Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  The formula worked. Made on a modest budget of less than twenty million dollars, Scary Movie went on to earn nearly three hundred million dollars worldwide and spawned a lucrative franchise. Career-wise it was a home run, and it’s informed nearly every project Keenen, Marlon, and Shawn have originated since then: White Chicks, Littleman, Dance Flick, A Haunted House, 50 Shades of Black. (The last two Marlon wrote and produced without Shawn or Keenen.) The Wayans brothers have become essentially a parody factory.

  Scary Movie represents a fork in the career path for Keenen. His original goal, to perhaps become the same type of actor that Eddie Murphy was during the 48 Hrs./Beverly Hills Cop years, hadn’t panned out, but now he’d found something that did. Eric Gold says it was around this time he realized his plan for Keenen’s career wasn’t Keenen’s plan. Gold wanted to position Keenen as a big mainstream comedy director not unlike Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents) or Tom Shadyac (Ace Ventura, Nutty Professor, Bruce Almighty).

  “Keenen should’ve become one of the most important comedy directors in the world,” he says. “He could identify great talent, had great points of view, understands editing so well, and could support a comedic personality. But instead of wanting to expand out of the family, Keenen, Marlon, and Shawn wanted to consolidate the family thing. They’re very comfortable together, they love working together, they had their friends who were part of their circle. Their feeling was I don’t want to play that game. I want to build a brand with my brothers.” Gold split with Keenen, Marlon, and Shawn after Scary Movie 2 in 2001, and split for good with Damon a few years after that. But Gold still thinks highly of them, particularly Keenen.

  “Keenen hasn’t been given his due,” says Gold. “He showed such leadership early in his career. In Living Color launched a generation of showrunners and movie stars and it really goes back to Keenen. It was his eye. He’s one of the most undervalued assets in Hollywood. The town is sleeping on him a little.”

  36

  “No Matter How Funny a Black Comic Is, It Doesn’t Mean Shit Unless He Makes the Right White Man Laugh”

  The winter after In Living Color was canceled, Fox added John Leguizamo’s House of Buggin’ to its Sunday-night lineup. The show was frequently billed as a Latino In Living Color, and superficially they had much in common. Five ILC writers—Fax Bahr, Adam Small, Mike Schiff, Bill Martin, and T. Sean Shannon—contributed to House of Buggin’, Paul Miller was the main director, and all of those except for Shannon got producer credits too. But Leguizamo resisted following the ILC template.

  “We tried to tell John how to produce a sketch the In Living Color way and he wasn’t into it,” says Small. “He wanted to do it like the theater, which meant no camera blocking. We’d rewrite a sketch on the day, and that night, he’d rewrite it back to the way it was.” Small and Bahr were fired after two episodes.

  Ultimately, none of that likely impacted the show’s short life span. Schiff and Martin both feel America wasn’t ready for a Latino sketch show. “In 1994, Latin culture hadn’t seeped into mainstream culture the way African-American culture had,” says Schiff. “In Living Color had huge swaths of things to parody that people were familiar with. At House of Buggin’, you’d look for things that enough people knew for it to be a network success. Frequently, we’d write sketches and the network would say, ‘What is this?’ ” The show was canceled inside of a month.

  Shortly after, Bahr and Small were tapped by Quincy Jones to adapt MAD magazine into a late-night sketch show on Fox. “Pretty much everything we did as showrunners was based on In Living Color, to some extent,” says Bahr. “MADtv,” says Small, “is marinated in In Living Color.” Nearly half of the first season’s cast members were African-American. Paul Miller directed sketches, Heavy D did the theme song, and a handful of ILCers, including Mary Williams-Villano and Rick Najera, worked as writers there. Faye Griffin says the show even rehashed sketch ideas from the ILC writers’ room.

  Bahr and Small stuck around for three seasons, but the show endured for fourteen, a remarkable accomplishment, though MADtv never really broke out to become a water-cooler hit. Its long life feels like evidence that ILC could’ve survived indefinitely had it moved to late night. It’s easy to imagine the final season of ILC as the beginning of the show transforming into something more like what MADtv became—less black, less newsworthy, still funny. But arguably, such a fate may have diminished In Living Color’s legacy more than enhanced it.

  In Living Color, or at the very least its aesthetic, resonated in obvious and less obvious ways in the years that followed. Ice Cube has talked about the show as an inspiration while he was writing Friday. That movie’s success opened the door for a wave of black comedies like Barbershop, Big Momma’s House, and How High, which continued to prove the mainstream appeal of what had previously been thought of by the industry as strictly niche. Friday also launched Chris Tucker, who became a huge movie star very much in the Eddie Murphy mold, before retreating from the spotlight for a long spell and only reemerging periodically to play smaller, quieter roles.

  “In Living Color was a pioneer,” says Leguizamo. “It was a groundbreaking transition in television to proving that black comedy is so relevant and appealing to everybody in America. That show was groundbreaking for anybody of color.”

  As the network and cable dial expanded, the number of channels willing to take a flyer on sketch shows seemed to expand with it. But the prize of a zeitgeist-seizing hit like In Living Color or Saturday Night Live remained elusive. Dana Carvey, Andy Dick, and Jenny McCarthy—yes, that Jenny McCarthy—each fronted failed sketch projects in the second half of the nineties. Upright Citizens Brigade helped launch some careers (Amy Poehler, Matt Walsh, Rob Corddry) but never connected with the larger public during its three seasons on Comedy Central in the late nineties (though their improv classes and theaters would eventually become a huge force in comedy a decade later). A pair of black sketch shows—MTV’s Lyricist Lounge Show and Cedric the Entertainer Presents—were occasionally funny but struggled to find loyal viewers. So when Dave Chappelle went in to pitch his idea for a sketch show to Comedy Central in 2002, the prospects for success seemed no more likely than they had for any of these projects.

  Chappelle was hardly an unknown quantity. He’d been doing standup since the early nineties. He’d had small parts in a half dozen studio films, had co-written and starred in his own film, Half-Baked, and been through the wringer with network television. By the midnineties, he’d starred in so many pilots that were never picked up that Les Firestein once joked to him that someone should syndicate all his failed pilots. “There were about a hundred of them,” says Firestein. “I had a sense people didn’t quite know what to do with him.”

  In 1996, Chappelle starred in Buddies, an ABC sitcom in which he and fellow comic Jim Breuer were to play best friends. After ABC saw the pilot, they canned Breuer. Chappelle considered quitting in protest, but stuck it out for a season and came to regret it. Chappelle’s character was frequently put in the position of defending the white establishment’s good intentions against black people’s prejudices.

  “Chappelle had a strong point of view, very edgy, no fear with racial comedy, and I don’t know that that’s what that show was doing,” says Todd Jones, an ex-ILCer who wrote on Buddies. “Chappelle would’ve been more suited to the In Living Color style of comedy.”

  After Buddies failed, Fox hoped to build a sitcom specifically for Chappelle. He’d play a standup comic, and have more control over the project’s creative direction. Fox ordered six episodes, but when the network—which at this point was a few years into repositioning itself as more mainstream and had recently shed its two remaining successful black sitcoms, Martin and Living Single—tried to recast the show’s female lead, replacing a black actor with a white one, and add another white character, Chappelle quit. In an interview with Variety at the time, he explained what happened.

  “They fly me out for a creative meeting,” he said. “I�
��m in a room full of white people and they proceed to tell me why we need more white people on the show, so it can have a more universal appeal. This network built itself on black viewers, and what they’re saying is white people are narcissistic. They don’t want to watch black people; they want to watch themselves. It tells every black artist no matter what you do, you need whites to succeed.” To Chappelle, this thinking perpetuated the kind of institutional racism that had pervaded the industry since its earliest days.

  UPN offered to pick up the series. Chappelle declined. “I’m just so disgusted with TV,” Chappelle said. “I don’t care if I ever work in TV again.”

  All this is an important prologue to understanding Chappelle’s Show. Chappelle created the show with Neal Brennan, a friend and comedy writer he’d worked alongside on Half-Baked. Because it was Comedy Central, ratings expectations were lower and Chappelle was promised a degree of creative autonomy he hadn’t gotten in his previous at-bats with television. The result was a revelation.

  In a sketch during the first episode that set the tone for the entire series, Chappelle plays a blind Klan leader named Clayton Bigsby who doesn’t realize he’s black. Untangling the threads of high and low humor here is instructive: There’s the sight gag of a black man raising his fist, yelling “White Power!” to a collection of dumbfounded white supremacists. There’s Bigsby’s white friend who hides the truth from him. “If I tell him he’s black, he’ll probably kill himself, just so there would be one less Negro around,” he says. There’s the question of whether Bigsby’s racist diatribes are less racist because he’s black, even if he doesn’t realize he’s black. And there’s the moment Bigsby unmasks himself in front of a roomful of his followers, who look on in shock, trying to work out if embracing Bigsby’s message about hating black people now amounts to embracing a black person. It’s sophisticated and silly, simple and complex, funny and serious all at once.

  Chappelle’s Show is undoubtedly the offspring of In Living Color, but the connection isn’t necessarily direct. Chappelle’s humor is harder, angrier, and more unforgiving than ILC’s. While it’s easy to see how sketches like “The Wrath of Farrakhan” and “Timbuk: The Last Runaway Slave” could’ve fit in on Chappelle’s Show, or how Chappelle’s crackhead Tyrone Biggums and his broad Rick James impression could’ve sat comfortably on ILC, the tone of the two shows is very different.

  “Dave is subversive,” says Rusty Cundieff, who directed many Chappelle’s Show sketches, including the Clayton Bigsby one. “In Living Color’s angle was more Let’s have fun with this.”

  Both Chappelle and his co-creator Brennan had been ILC fans—by chance, Brennan actually first discovered future Chappelle’s Show cast member Donnell Rawlings while filming some ILC casting sessions around 1992—but it wasn’t something they talked a lot about during the making of their show. Some of the difference in perspective between the two shows tracks to the personalities that created them. As much as In Living Color might’ve been the realization of Keenen’s vision, Chappelle’s Show was even more so an embodiment of Chappelle’s worldview. He and Brennan wrote most of the series themselves, and Chappelle stars in nearly every sketch. But some of the difference between the two shows also comes down to the thirteen years of time in between their respective debuts. The landscape had changed dramatically. Black culture was more integrated into the mainstream.

  It’s also worth keeping in mind that Chappelle’s Show was on Comedy Central, not network television, which freed Chappelle from the burden of having to—in industry parlance—“broaden the appeal.” Chappelle’s Show was a huge hit for Comedy Central, but a huge hit meant three million viewers. In comparison, In Living Color was averaging more than ten million when it was canceled. If three million viewers makes you a hit, you can take more risks. Still, Cundieff says, “There were plenty of sketches we did that the network didn’t want us to do because either they didn’t think they were funny or they just didn’t get it.”

  Chappelle’s Show was a phenomenon. It was a hit on Comedy Central. The DVD became the biggest-selling television show on DVD in history. As the third season was being prepped, Comedy Central signed Chappelle to a two-year contract worth about fifty million dollars. There seemed to be nothing but blue sky ahead. Yet before the third season premiered, Chappelle simply left, disappearing to South Africa for several weeks, and eventually walking away from his lucrative new deal.

  Much has been written and conjectured about Chappelle’s reasons for quitting. Many of the most salacious rumors—He’s on crack! He’s in the loony bin!—were baseless. Some other stories edged closer to the truth: He was fed up with Comedy Central meddling with the creative process. The huge payday suddenly put him in the uncomfortable position of no longer being an underdog. He feared audiences couldn’t relate to him anymore, or maybe he couldn’t relate to himself. And perhaps most interesting—though not necessarily most accurate—was the story about a sketch he’d been working on right before he left for Africa. In it, he played a magical pixie in blackface who tried to convince African-Americans to act out in the most stereotypically black ways. A white crew member reportedly laughed at the sketch, but something about that laugh struck Chappelle as wrong. It made him ask the same question of himself that had been asked of black comics since Stepin Fetchit: Are they laughing with me or at me? Am I lampooning stereotypes or reinforcing them?

  “When he laughed, it made me uncomfortable,” Chappelle said. “As a matter of fact, that was the last thing I shot before I told myself, ‘I gotta take fucking time-out after this.’ Because my head almost exploded.”

  Brennan says he doesn’t have a problem with “anything Comedy Central has done in terms of me and Dave.” He didn’t think there was a conspiracy to silence the show or excessive interference by the executives. In fact, between South Park, The Daily Show, and Chappelle’s Show, Comedy Central makes money by being subversive.

  But for a guy who had been dicked around by the industry for a decade, who’d been made to feel like a sellout on Buddies, who’d sworn off television after his subsequent experience at Fox, something didn’t feel right. Not only had the huge contract from Comedy Central not made Chappelle content with the first unqualified success of his career, it had done the opposite.

  Chappelle’s abrupt exit from his own show echoes the acrimonious departures of Keenen from ILC and Richard Pryor from The Richard Pryor Show. The individual circumstances differ, but the similarities between the demises of the three most important black sketch shows in history can’t be mere happenstance. It’s not just black show creators clashing with white executives—though it’s that too. It’s black comics struggling to bring their authentic voices to the mainstream, forced to question their own intentions in both success and failure. As Paul Mooney—not coincidentally, the only guy who worked on all three shows—put it to Pryor once, “The minute you hear white people applauding you, you get all pissed at yourself because you think you ain’t being black enough.”

  If there’s a definite pattern around the demise of the Pryor show, ILC, and Chappelle’s Show, there’s an even larger framework this pattern fits into. Consider the career arcs of many of the top black comics of the past fifty years. Flip Wilson had one of the most popular shows on television in the early seventies then abruptly quit and retired from show business. Pryor was the most important comic in the world then flamed out in mess of drugs, poor career choices, and actual flames. In the eighties, Eddie Murphy had one of the greatest commercial runs of any actor ever, but since the midnineties has quit doing standup and retreated from the public spotlight, generally only emerging to make really forgettable movies (with a few exceptions). Keenen walked away from ILC and since his talk show petered out has rarely been on-screen. Arsenio peaked in the nineties and spent most of the 2000s out of show business. At the height of Martin Lawrence’s television success in the nineties, he was hospitalized and jailed multiple times, once after running in the street, waving a gun, and yelling things
like “Fight the establishment!” at passing cars. Chris Tucker became a twenty-million-dollars-a-picture movie star in the second half of the nineties, but since 2001 has made only three films, a presumably contractually obligated Rush Hour 3 in 2007 and then smaller parts in 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook and 2016’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Chappelle famously bailed on a fifty-million-dollar deal from Comedy Central and was dismissed as crazy.

  These situations aren’t identical, not by a long shot, and certainly not every successful black comic’s career fits this pattern. Chris Rock has remained a cultural icon for decades, Kevin Hart appears to be managing superstardom well, and newer talents like Donald Glover, Keegan- Michael Key, Jordan Peele, and Hannibal Buress have adjusted to their expanding celebrity smoothly. But some of the parallels in the careers of those who have struggled or walked away are hard to ignore. Often, these comics fit for a moment in the box the entertainment industry creates for them then struggle to get out of it. At the very least, it seems that for black comics, there is a unique set of pressures that makes careers harder to maintain. Hollywood is still largely run by and for white people. As Chris Rock put it in 1993, “The sad truth is that no matter how funny a black comic is, it doesn’t mean shit unless he makes the right white man laugh.” Without question, the landscape has changed since Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor’s days, but the question is By how much? Black audiences are given more consideration than they were pre-1990, but for companies like Sony or Warner Bros. or Fox, these days, it’s less about straight-out racism than it’s about math: They want to make products for the largest possible audience with the most disposable income, and at the moment, that’s still white people. Black comics must balance these business pressures with the pressure not to disappoint black audiences. Then comes the pressure of their own creative instincts, which may be leading them in a direction that could let down all these audiences.