Why does Kweisi Mfume or any man get to decide what is “black” for somebody else?

  If a producer hires an actor, that actor should be allowed to succeed or fail based on his own merit. Instead he’s set up to fail by his so-called “brothers.” One thing activists do is they get loud. When you’re working on a show, it’s enough of a pain in the ass to get notes from the network. Now you’ve got to get notes from Kweisi Mfume? It’s no wonder why every single time there is a television show involving race, even a sitcom, there’s a level of controversy associated with it—which means some network president now has to explain himself. After a while, the executives get tired of it and it’s easier just to not have black actors there. When you look at why black people aren’t represented on television, civil rights leaders have a big hand in that. They are participating in our removal from television. We haven’t had a black drama in decades, if ever. It’s too serious and too touchy. Roots was the closest thing. They technically classified that as a miniseries, even though it sure as hell was a drama to us.

  These leaders try to pretend that current crimes perpetrated by black people don’t exist now. If the only black images you see on TV are nice, professional, yuppie black people, that’s a false kind of racism. In real life, human beings see black people at their best and then black people at their worst. We’re Barack Obama and we’re Flavor Flav. Both are real. To claim that Flavor Flav or representations of his type shouldn’t be seen
in media is to render a whole section of the black community invisible. That’s how our opponents wanted it, for decades.

  To suppress harmful imagery in the media is straight propaganda. It was the case when President Bush stifled pictures of the body bags coming out of Iraq—and it’s the case when the NAACP stifles images of inner-city crime. If a person from a foreign land turned on our television, he would conclude that every white person had a black best friend … and every act of crime is committed by a poorly dressed WASP.

  I know more cats who are hustling out there, trying to do whatever they can to get by, than I do people with MBAs. I probably know more dope dealers than I do doctors. Mind you, both of them do well and both serve a purpose. Just because an image of a black dope dealer or a black doctor is on TV doesn’t mean the show’s creators are supporting it or endorsing it. It just kind of is.

  When Jamie Foxx did Booty Call, everybody talked about how stereotypical the movie was. People forget his silly Wanda character from In Living Color. Yet that was part of his journey on the way to doing Ray. If he had stopped with Booty Call, it would have cut his career short. His path almost exactly parallels Tom Hanks’s. Hanks got his start doing drag nonsense on Bosom Buddies. Now he’s a multiple Oscar winner. The stupid stuff paves the way for the great stuff. You can’t eat fancy food all the time; sometimes you just want a burger and fries, and it’s perfectly okay. There is a lack of consistency between how black actors are treated compared to white actors, by the very people who supposedly care for them. This schizophrenic approach even fights against itself. When The Color Purple came out, it was extremely controversial. Nine months later, activists were just as angry that it didn’t win any Oscars.

  When I had my CNN show, one of the skits I did was about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and how they were pimping us. The reaction was extreme and immediate. It’s gotten to the point that you have to be so literal that you can’t even tell a joke that’s nuanced. It’s like how McDonald’s coffee has to have a warning label that lets you know that the hot coffee is hot, and that hot liquid and your bare skin are not friends. We’re coming to a point where every joke has to have a disclaimer on the screen that announces, “By the way, I’m joking!” That’s even more insulting than telling an offensive joke. I was on Facebook during Hurricane Irene, and I was talking about how the authorities were having problems with evacuations. People were refusing to leave, thinking nothing bad was going to happen to them. Well, I posted, that’s because Irene is not a threatening name. My favorite aunt is named Irene. They should have called it Hurricane Mohammed and watched the people flee.