Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  To most people who knew him, certainly those at the show, Keenen was a bit of an enigma. Though even his family members describe him as a tough boss and a taskmaster, Keenen didn’t yell and wasn’t prone to on-set tirades. He wasn’t rude and didn’t browbeat. He mostly held his cards close to his chest and seemed to play them carefully. Keenen was a guy comfortable with what others might deem uncomfortable silences. Several people described him as “mysterious” and “calculated.” He was the kind of guy who seemed to be playing chess, while others were toiling at checkers. Some assumed this was all part of some Sun Tzu Art of War–inspired strategy (“Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.”), but according to Keenen, there was a lot less to it than that.

  “What’s funny is you don’t know how other people perceive you as a person,” he says. “I’m quiet, not because I’m mysterious, just because I’m shy. I just don’t know what to say. I’m much more an observer than I am the life of the party. If I’m performing I feel comfortable, but not in a social setting.” That said, he’s learned to recognize and appreciate how his natural reserve can unnerve others. “People misread me but it has actually worked. Everybody thought I was this mysterious guy but really all it was is I’m not very gregarious.”

  Despite the increased emphasis on recurring characters and broader comedy during Season 3, the show didn’t lose its appetite for the incendiary and the racially provocative. In a sketch from the season’s first half, Kelly Coffield plays Sheila Peace, a cheery, clueless, unapologetically racist real estate agent. She tells Tommy Davidson the apartment she’s showing would be ideal for him because there’s a “Golden Bird Fried Chicken on the corner and a crack house over on Seventh.” She tells an Asian couple that the first-floor apartment is ideal because they won’t disturb their downstairs neighbors “with all that karate stuff.” She tells an Arab boy he must be looking forward to growing up and owning a 7-Eleven, “just like your father.”

  Then there was “Timbuk: The Last Runaway Slave,” a piece Damon adapted from his standup. Timbuk’s family has been hiding in a cave since the Civil War. When his father dies, he’s forced out into the world for the first time. Damon plays Timbuk as a cowering, ignorant heir to the racist Stepin Fetchit stereotype that dominated Hollywood in the pre–civil rights era. In the sketch, he runs into David Alan Grier, who’s dressed in a suit. Grier’s character quickly begins to lose his patience with Timbuk’s trembling mien and tries to walk away.

  “You must be one of them house niggers,” Timbuk tells him.

  Grier tries to set him straight. “You must be from the South. Brothers up here don’t act like that.”

  When a white jogger bumps into Grier, Timbuk is overly apologetic—“Sorry, suh, we just mosey out your way”—but Grier confronts the jogger: “Man, what the hell is the matter with you?”

  Timbuk is horrified. “Is you crazy, man? You don’t be talking to no white man like that! They want to be right even when they wrong.”

  After the jogger leaves, Grier scolds Timbuk: “This is 1991, man. All that handkerchief head stuff don’t play up here. This is America! We are free! We can do what we want!” At that point, the white jogger returns with two white police officers. Timbuk cowers as Grier confidently explains the situation. The cops don’t want to hear it. They throw Grier to the ground and arrest him. The message is clear, contemporary, and harsh with intent: The more things change, the more they stay the same. As if to drive home the point, Timbuk says, “Freedom don’t seem to last too long around here,” before a “To Be Continued” flashes across the screen.

  Damon used to do a whole monologue in his standup as Timbuk. “It was probably inspired by something I heard Richard Pryor do,” he says, “this amazing monologue at the end of the Bicentennial Nigger album that always resonated with me.” In that monologue, Pryor plays a shucking and jiving two-hundred-year-old slave who recounts the horrors of slavery, but with an upbeat spin, so as to not make white people uncomfortable as they celebrate the nation’s bicentennial.

  In spite of the promise at the sketch’s end that it would be continued, the adventures of Timbuk ended there. According to a couple of the show’s writers, Damon caught a lot of flack for Timbuk’s buffoonery from people in the black community who apparently missed the sketch’s satirical edge (or were offended, regardless). The overall response to Timbuk was lukewarm anyway.

  “The narrative was different back then,” says Firestein. “This isn’t the time of Jon Stewart. There was a sense sometimes, at least among the writing staff, that if the show got too real or too political, it could be a turnoff.”

  Unlike at SNL, where cast members and writers frequently shared offices, there was, generally speaking, a clearer dividing line—and division of labor—at ILC. Writers hung around their offices and cast members congregated around the soundstage, the rehearsal space, and the dressing rooms downstairs. There were exceptions. Damon spent a lot of time with the writers, in part because he did a lot of writing himself. Jamie Foxx also hung around the writers’ offices a lot, pitching ideas, trying out new characters for them. But the only cast member who actually had an office with the writers was Jim Carrey.

  Carrey’s sensibility was very much in line with most of the writing staff. “I loved the writers,” he says. “So many of them were just phenomenal talents. Les Firestein was truly hilarious and one of the sickest human beings I’ve ever met. He curled my toes.” Carrey worked frequently with Fax Bahr and Adam Small, and much of what they crafted was infused with a demented, anarchic spirit, though sometimes it was simply too demented and anarchic for the show. One such example that was a Carrey favorite was an anti-abortion ventriloquist and his puppet Feety.

  “It was a little fetus finger puppet,” he says. “I’d pull a hanger out and Feety would go crazy. I’d go, “Feety, Feety, I’m just going to hang my coat!’ We’d have an argument about whether he’s a living thing or not. I’d say, ‘You don’t have arms and legs, and you just got a little black dot for an eye. You don’t look like a human at all.’ He’d say, ‘I will, if you give me a couple of months, you son of a bitch!’ ” It wasn’t hard to imagine what the public reaction would’ve been to Feety. “Keenen was like, ‘Brother, they will burn down the studio.’ ”

  Policing such matters of taste generally fell to Fox’s Standards and Practices Department. The department was run by Don Bay, who looked about what you’d expect the vice president of Standards and Practices at a television network to look like. He was tall and slim, with blond hair that was going gray and a conventionally handsome, patrician bearing. It would be tempting to characterize him as the physical embodiment of “The Man”—and it’s true that his job was to be, essentially, the voice of the establishment—but Bay wasn’t so easily caricatured. He was a lawyer by training, and prided himself as a fair, open-minded guy. As the person charged with telling the writers, cast, and producers when they’d gone too far, his relationship with them was, by definition, antagonistic, but he was well liked and respected.

  “Don was actually a great dude,” says Keenen. “The censor’s job is to keep the network on the air so there’s always going to be conflict, but we couldn’t have done what we did if he hadn’t been supportive.”

  In the show’s early seasons the responsibility for dealing with Standards and Practices—or “the censors,” as many called them—fell mostly on Keenen and Tamara Rawitt. One of the main frustrations for Keenen was that the censors’ decisions seemed subjective and somewhat arbitrary. According to Bay, that’s not exactly right.

  “FBC [Fox Broadcasting Company] did have guidelines that were general in nature because specifics would’ve been impossible,” he explains. “My philosophy was that very little was prohibited because there was usually a way to present an objectionable line another way and still preserve the punch. I endeavored to allow Keenen to do his thi
ng without interfering any more than was necessary. They’d present their rationale for a particular line to which I expressed a concern, and I’d weigh it against our policy before giving my decision. It was all very businesslike.”

  That notwithstanding, when initially faced with a tall white man telling him what he could and couldn’t do, Keenen’s reaction was to try to undermine him. “We were horrible to the censors,” he says. When negotiating the language for a particular sketch, Keenen tried to take advantage of the gaps in Bay’s knowledge: “He knows nothing about street language.” So Keenen purposely inserted nonsensical phrases like “lemon and lime” into sketches and instructed the cast to laugh hard at the lines. “He’d get nervous and go, ‘No, you can’t say that.’ So I’d go, ‘Oh, we can’t say ‘lemon and lime.’ Can we say, ‘Toss your salad’? He’d go, ‘Yes, I guess that’s fine.’ So we had an episode where we talked about tossing salad and he had no idea. We’d do shit like that all the time and he’d get his ass handed to him the next day.”

  Bay doesn’t recall “ever being flummoxed or ignorant on a subject.” “Nothing,” he says, “caught me by surprise.”

  Keenen eventually figured out a better way to work with the Standards Department. Instead of Bay shutting down ideas deemed unacceptable, Keenen asked him to “come to me with some alternatives. We started to negotiate and found a sweet spot where we could work together.”

  Nonetheless, the battle between the show’s creative team and Bay’s Standards Department remained an elaborate chess game. The writing staff took pride in slipping dirty jokes past the censors. “No one,” recalls Steve Tompkins, “was better at this than Les Firestein. He had a way of working the censors like I’ve never seen.”

  The Standards Department read all the scripts, and watched the rehearsals and tapings, so there was no way to elude them completely. But Firestein had all sorts of feints, dodges, and other techniques to keep them off guard.

  “There was a whole art to that,” he says. It wasn’t just about choosing words carefully, it was about choosing when to use them. “Writers would have something really funny and I’d go, ‘You can’t put that in the script today. That’s a Friday joke. You can’t put it in on Wednesday, because the censor will have too much time with it.’ You want things to be too late in the game, where [Standards] would have to kill a sketch” to make the cut they want.

  Another Firestein ploy was to have the staff write “decoy sketches,” material so beyond the pale that they knew it had no chance of airing. The idea was that the censors couldn’t shoot down everything, so if they fed them these “sacrificial lambs,” as Firestein calls them, that would throw them off the trail of the sketches they really wanted to keep.

  “If that was a strategy, it’s one I didn’t recognize,” Bay admits. “I treated each script as if they were intending the material and dealt with it on that basis. If they were doing that, I can imagine they must have been surprised on occasion,” when a supposed “sacrificial lamb” actually made it to air.

  In fact, Tompkins recalls one of the show’s filthiest sketches began as an idea no one believed would ever be broadcast. “Les would do this thing where he’d resubmit a sketch that had been rejected, again and again, just to wear them down,” says Tompkins. “I remember one, it was so outrageous and inappropriate: It was about a powdered drink mix like Tang, that when reconstituted with water tasted like female vaginal juices. It was for men who didn’t have access to actual pussy juice—guys in prison, the Pope, astronauts in space. It was called Poon-Tang. He submits the sketch and of course, it’s utterly unacceptable. So, every few months he’d rewrite it and we’d just come up with a different name: Pie-C, Minute Maiden.” The persistence paid off: The “Minute Maiden” sketch ran in late October.

  Creative input from the network was generally unwelcome at In Living Color and actively resisted, but occasionally the suits stumbled on a decent idea. During Season 3, they pushed to invite Sam Kinison to guest star. During sweeps weeks, it’s not uncommon for network executives to do what’s known as stunt casting and this certainly fell into that category, but it was something more too.

  By late 1991, Kinison was a huge standup star who toured arenas and had killed in a supporting role in the film Back to School, but also a self-destructive force of nature, who’d amassed a crew of followers and hangers-on that included actors, porn stars, and many fellow comics. The fact that his guest appearance that season went off without a hitch seems noteworthy. He only performed one sketch, playing himself, so there wasn’t a lot being asked of him. Kinison was also, at that point, newly sober, which likely helped. At the end of Season 1, Kelly Coffield had done a “Samantha Kinison” impersonation—imagining a female version of Kinison—so having her dust it off opposite the actual Kinison made sense. The results were genuinely funny.

  Kinison had been tight with Carrey when both were young standups in Los Angeles, but according to Carrey, they’d had a falling-out prior to his guest spot on ILC.

  “Sam and I had a bit of a rough end,” says Carrey. “He wanted a gang and wanted me to join up and I was like, ‘No, I’m going my own way.’ Sam didn’t like hearing that. It was a bit of a contentious moment we had together at the Improv one night where it got a little nuts and we kind of drifted apart. Him coming on the show was a catalyst for us to become friends again. It was nice to get to know each other again, re-up our love for each other.” Sadly, five months later Kinison died in a head-on collision on a desert highway in Southern California.

  Although the Kinison guest spot worked, it was perhaps a worrying harbinger of things to come. This was the first time a guest star had played such a significant role on the show, and the relative success of the experiment seemed to embolden executives at Fox to try it over and over as the show moved forward. It would rarely be as fruitful again.

  26

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

  In 1986, Richard Pryor was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. For a while, his physical deterioration was gradual, but by the fall of 1991 it had accelerated. He was thin and frail, and had developed serious heart problems. CBS’s special that November, A Party for Richard Pryor, was widely interpreted as a sort of Lifetime Achievement Award, or—less graciously—a slightly premature wake.

  Eddie Murphy helped to orchestrate the event at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, and it served as something of an informal public reunion for most of the Black Pack’s core members. Keenen, Arsenio, and Robert Townsend helped write the special and were all in attendance, sitting close to the man who’d been their primary inspiration for going into comedy in the first place. As Eddie put it that night, “If there were no Richard, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Less than five years had passed since Keenen, Arsenio, and Robert had been struggling standups, best known for being Eddie’s friends. Since then, they’d fought to establish themselves and, really, to establish a beachhead for black comedy and black creativity in Hollywood. By the time they were sitting together to fete Pryor, it looked like they’d succeeded. Along with Spike Lee, who, by then, was working on his next film, Malcolm X, they’d played a fundamental part in altering the landscape for African-Americans in the entertainment industry.

  A sea change had taken place over the course of the last decade: It wasn’t just In Living Color, The Arsenio Hall Show, and whatever film Eddie lent his presence to. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and A Different World were Top 10 shows. Roc, a black family sitcom, had recently debuted after In Living Color and was regularly pulling in fifteen million viewers a night. Martin Lawrence was working with ex-ILC scribe John Bowman prepping his sitcom, Martin Def Comedy Jam, which would take the Comedy Act Theater’s underground vibe aboveground, was months away from its debut on HBO. John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood, which starred Ice Cube and a couple of then unknowns, Morris Chestnut and Cuba Gooding Jr. (who got his start, not coincidentally, in Coming to America), had dropped the previous summer like a cultural atom bomb. J
uice, which was written and directed by Spike Lee’s cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, was about to open number two at the box office despite a cast with no bigger star than Tupac Shakur. In July, Mo’ Money, a film Damon had written based loosely on a job he had after dropping out of high school, working in the mailroom at a credit card company (he was arrested for stealing preapproved credit cards but got off with probation), opened huge, making more than seventeen million dollars in its first weekend. Perhaps there was no better sign of the new normal than the fact that a month before the Pryor celebration, House Party 2 opened number one at the box office. Surely, when black filmmakers too can rake in dough making uninspired sequels to films that had only been mildly entertaining the first time around, something real has been achieved. So, the night celebrating Pryor had the feel of a victory lap, as well as being a tribute to the guy whom all roads led back to.

  Pryor himself hadn’t always been comfortable with the adulation of his younger acolytes. He’d reportedly been cold and brusque throughout the filming of Harlem Nights, which Eddie wrote largely for the purpose of working with him. As Eddie put it in 2011, “Richard felt threatened by me. It was this weird, I like this motherfucker, but is he going to take my spot? We got in the mix when they still did one nigger at a time in Hollywood.”

  Surely though, this night, and the array of African-American comics who’d carved their own pieces of the pie alongside each other was proof part of Pryor’s legacy was that the system was changing. Pryor seemed to have softened too. As Arsenio recalled, “I remember standing with Damon in Richard’s house and he talked about how much he appreciates Eddie and all of us who give him love. I don’t know if this would be [him being] insecure, but Richard said, ‘Sometimes when y’all say stuff about me, I’m thinking like, You have to be teasing or joking. Then it dawned on me, y’all motherfuckers for real.’ ”