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in the
laughs were. People were stomping their feet.
No one had ever seen anything like this. Barry
watched the whole thing and that was it.” Diller
was convinced.
As the dates for filming the pilot loomed,
there was no real sense among the writers and
cast which sketches were in and which were out.
Of those 100 or so that had been read through
initially, many had been discarded, but many
remained and new ones popped up all the time.
“There would be six sketches up on the wall
and we’d be prepping them with costumes and
casting,” says Edwards, “and the next day, six
new sketches were up. Three days later, there
would be three new sketches up. We never really
knew what the rundown of the show would be.”
This was a nice problem to have. There was
so much good material that they were spoiled
for choice. But the longer Keenen put off making
a final call on the pilot’s rundown, the more it
created a logjam in the production cycle. People
were waiting on him to do their jobs.
“We were about two weeks away from
shooting and Keenen had not locked into a show
yet,” says producer Kevin Bright. “He kept the
writers writing and didn’t want to commit. Paul
Miller and I were really concerned. We had to get
scenery built. We thought maybe if we initiated a
rundown based on the material we had, it would
pin him down, get him to think about it and then
work with us to commit to a show. So we did and
showed it to him. He liked it and we were going to
go with that.”
But Bright had broken the rule Keenen had
asked him to commit to when he first started:
he wasn’t supposed to be involved with creative
decisions. “Tamara came into my office and told
me Keenen was angry. I was out of my lane.”
Miller says they ended up producing “many
more sketches than we could ever use in one
episode.” In addition to “The Homeboy Shopping
Network,” “Men on Film,” and the Mike Tyson
“Love Connection” sketch, the final rundown
included Keymáh’s “Blackworld” piece that she’d
auditioned with, as well as a few short “Great
Moments in Black History” bits that Edwards had
proposed at his first meeting with Keenen. There
was also a sketch with Keymáh hosting a female
empowerment cable access show called “Go On,
Girl.”
Damon had a short commercial parody
for the United Negro College Fund in which he
played a malapropism-spouting prison inmate
named Oswald Bates. The character was based
on an impression Marlon Wayans used to do ofa guy from the family’s old neighborhood who’d
gone to prison and returned spewing all sorts of
half-cocked wisdom. Damon had also written
a funny Calvin Klein commercial parody called
“Oppression.” In addition, the final rundown
included a sketch Sheffield and Kuperberg had
penned, a commercial for a Broadway show
featuring Sammy Davis Jr. — as played by Tommy
Davidson — starring as South African freedom
fighter Nelson Mandela, that was universally
beloved among the cast and writing staff.
But arguably the sketch that both set the
template and the bar for In Living Color was a Star
Trek spoof called “The Wrath of Farrakhan.” In it,
Damon plays the militant Nation of Islam leader
Louis Farrakhan aboard the Starship Enterprise.
Farrakhan — as David Alan Grier’s Spock helpfully
tells Carrey’s Captain Kirk (and viewers) — “is
a former calypso singer who later became
leader of a twentieth-century African-American
religious sect.”
In the sketch, Farrakhan proclaims, “I’ve
come to warn your crew of their enslavement
on this vessel.” Everywhere he looks on the
Enterprise, he sees oppression. Uhura, played by
Kim Wayans, is a glorified secretary who hasn’t
gotten a raise in fifteen years. Grier’s Spock is the
crew’s strongest and smartest, yet only second
in command. Soon, Farrakhan has fomented an
insurrection.
Executives at Fox weren’t thrilled with it,
figuring anything about Farrakhan was likely tostir up problemseitherfromtheAnti-Defamation
League or the Nation of Islam itself. Probably
both. As Rawitt recalls, “Everybody at Fox said,
‘Nobody knows who Louis Farrakhan is! Nobody
is going to care!’ The point is, you let us create a
show for black culture. Everyone in black culture
knows who Farrakhan is.”
Keenen was steering the show without a
road map. He was making people nervous. Even
the show’s own writers and producers didn’t
always agree with him.
“Most of the time, the joke is on the media,
on white people, on white fear,” says Edwards.
“‘Homeboy Shopping Network’ divided the staff.
That one seemed to come from a different
point of view, where the people being made
fun of were poor black people.” It was certainly
possible to see Wiz and Ice as just a new version
of the same Stepin Fetchit stereotypes Edwards
had skewered in his 1934 NAACP Image Awards
sketch. “For us black writers, it seemed like it was
punching down, which you’re not supposed to do
in comedy. It seemed like making fun of people
who didn’t need to be made fun of.”
The same, he says, applied to “Men on Film.”
In both cases, though, political righteousness
proved less important than comedic effective-
ness. “Sometimes when you take something to
the stage and it gets a laugh, the laugh wins out,”
he says. “Ultimately, we lost the battle.”
It was the first battle in a war that would last
as long as the show itself.Damon Wayans as Louis Farrakhan