Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  Slotting in after Fox’s two hit comedies, The Simpsons and Married with Children, the episode was seen by nearly twenty-three million viewers, a gargantuan premiere that outstripped the network’s most optimistic projections.

  “We were very fortunate,” says Sandy Grushow, the senior VP of advertising and promotion at Fox. “We were playing a hot hand which got significantly hotter when we launched the show. We had the right audience already in our grip. Young people who’d been disenfranchised by the Big Three had already discovered The Simpsons and Married with Children and made them huge hits. Launching In Living Color helped supercharge the night.”

  Director Paul Miller was astounded at the reaction to the show. “They had it on on a Sunday night and by Monday, everybody was talking about it,” he says. “I’ve never had an experience like that. It was just this overnight sensation.”

  In fact, the months of hemming and hawing Fox had done about the pilot had an unintended positive consequence: By the time the show finally aired, it had serious buzz around it. Copies of the pilot were being sold on street corners in New York long before the premiere. As Kim Wayans recalls, “In those months it took Fox to finally move on In Living Color, a few people had slipped tapes underground in the industry.”

  One of the twenty-three million people who saw that first episode was Mike Tyson. Tyson was going through a tough spell. He’d looked terrifying and invincible, winning his first thirty-seven fights without a blemish on his record, before being knocked out by Buster Douglas in a stunning upset that February. The “Love Connection” sketch was written and produced months before Tyson’s loss to Douglas, but that probably didn’t lessen the feeling for Tyson that he was being kicked while he was already down. Arguably, his ex-wife Robin Givens comes off worse, but Keenen’s portrayal of Tyson as henpecked, high-pitched, and feebleminded—a portrayal he’d revive later in the season during a sketch called “Three Champs and a Baby”—left a mark, and Tyson wasn’t initially prepared to just let it go. He saw Keenen at a club one night and approached him.

  “That was the scariest moment of my life,” says Keenen. “All I feel is this paw land on my shoulder. I turn around and it’s the heavyweight champ of the world. He stepped to me. He goes, ‘What? I kill your mother or something?’ ” Tyson told him he’d seen Keenen’s impression of him. He wasn’t amused. “He was like, ‘Yo, you gotta freeze that.’ ”

  Keenen had practiced martial arts for years. Since he was a kid, he’d been taught to stand up for himself, even if it meant taking a beat-down. He knew he couldn’t let the targets of his satire bully him into pulling punches. On the other hand, this was Mike Fucking Tyson. “In my mind, I was like, I’m going to have to take this. Ain’t nothing I can do right now. He shut me down.” A few months later, Keenen ran into Tyson again, but this time, the ex-champ had mellowed. “He was actually really cool. He was like, ‘Yo, I was just going through some things. You do your thing.’ He gave me the green light to go ahead and get back to it.”

  Kim Coles, who played Givens in the sketch, ran into Tyson herself, while touring as an opening act for Luther Vandross the summer after the first season ended. “He pretended like he was mad,” she says. “Like, ‘I don’t appreciate you making jokes about me on the show!’ But he had a good sense of humor about it. Then he invited me to his hotel room and I promptly got on the tour bus. He was like, ‘I’m having a party back at my room.’ I was like, ‘I gotta be on the tour bus. Sorry. Bye!’ ”

  Fox’s reaction to the first episode’s big ratings was rather curious. After scoring in that time slot on Sunday night at 9:30, the show was immediately moved to Saturday at 9. Saturday was traditionally not a big television viewing night, and without the lead-in of The Simpsons and Married with Children, the ratings for the second episode nosedived to less than half of the debut. Eric Gold was befuddled.

  “What’s the first thing they do once it’s almost a hit? They move it. It almost killed it. We were hot but we plateaued and started to come down. People couldn’t find it.”

  Jamie Kellner, the network president, says, “Originally the conceit was to drive the audience from Married with Children into the premiere. Then our strategy was every network’s strategy: You take your anchor show and move it around to stack a bunch of other shows behind it.” To be fair, even after the move, the ratings were still strong. They ticked back up in the coming weeks, though never reached anywhere near as high as the debut—that is, until the show was moved back to Sunday night halfway through the first season.

  The show’s offices occupied the fifth floor of an office building on a lot that had been called Metromedia Square until Fox took it over in 1986. The building dated back to the forties, and was showing wear. The numbers had faded off the elevator buttons and very few windows in the show’s offices opened. The “In Living Color” sign adorning the entrance to the offices was marked in brightly colored crayons, but the suite itself was rather drab and generic, with the writers’ and producers’ individual offices in a U-shape surrounding some communal space and a kitchen in the middle. The one nod toward modernity was a state-of-the-art gym facility that Keenen negotiated into his contract, and which Fox built for him as part of the office suite. Downstairs were dressing rooms for the cast members and dancers, rehearsal space, and the soundstage where filming took place. On the wall of Keenen’s fifth-floor office, tacked up next to his desk, were four-by-six index cards with the titles of sketches in the works. From the office window, he could see the iconic Hollywood sign, five miles away in the hills to the north.

  Once the series was up and running, it settled into a punishing biweekly routine. The writers showed up Monday morning, and each was expected to pitch five sketch ideas to Keenen and Tamara. If they liked a pitch, the writer was asked to write it up into a full sketch for the week’s “packet.” Those sketches were then read at a table read the following Monday. But if a writer didn’t get any pitches selected, he or she often had to pitch again and again until something scored. Following the table read, the sketches were narrowed down further. After rehearsals on Tuesday and Wednesday, there were notes and rewrites on Thursday. Rewrites were sometimes done by a different writer than had written the original sketch, and there were opportunities for most anyone to toss in jokes. The show was filmed in front of a live audience on Friday. Usually, two to three times as much material was shot as ever aired. The normal cycle was two weeks from when an idea was first pitched until it was filmed, but there were always two shows being worked on at any one time. So every Monday, for example, writers were pitching for the following Monday’s packet, as well as sitting at that day’s table read.

  “There was a lot of pressure,” says Franklyn Ajaye. “Keenen was a demanding boss. People didn’t really look forward to a pitch meeting after a while.” Ajaye had been a standup for years, had appeared on The Tonight Show and Flip Wilson’s show, had a small part in Car Wash, and even worked briefly with Richard Pryor on an ill-fated, coke-addled film project called Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales in the late sixties. His comedy was cerebral—he was sometimes known as “the Jazz Comedian”—and faced with the overwhelming workload, he paired up with another veteran black standup, Barry “Berry” Douglas. “It was easier to come up with ideas with a partner,” says Ajaye. “Barry was a little more bawdy than I was but we seemed to complement each other well.”

  Rawitt had brought in Ajaye and Douglas as something of a cultural counterbalance to the white, Harvard types that typically dominated comedy writing. Finding black comedy writers had been challenging. Very few shows had ever hired them before. It wasn’t easy to know where to look.

  The writing staff was generally two to an office and only gathered together for pitch meetings, table reads, and the like. Mimi Friedman and Jeanette Collins were white improv performers who’d written some commercials. “When we were hired, we were told the demographic was eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old inner-city black males,” says Collins with a wry laugh. “So we
’re the perfect people to write that.” In fact, one of the sketches they pitched in their initial job interview was called “Leave It to Cleaver,” a send-up of the classic, white-bread television series but with radical ex–Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver in the title role. “It didn’t get used,” says Friedman, “but it got us the job.”

  The pitch was indicative of the pair’s work. Friedman and Collins wrote “Della Reese’s Pieces,” which was, in Friedman’s words, “merely a play on words that became a sketch,” and “Mitzvah Train,” an over-the-top commercial for what was billed as “the city’s premier Afro-Judeo video dating service.” Probably their most lasting contribution was “Snackin’ Shack,” a sketch set in a health code–flouting soul food dive. “That was based on a restaurant we’d gone to many times in New York, the Pink Peacock,” says Friedman. “Snackin’ Shack” would become a recurring set-piece on the show.

  Their philosophy as white women writing black sketches was simple. “We wouldn’t write black,” says Friedman. “We’re not going to write Ebonics. We’d just give the architecture of the sketch in our words and let the actors take off from there.”

  When filming in front of a live audience, the cast typically ran through a sketch at least twice. The first time, they mostly stuck to the script, but the second time there was license to improvise. Keenen estimates that close to 90 percent of the sketches that aired had moments of improv in them.

  “I’d tell everybody before the first take to put something in your back pocket,” he says. “Then I’d just let it go and whatever happened, happened. Everybody would be improvising. You can see it on somebody’s face when they got caught off guard but didn’t break character. A lot of great moments came from that.” Damon and Jim, in particular, seemed to thrive in these second takes. In one early sketch, Jim plays an overenthusiastic, underprepared karate instructor teaching a self-defense class for women. Kelly Coffield is one of his students.

  “Jim made everybody work because he was so insane,” says Keenen. “If you didn’t keep up, he was gonna blow you off the screen. At rehearsals, I kept encouraging Kelly to go for it. In that scene, when Jim starts to whoop on her, she goes for it and gets this huge laugh.”

  Coffield, who stabs Carrey’s karate instructor multiple times in the sketch and then tosses herself airborne when she’s punched in the face, says that sketch was an “epiphany”: “I realized you have a role, you play that role, but if you’ve got a better joke, definitely do it in take two.”

  The nature of the show meant Carrey and Coffield were frequently cast as uptight white people, or merely as foils to the other actors. But the cast’s token Caucasians didn’t feel like outcasts. In fact, both arguably integrated into the show more easily than some of the African-American cast members.

  “Obviously, we were going to be poked fun at,” says Coffield. “But I didn’t feel like we were separated out for any kind of awful treatment. I was never made to feel I was being ganged up on or picked on. People used to say, ‘Now you know what Garrett Morris felt like on Saturday Night Live.’ But that’s not at all what Jim and I were on the show.”

  Carrey seemed temperamentally incapable of fading into the background of a sketch. Even in parts where his main job was just to set up someone else’s jokes, he’d find a way to wring a laugh from it. The “Love Connection” sketch is a good example. He’s not the focus and could’ve played Chuck Woolery straight. Instead, his voice, his physicality, every part of his impression is wildly over-the-top.

  “I used to cite him to all the other cast members,” Keenen said. “He’s an example of ‘There are no small parts.’ That’s just how Jim always approached his work. He doesn’t walk through anything.”

  Although some may have quietly resented Carrey’s unabashed hamming, ultimately the show was better for it.

  “You don’t want to upstage what the point of the sketch is, but if you can get a laugh without doing that then absolutely you should,” says Carrey. “I was always working hard to try to make everything as interesting as possible. Some of my favorite things on the show are incidental characters.”

  It would take Carrey longer than most remember to establish himself as one of the show’s main draws. Through much of the first season he’s making the most of secondary roles. Toward the tail end, though, he conjured Vera De Milo, a deep-voiced, muscle-bound, comically mannish woman.

  “I was working out at Gold’s Gym and went to the counter to get a smoothie and there was a woman bodybuilder who came up beside me and said, ‘I’ll have a protein smoothie,’ ” Carrey recalls. “She had that voice and I just went Click! I don’t know what that is but there’s something there. That was the birth of Vera De Milo.” The character was unabashedly silly, but there was also something very of-the moment about her. “It was what was happening in the gyms—steroids. It was female empowerment at the same time as it was making fun of the fact that we’re all using drugs to get to that place.”

  When it came time to film the first Vera sketch, Carrey walked onstage clad in a skimpy leopard-print bikini, his hair in pigtails. He could tell by the audience’s reaction that the character was going to work before he even opened his mouth to speak. “It was enormous,” he says. “When you scored with a character on that show and felt like the character is going to be able to come back because it got such a huge response, it’s like heaven. It’s a feeling of total acceptance. Then you build on that. Once Vera happened, everything else started to fall into place.”

  16

  “Until It’s Funny, I Can’t Care”

  Two weeks after the show premiered, Tamara Rawitt went to the Beverly Center, a large upscale mall in Los Angeles, to do some shopping. She was wearing an In Living Color T-shirt that the production staff printed up for the cast and crew while they were making the pilot. When shoppers saw her T-shirt, they went bat-shit crazy for it.

  “I got bum-rushed,” she says. “People were handing me twenty-dollar bills to buy the shirt from me. This is before the Internet. Having grown up in marketing, I knew the show was going to be a huge hit based on just that reaction at the Beverly Center.”

  Despite the time slot move and the ratings dip, Fox was happy with their newest show and, in early May, added five episodes to the original eight-episode order. There was some backlash from the NAACP over “The Homeboy Shopping Network” and others cried foul at the “Men on . . .” characters, Antoine Merriweather and Blaine Edwards, who appeared in three of the first seven episodes, with the Detroit Free Press critic calling them “a gay Amos ’n Andy.” But even criticism of the show fed the sense that people were talking about ILC. Michael Hill, writing in the Baltimore Sun, called it, “the hottest, hippest comedy show on television. It’s got the same sort of buzz that accompanied early Saturday Night Live, the same sort of feeling that these are people you haven’t been allowed to see on TV before.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s television critic, Eric Mink, wrote, “In Living Color is outrageous, sexy, occasionally raunchy and often hilarious, sometimes uncomfortably so. It also can be self-indulgent, simplistic, tiresome and offensive—although the latter quality is inevitably in the eye of the beholder. All that said, in less than four weeks, Fox Broadcasting’s ‘In Living Color’ has become must-watch-or-tape television on Saturday nights, the new standard-bearer for slashing, squirming-in-your-seat satire.”

  The racially charged tone of the pilot notwithstanding, Keenen was wary about making ILC a vehicle for him and the writers to simply make political points. As Keenen told comedian David Steinberg in 2013, “I knew I couldn’t be too political because my politics would come across as angry.” Early in the show’s first season, it became clear that while the show would have its share of biting political satire, often it would just go for big laughs or goofy celebrity impressions. Keenen portrayed his old friend Arsenio as an obsequious dimwit with a big butt, and Marion Barry merely played straight man to Arsenio’s buffoon. Driving Miss Daisy wasn’t lampooned for its retrogr
ade depiction of black men, but rather used as an opportunity to make an easy sex joke in “Riding Miss Daisy.” Funny perhaps, but not exactly high-minded social criticism.

  Franklyn Ajaye and Barry Douglas struggled to find their place in this mix. They rarely got material on the show, and even when they did, it was a wrestling match. Case in point was “Endangered Species.” Kelly Coffield plays an anthropologist who is a guest on The Tonight Show and brings with her an exotic, endangered species: a young, streetwise black man—“or b-boy,” as Coffield’s character puts it—played by Tommy Davidson. When Jim Carrey, hosting the show as Alan Thicke, asks Coffield, “Is he dangerous?” Coffield answers, “Well, Alan, like any of God’s creations, without love, a proper diet, a decent education, and equal opportunities, he could be extremely dangerous.” The politics here are overt, and for Ajaye and Douglas, who’d pitched the sketch, that was the point. But Keenen was skeptical.

  “It was a brilliant premise and definitely had something to say,” said Keenen. But he objected to a line about the reason why this species was, in fact, endangered: They were being killed for their sneakers—a reference to a rash of such crimes in the previous few years. The line was cut from the sketch because, according to Ajaye, “he felt it was a downer.”

  For his part, Keenen explained, “The fight between me and Franklyn was that it had to be funny first. I think we accomplished both, but it was definitely a back-and-forth because he was like, ‘Why do we have to be funny?’ I knew anything we had to say had to have humor or people are just going to tune out. That’s one of my favorite sketches but that’s one of the biggest battles.”

  Ajaye and Douglas pitched other stuff in the vein of “Endangered Species,” including “Save the Children,” an infomercial focused on two kids living in a gang-infested neighborhood, but nothing came of it. “I was very disappointed,” says Ajaye. “But that wasn’t the direction Keenen wanted to go.”