52 EMMYmix
in the
Many of the other cast members knew each
other already, and not just the ones who were
related. Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey were
close friends. David Alan Grier had appeared in
I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and Partners in Crime
and was close with the Wayans siblings. Tommy
Davidson had been a regular at the Comedy Act
Theater and knew Keenen, Damon, Tj McGee,
and Toney Riley. Coles only knew Davidson, from
doing standup gigs with him. Kelly Coffield and
T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh, who were moving from
Chicago, were relative outsiders, too. Coles and
Coffield decided to sublet a house together in
West Hollywood.
“We were all just excited to be with one
another,” says Coffield. “There hadn’t been a show
like this before. There was great camaraderie. We
used to say, ‘This must be what it was like to be on
The Mickey Mouse Club.’”
The writing staff cranked out sketches every
day. The ones Keenen liked got written up on
notecards and tacked to the big bulletin board in
Tamara Rawitt’s office. The ones he didn’t, went in
the trash can. There was a feeling, at times, that
the writing of sketches was an end in and of itself.
“I thought I’d written more than half of the
show,” says Rob Edwards, “then the next day
you’d see the board again and everything I’d
written was gone. I’d write a bunch of new stuff
that would go up, then a couple days later, the
board would shift.” Material that seemed funny
at first would naturally grow stale with repeatedexposure. Edwards says the smarter, more
experienced sketch writers — “which I was not”
— held their best material until the end of the
writing process.
In a few weeks of writing, a mountain of
sketches was generated. The pilot was slated tobe an hour long, and Keenen wanted to produce
at least an hour and a half of solid material to edit
down. Extra sketches could always be banked
for future shows. When the cast, producers, and
writers got together to read through the initial
cache of scripts, director Paul Miller, the SNL vet,
was floored.
“I’d been through that with Saturday Night
Live, but I had never been through anything like
this,” he says. “There must’ve been a hundred
sketches read in one day. It was kind of numbing.”
Interesting ideas got lost in the shuffle.
Howard Kuperberg recalls a piece he wrote
called “Picasso’s BlackPeriod,”withCarreyasKim Coles was exhausted. She’d had a standup gig in London and had flown to
New York, then taken a red-eye into LAX so she could be there for the cast’s first
day of work in the spring of 1989. After landing around three in the morning, she
found a place to stay near the airport, slept for a few hours, showered, and then
arrived at the Fox lot, on the corner of Wilton and Sunset. She was buzzing with
nervous energy — and lack of sleep — as she met her castmates. “We were sizing
each other up, looking to see who’d gotten the job,” she says.FLYING COLOR
Excerpted with permission from Homey Don’t Play That! The Story of In Living Color and the Black Comedy Revolution, copyright ©2018
David Peisner; 37 Ink/Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.When In Living Color burst onto television in 1990, Saturday Night Live had already been on the air for
fifteen years. But this was sketch comedy like no one had seen before. The cast was mostly black. And
the humor was always provocative and the antithesis of politically correct. Created by Keenen Ivory
Wayans — who also wrote, hosted and starred — the show came together in early 1989, when cast and
crew gathered in L.A. to shoot the pilot for the young Fox network. But it would be a full year — rife with
network notes and nerves — before Fox would summon the courage to air the show. As David Peisner
explains in Homey Don’t Play That!, TV comedy — and its approach to race — would never be the same.BOOKS
FOX/PHOTOFESTThe cast: (back, from left) Jim
Carrey, Tommy Davidson, Kelly
Coffield, Damon Wayans; (front)
Anne-Marie Johnson, Keenen
Ivory Wayans, T’Keyah Crystal
Kemáh, Kim Wayans and David
Alan Grier