Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  20

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

  Friday could be a very long day at In Living Color. Friday nights were show nights. Rehearsals would typically start around ten in the morning, and by two in the afternoon, audiences were often already lining up outside. Everyone would break for dinner at five, and if everything went according to plan, the cameras were rolling by eight. Everything rarely went according to plan. Unlike Saturday Night Live, which Lorne Michaels famously has said “doesn’t go on because it’s ready,” but “because it’s 11:30,” ILC, since it wasn’t broadcast live, had the flexibility to start the show whenever they felt like it. So they did.

  “There was just a kind of ‘screw-’em-they-can-wait’ attitude that permeated the show,” says Buddy Sheffield. Mark Curry, a comic who’d later star on the sitcom Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, was frequently charged with keeping the audience entertained while they waited. “Oh my god, I felt for the guy. He did every joke he knew four or five times.” Occasionally, by showtime, the audience was worn out. Usually they rallied.

  “When you’d go to tapings,” says Bowman, “the audience were through the roof. People were dying. I’ve never seen an audience as hot.”

  Paul Miller, who, like Bowman, had worked on SNL, similarly marveled at the energy during those Friday-night shows. “The experience of shooting that show in front of an audience was something I’d never experienced before or since,” he says. “They could’ve sold tickets and made a fortune.” The tapings occasionally stretched into the wee hours of the following morning. “I remember going back to my car and the sun was coming up. It’d be five in the morning and the audience was still there. They were just this incredibly devoted fan base. They’d stay no matter how long we were there.”

  Although the show’s ratings were solid, they weren’t necessarily indicative of just how hot ILC was. It wasn’t just how many were watching, it was who was watching. The audience was young, cosmopolitan, and energetic. The Cosby Show might’ve had many millions more viewers, but people weren’t clamoring to hang out on the set when they were filming the latest installment of the Huxtables’ mild-mannered adventures. The ILC set became a Friday-night destination.

  “I remember going to the green room and everybody was there,” says David Alan Grier. “Every famous person, all the coolest people wanted to hang out in that green room and in the hallways the first and second year.” There was sometimes little rhyme or reason as to who might be there any given week. Some were famous—Bruce Willis, Whoopi Goldberg, Ricki Lake, Q-Tip, Rodney King—though many others were merely chasing fame.

  “It was a party every week on that set,” says Joe Davola, the VP who helped oversee the show for Fox. “Every agent in Hollywood, every hanger-on was there. There were cats from CAA, a ton of different groups of people.” The scene got so ridiculous that it became fodder for a recurring sketch, “The BS Brothers,” in which Grier and Tommy Davidson play two slimy showbiz leeches, faking it until they make it. “They took that exactly from what was going on while the show was being filmed every Friday night,” says Davola.

  During that second season, the cast members felt what it was like to be on a hit show. Dinner reservations were easier to come by. A short trip to the car wash could turn into an hour-long autograph-signing session.

  “I remember going to visit Chris Rock at SNL,” says Grier. “They treated me like a star. They were all over me. That was when I felt like, ‘This show is really big.’ ”

  There were career benefits too. Tommy Davidson was cast as the lead in Strictly Business, a romantic comedy that co-starred Halle Berry and reunited him on-screen with Kim Coles. Damon landed a starring role in The Last Boy Scout, a buddy flick in the 48 Hrs. mold. “Having run Eddie Murphy’s life and creative career,” says Rawitt, “when Damon booked The Last Boy Scout, I thought, Okay, Damon’s going to be the next Eddie Murphy.”

  Grier scored a major supporting role opposite Murphy in the romantic comedy Boomerang, which was directed and produced by the House Party team, Reginald and Warrington Hudlin. Cast members also discovered that their newfound fame made them in-demand standups. Even those, like Grier, who weren’t really standups. He was a classically trained actor, but once the show was a hit, standup offers started pouring in. “I was like, ‘I don’t perform in bars, gentlemen,’ ” he said, with mock haughtiness. “Damon goes, ‘I made thirty-eight thousand dollars one weekend.’ I’m like, ‘Really? Dingleberries! Virginia Beach!’ ”

  Michael Petok, one of the show’s producers, says the rising profile had drawbacks. “When there’s success, there’s egos,” he says. “Everyone’s a diva.”

  Miller, with his background at SNL, as well as directing episodes of Not Necessarily the News and Fridays, was considered one of the show’s steady hands. As Season 2 wore on, he saw familiar patterns emerge. “Success is a good thing, but it’s also a trap,” he says. “In the beginning when you’re really hungry and trying to prove your point, there’s a lot more discipline. As the show is getting to be more popular, there’s a tendency to become less disciplined. People are late, people don’t want to rehearse. Some of the cast are trying to take off days from rehearsal so they can do a standup gig. I had to deal with So-and-so isn’t going to be here today because they have an audition this morning for a movie. Well, you have to rehearse. The set has to be built, cameras have to know what they’re doing, lighting has to know what they’re doing. So even though the show’s a hit, you have nice careers that you didn’t have two years ago, we still have a job to do. I sometimes found my role was being the taskmaster.”

  That could be trying. It was always Keenen’s show and Keenen’s vision, but Keenen wasn’t the show’s traffic cop. That responsibility fell generally on Miller, along with Rawitt, Petok, and another producer named Kevin Berg. Toward the end of Season 2, Miller felt that Keenen’s focus was undergoing a subtle shift.

  “First year, he was really hands-on,” says Miller. “Second year, a little less so. I remember a couple instances where he wouldn’t come in until the afternoon.” The lines of communication between Keenen as the showrunner and Miller as the director were beginning to break down. Miller would sometimes be rehearsing sketches Keenen had already cut from the show, or preparing to shoot ones that needed to be heavily rewritten. He recalls one show day when the crew was getting ready to film but little or nothing was ready to be filmed. “Keenen said, ‘Why don’t you give the crew a break?’ We went away for four hours while they rewrote everything. That was one of those nights we were there until four in the morning.”

  These weren’t unusual challenges for a successful show. Egos grow, jealousies fester, friction develops—that’s show business. For the most part, even as the spotlight shined brighter on some cast members than on others, the group’s core camaraderie remained intact.

  Coffield recalls that at some point a well-known standup comic made an appearance in a sketch that simply died in front of the live studio audience. The sketch, which never aired, made some reference to a chicken, and from that point on, “chicken” became the show’s shorthand for jokes and sketches that failed, or just any general calamity. “Anytime something was remotely not funny, somebody would say, ‘The chicken,’ or plop down a chicken sandwich,” says Coffield.

  This inside joke eventually got a public airing. Grier had pitched an opening number for the show that involved him walking onstage in all black and singing a mock-serious “Tribute to Broadway.” Keenen thought it was a terrible idea and told him so, but Grier insisted it would be funny, so Keenen relented. Sort of. He told him he could do it, and even when Grier had second thoughts, he reassured him.

  “At the last minute, I tried to back out of it,” says Grier. “He called me into his office and goes, ‘This is going to be really special.’ ”

  When Grier took the stage, the spotlight pulled close in on him and he began singing, a cappella. A few li
nes into it, a stage door opened behind him, and out walked a live chicken. Then another. And another. And another. The audience started laughing.

  “He didn’t see them,” says Coffield of the chickens. “The audience was like, What the hell? They don’t know this is a private joke.” Eventually Shawn and Keenen collapsed onto the stage laughing at Grier, who finally noticed the live poultry around him.

  “It was a setup,” says Grier. “At the end, I walk offstage, and Carrie Ann Inaba goes, ‘David, I really liked it,’ which is like your fat aunt telling you you’re handsome. It stunk.” Amazingly, the sketch aired. “I don’t know that America got the joke, but we got it.”

  Keenen seemed to revel in taking shots at his friends and rivals on the show. Over the course of his time in charge, the show jabbed, among others, Robert Townsend, Marsha Warfield, Byron Allen, Chris Rock, Oprah Winfrey, Sinbad, and the Hudlins. But the two contemporaries he mocked the most (and the most gleefully) were Spike Lee and Arsenio Hall.

  Keenen and Lee knew each other and worked with many of the same actors, choreographers, casting directors, and crew members, but weren’t necessarily friends. They were both picking apart black culture and poking at the question of what it means to be black in America, but doing so from different perspectives and probably for different reasons. For Lee, the drama, the story, and the sociopolitical message were the point. Laughs were welcome but incidental. For Keenen, the inverse was true. But it’s easy to imagine each of them looking at the other’s career and seeing a path not taken for themselves. It may not have risen to the level of actual envy—though Lee no doubt would’ve liked to have had Keenen’s commercial success, and Keenen would’ve appreciated Lee’s critical plaudits—but these were two New Yorkers planting and plowing in the same fields, just harvesting different crops.

  “Spike’s Joint,” which surfaced three episodes into the second season, was conceived and written by Steve Tompkins, but endorsed by Keenen. Tommy Davidson does a note-perfect impression of Lee, who in the sketch is running a tchotchke shop in Brooklyn, selling cheesy merchandise he’s lent his imprimatur to: the Mo’ Better Butter Dispenser; Malcolm X-Lax; his Nike-imitation sneakers, Spikes; and the School Daze DVDs he can’t even give away for free. The implication is that Lee is merely a huckster, packaging and branding revolution, turning it into a cheap commodity to sell to (mostly white) people. It pokes holes in Lee’s blacker-than-thou persona and dares suggest he’s a sellout. Lee had recently criticized Eddie Murphy for not using his clout to get more black performers and executives hired, so turnabout was, in this case, apparently fair play. As Tompkins puts it, “I definitely tried to do something a little bit edgier when we took on Spike.”

  Spike didn’t appreciate it one bit. When he ran into Keenen after the sketch aired, he confronted him. “He came up to me at a party and was chastising me for making fun of him,” says Keenen. “I just let him know everybody gets it. ‘You’re not special. When you do your thing, nobody dictates to you. When I do my thing, same here. I love you but you gonna get it.’ ”

  In an interview with Playboy several months later, Lee explained the root of his beef was that Keenen’s writing staff was mostly white. “They had thirteen writers and only three or four were black,” said Lee. “The rest were all these Jewish kids that went to Harvard. I just asked Keenen, ‘What’s up?’ He explained to me all he’s done for black people as far as the show is concerned. I’m not going to dispute that. But if you have some white kid from Harvard joking about Malcolm X-Lax—I don’t think that shit is funny. I don’t think they’d allow a black person to make a joke about [then Israeli prime minister] Golda Meir.”

  Tompkins took the dustup in stride. “He didn’t think it was fair for some white Jew from Harvard to write the sketch,” he says. “Well, I’m not Jewish.” He laughs. “Obviously, I patently reject that notion. Anyone can write about anything, black or white. You’re telling me Shakespeare can’t write Othello?” He laughs again. “I’m not comparing myself to Shakespeare. It was Spike being Spike.”

  Davidson recalls getting a chilly reception from Lee when he ran into him clothes shopping back in the nineties. “We were in a store in Brooklyn and he happened to be walking out,” says Davidson. “I was so excited to meet him and said, ‘Hey, I’m Tommy Davidson.’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, I know.’ ” Lee then reiterated the criticism he’d aired in Playboy. “He’s like, ‘Those white writers wouldn’t let us talk about their leaders that way,’ and walked away.” The two eventually patched up their differences. In fact, Davidson—and Damon Wayans—ended up starring in Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled, which, incidentally, explored many of these same issues around race and identity.

  But at the time the tension between Lee and the show was real. Tompkins felt Keenen took the entire fracas to heart, and afterward was far less willing to “take potshots against other people like him who had made it.” Keenen denies he ever went easy on anyone, and to be fair, Lee is targeted, albeit somewhat more indirectly, in another sketch in Season 3. But regardless of the accuracy of Tompkins’s assessment, even he admits there was one major exception to this emerging rule: “Arsenio was the only guy Keenen seemed to relish going after.”

  Keenen and Arsenio had a complicated relationship. As Keenen himself says, “When both of us first came to L.A., we were best friends.” But time and competition twisted that friendship some. Although both have steadfastly denied they were jockeying for pole position behind Eddie Murphy, to be his heir apparent, many who knew them back then say this was almost certainly the case, even if only subconsciously.

  The two just seemed to be on a collision course. The fact that The Arsenio Hall Show tapped into the same cultural vein as In Living Color made Keenen and Arsenio natural rivals. With Kim Coles’s dismissal, there was the suggestion Arsenio may have been trying to poach her from ILC. And Keenen’s efforts to branch out with a potential Fly Girls television show was putting him into direct competition with Arsenio, who was in the process of producing a similar show with singer/actress Nia Peeples, called The Party Machine. All this added up to what one person close to the situation at the time referred to as a “virulent, competitive, tortured relationship” between Keenen and Arsenio. In an interview in late 1990, Keenen said there was no specific incident that caused the rift, but said, “Some friendships, you kind of outgrow.” In another interview from around that time, Keenen called Arsenio “a parody of himself.” He also felt Arsenio had taken jabs at him on his talk show.

  Keenen’s impression of Arsenio across four separate ILC sketches was withering and personal. He portrays Arsenio as a long-fingered, big-butted, empty-headed suck-up whose only interests are celebrity and his relationship with his “best friend” Eddie Murphy. A Season 2 sketch casts Keenen’s Arsenio as a prosecuting attorney who even when questioning an accused felon on the witness stand still misses the point: “Now, your picture is up all over the post office. You’re on the FBI’s Top 10 list two years in a row. What the court would like to know is . . . has celebrity life changed you?”

  All in all, it was an impression built on an almost intimate familiarity with its subject. Keenen understood Arsenio’s soft spots and attacked them. He knew Arsenio was sensitive about his ample posterior. “That’s something he hates,” Keenen said around the time. “He tries to hide it with those long jackets.” Unlike with other celebrities, who were usually parodied once and then left alone on the show, ILC was relentless with Arsenio. As Keenen put it back then, “Each time I do him, I try to do a different hit on him.”

  Arsenio was, according to multiple reports, not amused. In the New York Times in August 1990, Arsenio called Keenen’s impression a “vendetta” against him. Two months later, New York magazine reported that he’d banned Keenen from his talk show. By December of that same year though, tensions had apparently cooled and Arsenio was claiming publicly that he wasn’t offended at all.

  Now, many years removed, it all seems largely like water under the brid
ge. Keenen says that through it all, he and Arsenio “remained friends. We definitely had our ups and downs. There would be potshots taken on his show, and it was like, ‘Okay, you wanna play?’ It’s more of a friendly rivalry than animosity. It was just about who’s gonna get the funniest laugh at the other person’s expense.” It’s apparently a rivalry Keenen has not completely left behind. “I think I won.”

  In the final episode of the season, two of the show’s most popular franchises ended on cliffhangers. Homey the Clown takes one million dollars from “The Man” to become the spokesperson for “Homey Wheats,” a sugarcoated kids’ cereal. He allows himself to be played for a fool in order to rake in the dough, and dine with his new Brooks Brothers–clad white partners at the restaurant that was previously a symbol of all he stood against, Chez Whitey. The sketch ends with Tommy Davidson, as one of Homey’s fans, accusing Homey of selling out. “To Be Continued” flashes across the bottom of the screen.

  The sketch is something of a crude metaphor for what was happening around ILC. The series was an unqualified success. Fox was riding high. They’d expanded their schedule to five nights a week and had turned a fifty-million-dollar profit in 1990. This, only a year after losing almost one hundred million dollars and nearly packing it in. Suddenly, at the show, there was pressure to repeat certain characters as much as possible. The audience loves them! Let’s give the fans what they want! Conversations began about merchandising, about building the brand.

  The sketch that followed Homey was “Men on Television.” Damon’s Blaine Edwards and Grier’s Antoine Merriweather were among the show’s most popular characters, but also among the most criticized, and not without some justification. Their flamboyant wardrobes and effeminate manner indulged persistent gay stereotypes, and some gay rights organizations complained. Keenen always maintained the sketches were never gay-bashing.