Homey Don't Play That! Read online

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  Contents

  Preface

  Epigraph

  1

  “If You Ain’t Helping Your Brother, Then I’m Beating Your Ass”

  2

  “Keenen Was Always the Pioneer”

  3

  “This Is the Place”

  4

  “Richard Was a God, So We Were Just Lucky to Be in His Orbit”

  5

  “There’s a New Sheriff in Town”

  6

  “This Is What They Think of Us”

  7

  “I Was Young, Black, and Angry”

  8

  “Anybody Who Was Anybody Went There”

  9

  “We’re the Black Pack, Homey”

  10

  “You Can’t Kill This Movie”

  11

  “The Bad Boys of Television”

  12

  “The Running Joke Was If Your Last Name’s Not Wayans, You Didn’t Have a Shot”

  13

  “Is This Okay to Say?”

  14

  “If He Ain’t Got No Jokes, I Don’t Need Him”

  15

  “It Was Just This Overnight Sensation”

  16

  “Until It’s Funny, I Can’t Care”

  17

  “What They Thought Was Hip-Hop, Wasn’t Hip-Hop”

  18

  “That’s the Beauty of It: It’s Dangerous and We Shouldn’t Be Doing It”

  19

  “We Got a Problem. I Want the Other Girl.”

  20

  “Some White Kid from Harvard Joking about Malcolm X-Lax—I Don’t Think That Shit Is Funny”

  21

  “If You Don’t Bring Your A Game, Other People Are Happy to Do It”

  22

  “All I Remember Is the Layer of Desperation That Hung in the Air”

  23

  “Jamie Fucking Scared Me”

  24

  “I’m Better Than Any of These Girls and You Know It!”

  25

  “We Were Horrible to the Censors”

  26

  “I Started Laughing So Hard That I Forgot to Do My Job”

  27

  “This Show Isn’t Just a Money Spigot”

  28

  “It Just Seemed Like Nothing Was Ever Going to Be Funny Again”

  29

  “It Was a Really Cold, Destructive Place to Work”

  30

  “They Were Trying to Commandeer the Show”

  31

  “It Was a Bunch of Scared People Left Trying to Save a Sinking Ship”

  32

  “We Didn’t Land on Chris Rock. Chris Rock Landed on Us.”

  33

  “We Were Getting a Sense It Just Wasn’t Working”

  34

  “It Was Time to Fold Up the Tent”

  35

  “Does Anybody Say NBC Has All This White Programming?”

  36

  “No Matter How Funny a Black Comic Is, It Doesn’t Mean Shit Unless He Makes the Right White Man Laugh”

  37

  “How Does In Living Color Fare in a World of Key and Peele?”

  38

  “It’s That Moment When It All Ignited”

  Acknowledgments

  Author Interviews

  About the Author

  Bibliography and Other Sources

  Index

  “When Americans can no longer laugh at each other, they have to fight one another.”

  —RALPH ELLISON

  “Heroes ain’t born, they’re cornered.”

  —REDD FOXX

  Preface

  Keenen Ivory Wayans stood up, kissed his mom on the cheek, high-fived his younger brother Shawn, and hugged his dad. Smiling broadly, dressed in a sharp, black tuxedo, he paused for a split second, as if to take in the moment, just for himself.

  It would’ve been hard to script a triumph any more complete than the one he was in the middle of. He’d just heard his old friend Jerry Seinfeld say it, “And the winner of this year’s Emmy is . . . In Living Color.” The show had been on the air barely five months. And it was on Fox, which was barely considered a television network, programming only four nights a week. Fox had hemmed and hawed for the better part of a year deciding whether to air the show. They worried it was too black, that white people wouldn’t get it, that black people would be offended, that gay people would protest, that Keenen’s siblings weren’t as funny as he thought they were, or simply that nobody would watch. Keenen had resisted their attempts to bend the show to their ideas, to water it down. He’d come too far. If he was going down, he was going down swinging on his own terms.

  Keenen took one step toward the stage inside the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and wrapped the show’s line producer, Michael Petok, in a bear hug. Petok’s fiancée wiped lipstick from Keenen’s face and then Keenen embraced the show’s other producer, Tamara Rawitt, a short, Jewish former marketing exec who’d become his somewhat unlikely lieutenant. As the three of them strode down the aisle toward the dais, they were trailed by Kevin Bright, a supervising producer on the show’s pilot. All four walked onstage, Keenen nodded at Seinfeld, whom he’d known since the two were young standups at the Improv in New York, took the gold statue from the other presenter, Patrick Stewart, and looked out across the three thousand or so people staring back at him.

  At thirty-two, Keenen was hardly a fresh, young face anymore. He’d spent years slugging it out as a standup. He’d been turned down by Saturday Night Live. He’d played forgettable roles on forgotten television shows. For years, he’d watched the friends he’d come up with—Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Robert Townsend—achieve their dreams. He’d done okay too, but sometimes couldn’t escape the feeling he was being left behind. Eddie was the biggest comedy star in the world. Robert and Keenen had worked together on a pretty great movie, Hollywood Shuffle, but afterward, Robert got all the shine. Arsenio debuted his hit late-night talk show more than a year before In Living Color launched. For a long time, even Keenen’s younger brother Damon’s star seemed to be eclipsing his. But this was, finally and undeniably, Keenen’s moment. His show was a hit. He just won an Emmy. And to make it a little sweeter, the nominees he beat out included both Saturday Night Live and his old friend and rival Arsenio.

  “All right,” he said, looking down at the floor, clearing his throat and exhaling in a short, shallow breath. “I’d like to thank the people who helped make the vision become a reality.” He rolled through the expected list of thank-yous—his producers, his writers, Fox bigwigs like Barry Diller and Peter Chernin, his manager Eric Gold.

  “I could tell he was beginning to forget people,” says Rawitt, recalling the moment. “You could see my mouth moving behind him, like ‘Thank this one,’ ‘Thank that one.’ I remember before the ceremony Eric Gold frantically rushing over to me and going, ‘Please make him thank me.’ ”

  Keenen had grown up one of ten kids in the projects in Manhattan, and as he turned his speech toward his family, emotion overwhelmed him. “Above all, I’d like to thank my family. Those are the ones I’ve been doing this for all my life.” He covered his mouth, stepped back a half step from the microphone, and quietly told himsel
f, “Okay, let me chill.”

  Keenen had never won anything in his life. In Living Color had been nominated in two other categories that year, Outstanding Choreography and Outstanding Writing, and lost both. He figured this would be the same but was prepared in case it wasn’t. He’d planned a great speech to salute his mom, who’d been there to support him through all the things he’d never won, through his disappointments and failures.

  Composing himself, Keenen tried to continue. “My mother and father are here tonight . . .” Again, he began to choke up, and, out in the crowd, his brother Shawn wiped tears from his own eyes. “I’m gonna get through this,” Keenen pledged before abandoning his resolve. “This is for you, Ma, forget it,” he said, his voice shooting up a few octaves and cracking. With that, he waved the Emmy, and walked offstage, his arm draped around Rawitt’s shoulders.

  “It was the worst acceptance speech ever,” Keenen says, looking back on it twenty-five years later.

  Yet the moment was an unqualified, wide-screen triumph for a show that punctuated the beginning of a new era. There had been black sketch shows before In Living Color, including the short-lived but influential Richard Pryor Show more than a decade earlier. That this was the first one that found an audience said as much about that audience as it did about the show. The culture was changing. For more than fifty years, black life on screens big and small had looked even more demeaning than it did in the real world. Stereotypes were indulged. The Civil Rights Movement came and went without too many substantive changes in front of or behind the camera. There had been important breakthroughs—Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor—but the march of progress was exceedingly, agonizingly slow.

  Until suddenly it wasn’t. Not only were there Eddie and Arsenio and Robert and Keenen, but there were Spike Lee and Oprah Winfrey and Reggie and Warrington Hudlin. Soon there would be Chris Rock and John Singleton and Martin Lawrence and the Hughes Brothers and Chris Tucker and Dave Chappelle. The week before that Emmy broadcast, a new show featuring a former rapper named Will Smith had debuted. Many of the era’s other rappers would soon become multi-hyphenate stars themselves: Ice Cube, LL Cool J, Ice-T, Queen Latifah, Tupac Shakur. In Living Color—a black show created by a black man that seemed to effortlessly cross over to a mainstream audience ready and waiting for it—was in many ways at the center of it all. As Keenen put it, “We became this bridge in America between white suburban kids and urban kids.”

  Most great success stories are the sum of small failures overcome. When you zoom tightly in on that Emmy coup, cracks appear in the foundation that offer hints as to why In Living Color lasted only five seasons and why Keenen didn’t even finish out the fourth: One of the original cast members had been fired a few weeks before the Emmys, nearly the entire writing staff had already turned over, and many of the Fox executives Keenen thanked in his acceptance speech had either left the company or were on their way out soon. Even one of the producers on the podium that night accepting the Emmy alongside Keenen hadn’t seen him since he was dismissed after the pilot. This was the unforgiving cauldron in which In Living Color was forged. But for at least those few moments on the auditorium stage that night, things were about as perfect as they could be.

  “There was the feeling of newness and excitement and Here we are! We’ve arrived!” says David Alan Grier, one of four cast members that survived all five seasons on the show. “Two weeks later it was, ‘Let’s move on.’ ”

  In Living Color was nominated for fifteen more Emmys over its next four seasons. It would never win another one again.

  1

  “If You Ain’t Helping Your Brother, Then I’m Beating Your Ass”

  It was five blocks from PS 11 to the Wayans family’s fifth-floor apartment in the Robert Fulton Houses in Chelsea, on the West Side of Manhattan, and Keenen had run the whole way home. He was a skinny, quiet kid, still pretty new to the neighborhood. He wasn’t looking for trouble. Nonetheless, trouble found him and had chased him home. A menacing elementary school classmate had insisted that he and Keenen would square off at 3:00 p.m. to settle their grievances—real or imagined—so Keenen hightailed it for the safety of home around half past two, his tormentor presumably in pursuit.

  Now, safely barricaded in his family’s apartment, sweating from his dash home, he took to his afternoon ritual of parking himself in front of the television and watching cartoons. But he’d gotten home so quickly that he arrived before they started. Instead, he turned on the television to find something entirely unexpected: Richard Pryor on a daytime talk show.

  This was the midsixties, when Pryor was still “Richie Pryor,” a gangly kid in a sharp suit, spouting funny, if not exactly weighty, Bill Cosby–isms. He hadn’t yet completed the existential transformation into the radical, truth-telling black man who would change comedy forever.

  In a sense, that was all the better for Keenen, who looked at the television and saw a vision of himself staring back at him: a skinny black kid unloading tales of childhood poverty, an unusual family, and in fact, his own victimization at the hands of a school bully.

  “I was laughing, so amazed that this guy could take this horrible moment and make it funny,” Keenen would say years later. “I was like, ‘Who is this man? I want to be like this man.’ ”

  As humans, we have a way of imposing a narrative structure on our pasts that rarely exists in real life. What was the moment when your life changed? What set you down this road? When did you first stumble on this idea? Clean, easy-to-follow storylines with distinct beginnings, middles, and ends are appealing, but life doesn’t usually conform to our storytelling desires. Ideas don’t turn on like lightbulbs. Rather, they flare up like a fire on wet wood: lots of sparks, plenty of smoke, much frustration and failure before finally catching and holding—and even then, always in danger of being snuffed out by the whims of fate.

  Keenen Ivory Wayans has told this tale about being chased home by a school bully and stumbling on Richard Pryor many times as a way of explaining his path into comedy. There’s no reason to doubt that the tale itself is true—though some details have likely been obscured by the intervening fifty years. As a great storyteller, and an unabashed lover of structure, Keenen himself is undoubtedly drawn to this anecdote as a premise, a sensible start to his own tale and to the story of the show he’d create, inspired by that same gangly comedian he saw on television after school that day. But reality, as it turns out, is rarely so sensible.

  The Wayans family moved to the Fulton Houses in 1964. The housing project was brand new then. In fact, the 944-unit, 11-building complex that sprawls from 16th Street to 19th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues wouldn’t be totally complete until the following year. When the Wayanses moved in, monthly rents ranged from $46 for a small three-room apartment in one of the complex’s three high-rise towers, to $94 for the largest seven-and-half-room units in one of the six-story low-rises.

  Keenen’s family had one of the bigger units in a low-rise that opened onto 16th Street. It had four bedrooms, which was already a little tight: His parents shared one room; Keenen, his older brother, Dwayne, and his younger brother Damon split another room; his sisters Kim and Diedra shared another; and the baby at the time, Elvira (named after her mom), had a room to herself, though not for long. Younger sisters Nadia and Devonne entered the picture in 1965 and 1966, and younger brothers Shawn and Marlon further expanded the brood in 1971 and 1972, respectively.

  The Chelsea that the Wayanses moved to in 1964 was not the Chelsea of high-end boutiques, world-renowned art galleries, multimillion-dollar apartments, and artisanal food emporiums it is today. It was a loud, busy, rough, working-class neighborhood. Much of the area around the Fulton Houses was still tenements. A freight train ran along Tenth Avenue, on the backside of the projects. Across 16th Street from the Wayans family’s dark brick apartment building was the Nabisco factory, where Oreos were made. Facing that, on the opposite side of Ninth Avenue, was a massive Art Deco building that ho
used the Port Authority headquarters. In 1966, another striking building, with small porthole windows and the general countenance of a large ship, was built across 16th Street as a union hall and dormitory for visiting seamen. Bodegas, pizzerias, record stores, Laundromats, and other small family-owned shops lined Ninth Avenue, including a barbershop owned by a resident of the Fulton Houses and an arcade, both of which were frequent gathering spots. A vaguely gothic-looking building on 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh, housed a drug rehab facility and was converted into the Bayview Correctional Facility, a women’s prison, in 1974.

  The construction of the Fulton Houses and the neighboring Chelsea-Elliott Houses, roughly ten blocks farther north, brought a wave of new families, like the Wayanses, to the area. PS 11, already crowded, braced for a doubling of its enrollment. Many who moved into the Fulton Houses were Irish families, relocating from the collapsing tenements nearby, and Puerto Ricans, who’d begun emigrating to both Chelsea and the Lower East Side in the first part of the century. In addition, there were a smaller number of African-Americans, including a young Gil Scott-Heron, who’d grow up to become a pioneering black poet, spoken-word performer, and one of hip-hop’s godfathers. Heron was a teenager in 1964, when he and his mother moved into an apartment on 17th Street, just a block from the Wayans family. Another proto-hip-hop influence, the fiery, militant civil rights activist then known as H. Rap Brown, who had been the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the minister of justice for the Black Panthers—he’s currently serving a life sentence for shooting an Atlanta police officer—lived on 18th Street for a stretch in the late sixties. Whoopi Goldberg, who was a few years older than Keenen, lived in the nearby Chelsea-Elliott Houses, as did Antonio Fargas, who’d star in a string of blaxploitation films in the seventies—including Foxy Brown and Across 110th Street—and as “Huggy Bear” on Starsky & Hutch, as well as in Keenen’s own 1988 blaxploitation spoof, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.