Saturday Night Live faced a lot of euphoric highs and tumultuous lows before becoming the definitive sketch comedy show on television. In the process, a lot of great comics have came and went from the show. For Damon Wayans, he ended up forcing his way out during one of the show's most scattershot seasons.
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Recently, Wayans spoke in the Peacock docuseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night. There, he specifically covers the fourth episode, "Season 11: The Weird Year," where he auditions for the first time. Coming from an iconic comedy family already, there wasn't really anything for Damon to be anxious about heading into it.
"I felt like I was born to be on Saturday Night Live and so I was not nervous at all for the audition. I was like, 'All right, bring it, let's go.' I had been working on characters," he says
Damon Wayans Heeds Eddie Murphy's Advice, Ends Up Leaving SNL
However, Eddie Murphy distinctly recalls his experience with Wayans and tells him to exercise caution when working at SNL. Why? Back then, Lorne Michaels and Company were good for propping up easy stereotypes for Black comics to play.
Consequently, he told Damon to write his own work to subvert this system. "I knew Eddie Murphy and Eddie's advice to me was, 'Write your own sketches.
Otherwise, they're going to give you some Black people s--- to do and you ain't gon' like it,' " Wayans recalls.
So Damon Wayans does just that. He knows he has a ton to offer and brings a ton of sketches to the various writers on board. However, none of them quite stick and what Eddie had predicted ended up coming true. Eventually, all of this frustration mixed with some seemingly problematic sketches caused Wayans to lash out and essentially force his way out.
During the Mr. Monopoly sketch, Damon takes liberties with his character and performed a line as a gay guy. The audience seemed to like it enough but Lorne Michaels was furious off stage. Ultimately, there was no room for surprises when doing a show of this magnitude live. But Wayans did it on purpose because he knew it would get him off the show. He gets what he wants and after a while, he patched things up with Michaels and knew where his frustrations came from. "Lorne is a very forgiving man and I think he just wanted to let me know he believed in me," Damon says. "But so much was going on. SNL was on the verge of being canceled."
