Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  ILC wasn’t simply incidental to this development. Of Fox’s “black” shows, Martin was co-created by former ILC head writer John Bowman, and co–executive produced by two other former ILCers, Matt Wickline and Sandy Frank. Living Single had an original ILC player, Kim Coles, as one of its stars. A former ILCer, Michael Petok, was a producer on The Sinbad Show. Three ex-ILCers—Franklyn Ajaye, Barry Douglas, and Rick Najera—wrote for Robert Townsend’s variety show, Townsend Television, and ILC’s two main directors—Miller and Terri McCoy—helped direct it. McCoy also directed episodes of South Central, a midseason replacement that included former ILC scribe Michael Anthony Snowden among its writers and Jennifer Lopez in its cast. The only black show on Fox not directly sprinkled with In Living Color’s DNA was Roc, but even that had benefited from ILC’s success. For its first two seasons, Roc occupied the Sunday time slot immediately following ILC. Jamie Foxx was also a recurring guest star. Fox looked very much like the House that Keenen Built.

  Over on ABC, Keenen’s influence was hard to miss too: Sister, Sister was co-created by another former ILC writer, Kim Bass, and Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper was built around the comic who used to warm up the crowd before ILC tapings, Mark Curry. Even Family Matters had a connection: One of the show’s stars, Reginald VelJohnson, was Keenen’s good friend from his days as a New York standup and had been part of the first performances Keenen and Damon ever filmed with the Kitchen Table.

  When Fox set their prime-time schedule for the 1993–94 season, they shifted In Living Color to Thursday night at nine. Sunday night’s slate was now filled with the show’s spiritual offspring: Martin, Living Single, and Townsend Television. The move to Thursday was curious. The show now ran head to head with Seinfeld, which, after a slow start, had picked up considerable steam during the previous season and was consistently a Top 5 show. What’s more, slotting another black sketch/variety series into the Sunday lineup, a show run by Keenen’s old friend and writing partner Robert Townsend—the same guy Garth Ancier tried to pitch on doing a “black Laugh-In” even before meeting with Keenen about it—certainly made it look like Fox was hedging their bets on ILC and scouting for a like-for-like replacement, if not actively trying to stick it to Keenen.

  Townsend didn’t sense any ulterior motives. He just wanted to do his show. “I’d pitched the show to other places, ABC, NBC,” he says. “Fox was the only one that wanted to do it. I never look at it like, There’s only one black show. I had already been in the sketch comedy world with Partners in Crime. It was an extension of what I do.” He says he wasn’t sure what Keenen thought of all this, because by that time, he and Keenen weren’t talking on a regular basis. “Once you’re in the Hollywood thing, everybody’s doing their stuff. So, it wasn’t like, ‘Hey, let me check in.’ ” Besides, competition was always part of the game, particularly among comics, and particularly among Keenen, Robert, Arsenio, and the rest of the guys they’d come up with. “We’re all big boys,” says Townsend. “It’s just business. We’re in an industry where they try to pit us against each other, but we’re all family. Keenen is one of my best friends.”

  Nonetheless, in December, Keenen filed a lawsuit against both Townsend and Fox, after a sketch, called “The Bold, The Black, The Beautiful,” that the two worked on together for Partners in Crime, appeared in a September episode of Townsend Television without Keenen’s permission. Fox had suggested using the older clip and Townsend told them he didn’t have a problem with it, “as long as legally everything is fine.” Fox reassured him it was okay to use the Partners sketch. “I guess it wasn’t.”

  Keenen still had ongoing disputes with Fox regarding the use of his name and his work when packaging and rerunning ILC episodes. The lawsuit claims Fox and Townsend were aware of Keenen’s “very strong desire not to have anything to do with Fox and of his desire not to be associated with any television series broadcast by FBC.”

  “I think there was a bigger game going on with Fox and Keenen that I wasn’t privy to,” says Townsend. The conflict was eventually resolved, but “whatever the settlement was, that was between Keenen and Fox. I never got involved.”

  33

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

  The conventional wisdom is that the fifth season of In Living Color was awful. That judgment fits a tidy narrative that once Keenen and his family were gone, the whole enterprise fell apart and became worthless. It’s a narrative that’s certainly been pushed by the Wayans siblings themselves and isn’t without some truth. Much about the show changed when Keenen left, and many of those changes weren’t for the better. But there was still a ton of talent at the show, and viewed in hindsight, Season 5 has more to recommend than even some of those who worked on it might remember.

  In fact, the first episode of the season could stand comfortably alongside some of the better work from earlier seasons. The commercial parody for “Russell Simmons’ Def Strawberry Jam” is a clever premise—as the voice-over explains, “One bite will turn your family into a fresh, fly, hip-hop crew”—that’s very well executed. David Alan Grier, dressed in a conservative gray suit, eats a little jam on his toast and then suddenly explodes with a flurry of bleeped expletives. “Yo, it’s about tiiiiime you served some good food, bitch!” he tells his wife, played by Anne-Marie Johnson. “Hey, hey, hey!” Johnson answers. “Your ugly ass ain’t the only motherfucker who likes this shit! Those motherfucking kids be putting it on their waffles and shit!”

  Grier also scored in a sketch as Sammy, a ventriloquist with a Korean hand puppet named Kim. Grier dances on the edge of offensiveness, adopting a choppy Korean accent for Kim, a bodega owner who repeatedly screams, “You buy something now!” at Sammy. The sketch simultaneously indulges and attacks stereotypes in a style the show practically invented a few years before.

  “Seinfeld in the Hood” could be interpreted as a shot over the bow of their new Thursday-night competition, though as Tim Kelleher, who wrote it, explains, it was really “more in response to Seinfeld being a New York show, yet there were no black people” on it. Jim Carrey does an over-the-top Seinfeld impression, Jay Leggett magnifies all of George Costanza’s most irritating traits, and Carol Rosenthal does a decent Kramer, particularly considering she had only an hour to prepare for it.

  The sketch points up the gulf between two shows’ comic sensibilities. Seinfeld’s observational humor was the product of privilege and comfort, something Les Firestein says “was so not the experience of most of our audience.” As a New York Jew who had grown up on the border of Harlem, Firestein’s sense of humor resided on that border, “with Seinfeld people on one side of the street and In Living Color people on the other.”

  The sketch, as Mike Schiff notes wryly, “failed to take Seinfeld down.” In fact, that week Seinfeld clobbered ILC in the ratings, pulling in twice as many viewers and setting a pattern that would only get worse as the season progressed.

  The rest of the season was rarely as good as that first episode, but there was plenty to recommend. T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh and Tommy Davidson’s sketches as two precocious kids, Deronda and Pookie, whose games of pretend mimic the grown-ups in their lives, was a very funny commentary on the persistent childishness of the adult world. The All in the Family parody “All Up in the Family,” which reimagines Archie Bunker and his clan as a black family, got better and better as the season wore on. David Alan Grier’s “Insensitive Therapist”—who laughs at his patients’ problems, reveals their innermost secrets in public, mocks their grief, and complains, “You people are so selfish!”—tapped into a gut-level disgust with the feel my pain culture that had taken hold in the nineties. Ali Wentworth was great as Candy Cane, a hot mess of a children’s show host, and Jamie Foxx’s version of Wile E. Coyote as an unfairly targeted, increasingly assertive societal outcast was just the right mix of clever and stupid.

  Then there was Jim Carrey, whose role on the show grew more dominant in the Wayans family’s absence. Some of his older characters
, like Fire Marshal Bill and Vera De Milo, felt a little tapped out, but others, like Background Guy and his Overly Confident Gay Man, were just finding their groove. One-offs, like the musical parody of the white Canadian dancehall star Snow’s hit “Informer” (retitled “Imposter”) and his maniacal school guidance counselor—kind of a cousin to Grier’s Insensitive Therapist—were vintage Carrey. And one of the season’s best new characters was his Umbilical Barry, a college-aged kid who has literally never cut the cord between himself and his overprotective, overly doting mother, played by Rosenthal. The character had actually been created the season before by Carrey’s office-mate Steve Oedekerk, who thought it “could never be on the show in a million years.” In fact, it was on twice and, according to Buddy Sheffield, there was at least one more in the works.

  “We were trying to come up with the last one of those and Jim said, ‘He’s got to be sucked back into his mother.’ They found some set that could look like a womb, and we were starting to shoot the thing. He’s on the floor in the fetal position and he just stopped everything. He said, ‘Oh my god! For this to work, I’ve got to be completely naked.’ He stripped to nothing right there in front of all the crew and shot the closing of that sketch. He’d do absolutely anything.”

  Although the friction between Carrey and Keenen created great sparks, more than any other cast member, Carrey seemed to blossom in his absence. “He had a lot of ideas of his own and nothing was holding him back,” says Bill Martin. “Jim’s stuff got crazier and bigger. He felt less restricted.”

  With Oedekerk gone, Carrey shared an office with one of the new writers, Nick Bakay, and an iguana. “I’d say Jim was gone 70 percent of the time,” says Bakay. Carrey had filmed most of Ace Ventura during the summer hiatus, but there was still a lot of work to be done—pickup shots, voice work, promotional duties—before the film’s February release.

  “I remember Jim leaving to do Ace Ventura,” says Colin Quinn. “I read that script. I was like, ‘Poor guy. What a mistake, man.’ I felt like he was going off into obscurity.”

  Carrey was burning the candle at both ends juggling Ace with ILC. “Jim’s office was right next to mine and he didn’t have a sofa,” says B. Mark Seabrooks, one of the new writers on the show. “I’d go in my office all the time and the cushions would be off my sofa because Jim would take them into his office and go to sleep.”

  When Ace was released in early February, the reviews were pretty terrible but it didn’t matter. It topped the box office for three weeks. Everyone at ILC had to eat crow. They also had to contend with Carrey’s increased absences. He quickly had three more films lined up, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, and Batman Forever. Not all of that work could be done during a summer hiatus or in off-hours from the show. Carrey was under contract, which obligated him to be on set, but Eric Gold, who was still one of his managers, worked out a deal in which Fox gave Carrey some extended time off to shoot The Mask. In return, Carrey signed on for a sixth season of the show.

  “Jim was very, very committed,” says Pam Veasey. “We accommodated the schedule so he could do movies, but he was there enjoying doing Fire Marshal Bill even after Ace Ventura. I remember when he came in my office and told me he got Dumb and Dumber. He was like a kid. He was so excited.”

  When Firestein, Veasey, and Fields took over in the middle of the fourth season, they were doing emergency first aid. Their primary job was to keep the show alive. During Season 5, they were hoping to rebuild it more deliberately for the future. “The first thing we did was try to eliminate competition, so more people wrote together,” says Veasey.

  In some sense, simply not having Keenen’s intimidating presence relieved a bit of tension, at least for the writers. A Ping-Pong table near the elevators became a good repository for competitive juices.

  “There was a certain fear and panic the writers all had when Keenen walked in the room, and that was gone,” says producer Kevin Berg. “If Keenen said I want to meet all the writers at four, the writers would be assembled at four. If Keenen didn’t show up until ten, those writers sat there waiting for him. It was a fear that he’d come in and rip them head to toe, tell them what he hated about every single sketch. Pam, Greg, and Les didn’t invoke that fear.”

  Everything was done by committee now, so if you didn’t like the decision one of the showrunners made, you still had a chance to convince the other two. Most of the staff liked the changes, at least on a day-to-day basis.

  “A real darkness had been lifted,” says Marc Wilmore. “It was like going from Rikers Island to a federal penitentiary with tennis courts, just one fence, and no guard in the tower. People appreciated your work and you left to go home early—‘early’ being ten o’clock, but it’s better than midnight.”

  Quinn, who later worked as both a writer and cast member at Saturday Night Live, felt like the vibe around ILC was low-pressure and low-stakes.

  “Everyone was so mellow,” he says. “It was really hilarious. I was like, ‘Hey, I wrote this sketch. I think it’s really funny.’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, man, that’s good.’ They had their system down and there was no reason to get all hot and bothered about it. It was such a good environment. We’d just bust each other’s balls. There were couches all over the office, and anytime you’d be lying on the couch, writing, Les would come and pick up the couch—just fling it. He was a strong guy. It was so funny watching a man flip a couch.”

  Not everyone appreciated Firestein’s office antics the same way. If he’d perhaps dialed down the cutthroat vibe that rattled through the staff in earlier campaigns, he hadn’t lost his taste for the outrageous. “Les was pretty infamous in terms of the wild shit he’d say and do,” says Seabrooks.

  One day, Firestein was playing Ping-Pong and spotted a new writer, Mary Williams-Villano, walking through the offices accompanied by a man she was talking to about being her agent. Villano, a somewhat skittish white woman in her midthirties, didn’t really fit in at the show, and Firestein took great joy in tormenting her. As she was ushering the agent into the elevator, near the Ping-Pong table, Firestein paused the game.

  “Mary, you forgot your diaphragm in my apartment,” he told her, straight-faced. Then he returned to playing Ping-Pong. As the elevator door closed, she stood there, embarrassed and dumbfounded.

  Villano recalls the incident slightly differently. “Les said, ‘Why does it burn when I pee?’ ” she explains. She didn’t remember the diaphragm comment but admits, “He may have also said that.” Firestein picked on her, she says, “perhaps because he sensed I’m too sincere or too open. I’ve always been teased, my whole life.” Sometimes she could shrug it off. Sometimes she’d end up in tears.

  The office was not a place for the faint of heart. Firestein had framed photos of children with horrific deformities on his desk. For a while, his walls were heavily decorated with gay porn. “This is pre–hostile workplace environment lawsuits and stuff like that,” he says.

  In the middle of one workday, Seabrooks heard loud groans coming from Firestein’s office. The door was open so he walked in. There were four people standing around, mouths agape, watching a video of a man with a handlebar mustache wearing a captain’s hat, hanging from a sex sling, while another man had his foot literally in the man’s ass. The video was playing all day.

  “My joke about Les was if he wasn’t a comedy writer, he’d be a serial killer,” says Villano. “He definitely tried to give out that vibe.” (Interestingly, Firestein, in an unrelated email exchange, offered that he “always said that the only differences between comedy writers and hatchet murderers were hatchets and courage.”)

  Firestein unreservedly took delight in making people squirm, but he points out that the gay porn in his office wasn’t completely his idea. At the time, he says, Carrey was frequently pulling all-nighters and sleeping on the couch in Firestein’s office. “In the middle of the night, he went out to Hollywood with Martin and Schiff and bought very hardcore gay porn,” he says. “Then Jim wallpapere
d my office completely with that porn, from floor to ceiling. He went so far as to line the drawers of my desk. Say what you will about Jim, he commits to the bit. I left it up for weeks, if not months, because that was just part of the atmosphere there. Anything goes was kind of the idea. I remember Greg Fields came up to me one day and he’s like, ‘Les, I think you should take this shit down. It’s starting to fuck with your head.’ I took it down a couple days later. The next day, Rupert Murdoch just randomly came to my office.”

  Many of the show’s new writers adapted to the environment more easily than Villano. Two brothers, Todd and Earl Richey Jones, had started as writer trainees in the network’s diversity program during the previous season, and seemed to get the show’s culture immediately. “It was a great environment,” says Todd Jones. “Throughout tape days and run-throughs, people were constantly playing Ping-Pong. My brother and I didn’t want to leave. We’d stay there until three in the morning.”

  Colin Quinn, Tim Kelleher, Nick Bakay, and T. Sean Shannon had all started as standups and hung around the office together a lot. Villano called them the Irish Mafia, and individually and collectively, they made their presence felt. “That’s a pretty intimidating group of guys, particularly in the low-sperm-count world of comedy writing,” admits Bakay. “We definitely had no problem bagging on each other and everyone else in our path. Then again, we all arrived at writing via the [standup] comedy gauntlet as opposed to the Ivy Leagues.”