Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  “The only person speaking for Reverend Sharpton is Alton Maddox and I’m not calling for calm,” he said. Maddox called for more protests and promised to meet violence with violence.

  Seven months later and five miles farther north, in Crown Heights, a car in a motorcade for Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of a Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Jews, was involved in an accident. The car collided with another car, then struck two black children on the sidewalk. One of the children, seven-year-old Gavin Cato, died shortly after. The incident, and the immediate aftermath, during which a Hasidic ambulance service removed the driver from the scene before Cato was extricated from the wreck by city ambulance crews, exacerbated existing tensions between the Jewish and black communities in Crown Heights and beyond. At Cato’s funeral, Sharpton called the neighborhood’s Jews “diamond dealers” and railed against the existence of an “apartheid ambulance service.” A banner on display at the funeral read, “Hitler did not do the job.” Three days of rioting and violence, mostly directed at the local Jewish community, led to one murder, nearly 200 injuries, 129 arrests, and close to $1 million in property damage.

  Les Firestein grew up in New York, but was in Los Angeles getting ready for Season 3 when the Crown Heights riots kicked off in August. Firestein had been promoted to co–head writer, along with Pam Veasey and Greg Fields, for the new season. As a New York Jew, Firestein figured it was on him to wrench humor from the horrible events in Crown Heights. “Crown Heights Story,” a send-up of “West Side Story,” appears in the first episode of the third season, and features Jim Carrey as a Hasid named Menachem who falls in love with Kim Wayans. It unabashedly indulges Jewish stereotypes—“They bring knives, we bring lawyers,” Carrey tells his gang, pre-rumble; “They bring guns, we bring more lawyers”—which, of course, was the point. The show’s “unwritten rule,” Firestein explains, was any writer had complete freedom to offend his own people. After the sketch aired, he got a letter from Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics for West Side Story. “One of my favorite mementos is a letter from Sondheim saying he really enjoyed the piece and thought it was better than his rendition,” says Firestein.

  In the season’s next episode, another Firestein-penned sketch, “Jews on First,” kicked at the racial tensions in New York and the rest of the country from another angle. Imagined as an excerpt from The Al Sharpton and Lou Farrakhan Comedy Hour, it’s a spoof of Abbott and Costello’s legendary “Who’s on First?” routine, with Damon’s Farrakhan and David Alan Grier’s Sharpton filling the baseball team’s ranks with names drawn from their stock-in-trade list of enemies and denunciations. “Jews on first, The Man at second, Mr. Charlie at shortstop, and It’s a Conspiracy at third,” as Farrakhan puts it to Sharpton in the sketch.

  Sharpton, then a three-hundred-plus-pound man of the cloth who favored shiny track suits, gold medallions, and long, pressed hair in the style of his hero and former employer James Brown, was almost too ridiculous a figure to parody, and Grier wisely plays him mostly straight. The joke here is that for black leaders like Sharpton and Farrakhan, their catchphrase rebukes had become so numerous and interchangeable they’d been rendered meaningless and unintelligible.

  “It was my favorite sketch I ever did on the show,” says Firestein. “I have to give it up to those guys, especially Damon and Keenen. Keenen isn’t in the sketch, but essentially Keenen is in every sketch. His kosher stamp of approval is all over the show. What was cool about those guys is that they’d mock the heroes of their community, which is a real threading of the needle. They realized conspiracy theory is a big part of the culture that they wanted to make fun of, and they wanted to make fun of it because having the ability to make fun of yourselves as a culture is a show of great strength. One of the things that was seminal about In Living Color was that black people enjoyed laughing at black people. That was the seismic change. You had an entire culture getting to the point where they said we’re strong enough that we can laugh at the more ridiculous parts of our own culture.”

  The first two episodes of Season 3 also resolved the two cliffhangers that had ended the previous season. Homey the Clown’s was the more satisfying of the two resolutions. Sitting at Chez Whitey, he proves his establishment bona fides by denouncing Farrakhan and telling his white hosts that “Rodney King was way out of line.” He’s then granted an audience with “The Man.” But when “Whitey himself,” as Homey calls him, asks Homey to kiss his ring, Homey smacks him on the head with his trademark sock, and tells him, “Homey’s never played that.” It had all been a setup: Homey just wanted to get close enough to The Man to bop him.

  “That Homey sketch was really about how they buy your soul,” says Keenen. If taken as a metaphor for ILC’s long-running battle with the establishment, it could be seen as a heartening promise to keep fighting the good fight, but on reflection, somehow it feels more like an endorsement of the show’s status quo.

  For “Men On,” the denouement is less imaginative: Damon begins playing Blaine as the seemingly straight man he became at the end of Season 2, much to the horror of David Alan Grier’s Antoine. But through repeated blows to the head, Antoine eventually succeeds in turning Blaine back into the effeminate gay man he used to be. It’s certainly possible to read both sketches as a renewal of the show’s commitment to controversial, uncomfortable comedy, except that the comedy here no longer feels controversial or uncomfortable. ILC deserves credit for helping to make that so, but ultimately, both sketches feel like a minimization of risk. If the show was in a transitional moment, the significant decision made here was following the less-than-inspirational mantra of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  Michael Anthony Snowden compared his introduction to In Living Color to the moment “Charlie Sheen first got out of the helicopter in Platoon. It was like being dropped off in Vietnam,” he says.

  On one level, things looked good for Snowden. Initially, he was just a writer trainee but Keenen clearly liked him. When Shawn Wayans was struggling to find his place in the cast, Snowden stepped up. “Me and Shawn started writing together because nobody would write for Shawn,” says Snowden. “[The writers] could be mean sometimes, but with a reason. They felt Shawn was just there because of Keenen, due to nepotism. They had it in for Shawn but so unfairly. Shawn was really funny.”

  The first product of their collaboration was a parody of LL Cool J’s hit “Mama Said Knock You Out.” It was funny, if not exactly revelatory, but Keenen was pleased, and as the season progressed, it wasn’t unusual to find Snowden tossing a football in the parking lot with Keenen and his brothers, or huddled with Keenen in his office, or even hanging out with him late-night at a club. He was quickly promoted from trainee to a full staff writer.

  But Snowden soon discovered that ingratiating himself with Keenen didn’t make him popular with the other writers. “I’d go out with Keenen and we had these extremely late nights, like four in the morning,” he says. “Then I’d come back to the office and all the writers would still be there. They’d look at me, shaking their heads and I knew I fucked up.”

  The writers’ room became more cutthroat in Season 3. There was intense pressure not just to produce good sketches but to defend those sketches, defend your jokes, defend your life.

  “It was every writers’ room I’ve ever been in but probably more so,” says Fred Graver, who’d worked at Late Night with David Letterman and would later write for Cheers and The Jon Stewart Show. “It was very competitive. It could be very mean. One of the things that made the job really hard was we were in this office building and none of the windows opened. We were all there like twenty hours a day and the air was stifling. Maybe I was more sensitive to it than other people but it drove me nuts. I look back on those writers’ meetings, and all I remember is the layer of desperation that hung in the air in this windowless office where people were spending eighteen to twenty hours a day trying to make each other laugh.”

  The grind of churning out material got more d
ramatic as Fox wanted more and more episodes each season. There could only be so many Fire Marshal Bill, Benita Butrell, and Homey the Clown sketches. The show needed fresh material all the time. The constant need for more pitches loomed over the writers like a dark cloud, morning, noon, and night. “The pressure of knowing you had to pitch every Monday would mean that even if you were home for the weekend, maybe you’d let yourself have Saturday as a little mental break,” says Becky Hartman, “and then all day Sunday, you’d run to the newspaper stand and get every newspaper, every magazine, try to see movies. It felt like when you weren’t at work, you never got that mental break you needed to recharge.”

  The long hours exacted a toll, and the subsequent physical exhaustion wasn’t the only thing that often resulted in diminishing returns for the writers.

  “It was not unusual for you to be there until well into the morning on weeknights, writing and rewriting, trying to get stuff on the air,” says Larry Wilmore. “Once, Keenen was a little frustrated with some of our stuff, which wasn’t unusual, and he was like, ‘You guys need to pull more from your life. You need to get out.’ I’m like, Get out? This is our life! What are we going to pull from? Being here all the time is our life!”

  The very act of pitching had become a harrowing death waltz. Keenen would sit at the head of the table, eating his dinner, while, one by one, writers labored to make him laugh. “The pitch room atmosphere was hostile,” says Firestein, “I’m going to say intentionally so.”

  Fax Bahr, who’d proven himself an important contributor during Season 2, says the show’s routine grew more untenable in Season 3: “You’d hear at two that there was a pitch meeting at six. Then you’d wait until seven before Keenen would come in. We were all hungry and Keenen would have a full-blown dinner. He’d sit at the end of the table, eating, and we’re just salivating. He was focused on his dinner and if he’d like something he’d go, ‘Yeah, write that one.’ If he didn’t he’d be like, ‘Next.’ ”

  Time was a relative concept at the show. Nothing ever seemed to be running on schedule. “Meetings started late because Keenen did everything,” says Graver. “He was in the edit rooms, in casting, in with the writers, in with the Fox executives, in everything. One day, he called a meeting for two in the afternoon and I knew this meeting wasn’t going to start until four or five. So I bet a bunch of the writers I could go to the Beverly Hot Springs, get a massage, a hot spring, and a steam and be back in time while everybody else is sitting in these windowless offices, fuming. Sure enough, I got a massage, I soaked, I came back fantastically refreshed while everybody else is just walking into the meeting.”

  Because Keenen was juggling multiple tasks and projects, it could be hard to get his attention. By Season 3, he was around a lot less and, according to some I spoke to, not having much fun when he was there. It often seemed that he needed to be, or simply wanted to be, someplace else. Firestein recalls arriving at work five minutes late one day and being unable to find anyone. After walking around the office for a spell, he finally wandered into the gym that Keenen had had installed for himself. “Keenen was doing squats and the staff was pitching,” says Firestein. “That’s where the pitch meeting was taking place that day.” Bahr says it was like “an acid trip. Keenen was benching some ungodly amount of weight while we sat around and pitched ideas to him.”

  At least a few times, writers pitched to Keenen via speakerphone. Even under the best of circumstances, Keenen seemed to make the pitching process as uncomfortable for the writers as possible.

  “There was nothing more gratifying than making him laugh and nothing more terrifying than pitching a really crappy idea that he and the rest of the writers go to town on,” says Hartman.

  And Keenen was grudging with his laughs. Even his brother Marlon knew what it felt like to long to hear his big brother crack up. “Keenen always goes, ‘Oh, that’s funny,’ ” says Marlon. “It’s rare he laughs.”

  For Keenen, not laughing in pitch meetings wasn’t about being a curmudgeon. There was strategy behind it. “There’s a psychology of laughter,” he says. “Laughter in groups always works better. The writers would laugh at each other’s sketches whether they were funny or not. I wouldn’t laugh so I could hear what was really funny or not. I know the tricks. I wouldn’t let them get away with their tricks. I’d just sit, I’d listen, and if it was funny, I’d say, ‘That’s funny.’ Unless it was hysterical, then I’d laugh.”

  Writers had a short window to prove their worth and then had to prove it again and again. “Keenen didn’t suffer fools,” says Firestein. “If someone came on board and you could tell they didn’t have it or weren’t going to get it in time, I don’t think Keenen had a great deal of sympathy. It was sink or swim. There wasn’t a lot of hand-holding.”

  For someone like Michelle Jones, who’d come from a receptionist job at the Hollywood Reporter, there was no time to learn the ropes.

  “Keenen didn’t have a problem telling you if he thought something wasn’t funny,” says Jones. “To his credit, he wouldn’t just say, ‘This sucks.’ He’d say, ‘This is wrong because of this, this, and this.’ He had it in his head what would make it right.”

  The stakes were clear. “If you didn’t do your job, a lot of people got fired,” says Wilmore. “So you felt like you could be fired anytime. I felt that every single day.”

  Keenen’s own characterizations of the environment at the show and his attitude as its leader more or less conform to this portrait. The pressure he put on the writers was the same pressure he felt. “Once you set a standard, you can’t go backwards,” he says. Pitches had to be good. They had to be creative. Sometimes they weren’t. “I knew when people had been fucking off on the weekend. You come in Monday with bullshit, it was like, Okay, we will shut this down and get back together at four and you guys better have some sketches. There were days like that.”

  It was a hard job because putting together a show like this was hard. There were no shortcuts. “I remember one night we were taping and the writers had gone home,” says Keenen. “They thought, Our job is done. I had everybody called and brought back to work. As long as I’m here, you’re here, because we’d continue to write while we were shooting. If something wasn’t working, we had to fix it right there. Even if you didn’t have a sketch in the show, you had to be there.”

  Pitching was tough, he says, not just because of him, but because of the writers themselves. “The writers were brutal to each other,” he says. “They would break up laughing in the middle of your pitch because it was that bad. If you were bombing, there was no mercy. The writers’ room was far more cutthroat than the performers. The guys especially were tough on the women. There was a lot of—I don’t want to say harassment—but kind of like hazing.”

  It wasn’t as if these elements hadn’t been part of earlier seasons, but with the show now a hit, the pressure was cranked up. Unquestionably, as the show’s leader, Keenen deserved a significant portion of the responsibility for the atmosphere, but he wasn’t the only one. Under Sheffield and Bowman, the writers’ room had been run with a gentler hand. Their replacements, Firestein, Fields, and Veasey, were tagged as equals, but it was Firestein—who relished the blood-sport aspects of comedy—who set the tone.

  “Me and Les started doing a Wall of Shame,” says Snowden. “Everything that was pitched that was really bad, we’d put it on the wall. Every time a sketch would bomb Les would pin it on the wall.” When people got fired, their photos went on the wall too.

  “It started as bad sketches but then it just became the Wall of Shame generally,” says Firestein.

  Some writers adapted to the comedy killing fields better than others. Michelle Jones and Harry Dunn shared an office and both struggled. “Most days, I went to work afraid,” says Jones. “Afraid I’d lose my job, afraid I wasn’t funny enough, just always scared. It’s hard to be funny when you’re scared.” She knew her job was to please Keenen but wasn’t sure how to do it, and no one was going to t
ell her. “It felt like high school,” she says. “There are the ins and there are the outs.” She was an out.

  Dunn was even further out. He and his wife had just had a baby, and as with Jones, ILC was his first TV job. “I came in with a Pollyanna attitude because it was like, ‘Oh my god, I got this great job. I just had a baby,’ ” says Dunn. “It was a good start for the year. I didn’t know what I was walking into. I didn’t know how to survive in a room like that.” Television writing staffs, he says, are like Lord of the Flies. “They try to figure out where the weak link is and then target them.”

  He was the weak link. He wasn’t contributing much each week. Most of his original ideas never made it to air. Desperation set in. He came to dread pitch meetings as regularly scheduled public humiliations. Firestein recalls seeing Dunn actually faint during one of his pitches, though Dunn insists it wasn’t that bad. “After weeks and weeks of failed pitches, an idea started to get traction,” he says. “For some reason, in the middle of it, I just froze. No fainting, I just froze.”

  Jones says her office with Dunn “was kind of dubbed the loser office.” She accepted that she didn’t fit at ILC, but Dunn fought hard to gain a foothold. The other writers, she says, “bagged on him behind his back. Harry was out like me but worked really hard to get in.”

  The low point for Dunn came after he brought in a photo of his newborn to share around the office. “Les took the picture, Xeroxed it, and drew dicks going in my baby’s mouth with the caption, ‘Baby’s first teething,’ then posted it all over the office,” says Dunn. “At that point, I didn’t know what to do. Do I fight the guy? Do I try to top this guy? I don’t have that instinct where I can just attack. From that point forward, I realized I wasn’t destined for this job.”

  Firestein saw the whole idea of Dunn passing around baby photos as a “survival move” that deserved a degree of scorn. “Plain and simple, Harry wasn’t getting stuff into production. Showing his baby’s picture to Keenen, I think the idea [was] that might help him not get fired. That wasn’t the culture at that show. The only thing that was going to keep you there is if you were productive.” Dunn was not and his baby photos, whatever their intention, didn’t save him. He was let go halfway through the season. So was Jones.