In Living Color helped pave the way for today’s cultural pacesetters

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The near-constant search for new writers – particularly new black writers – led Keenen to bring in Paul Mooney midway through Season 1. Mooney had been Richard Pryor's writing partner, he'd had a small part in Hollywood Shuffle, and was a bona fide comedy legend, as he'd almost certainly be the first to tell anyone within earshot. A tall, undeniably handsome man, he carried himself with an almost regal air, and had an indignant, withering, unapologetic take on race relations that informed not only his comedy, but his entire worldview. White people had "the complexion for the protection," and black people had every right to be pissed off about it. His jokes were less jokes than provocations.

"Mooney was brought in as a grenade," says Tamara Rawitt. "He's sort of bulletproof when it comes to wearing it out loud and saying anything. I think it was Keenen's own amusement and perversion that had Mooney around just saying incendiary, racist things."

According to T'Keyah Crystal Keymáh, "When word got out that he was coming to the show, there was panic among the white writers."

Buddy Sheffield, who was one of those white writers, says Mooney was "hardly ever there. He'd come in and out. He'd come to the table sessions. About all I remember him doing is sometimes somebody – or me, in particular – would pitch an idea and he'd say, 'Oh, no, homey!'"

Kim Bass, a black writer who joined the show's staff around the same time as Mooney, says that "when Paul was at the writer's table, we'd be discussing a topic, and when it got in his wheelhouse, everybody waited to see what Paul was going to say. He had that booming voice: 'Oh, I'm gonna go there, homey!'"

Mooney was definitely not just another staff writer, and from the moment he got there, Keenen gave him special treatment, although not necessarily the kind anyone else would've envied. He told Eric Gold to put Mooney in the "worst office we have."

When it was lunchtime, Keenen made sure no one took Mooney's lunch order. The idea was to keep him agitated.

"Paul is funniest when he's angry," says Keenen. "If you look at his act, whenever Paul would do TV, he'd never be funny because he'd have to try to be nice. When you'd see him in the club and he was pissed, he was brilliant. I wanted that energy out of him."

Therefore, as Gold recalls, "Keenen kept having everybody fuck with Paul Mooney." Mooney's frequent response to all this would stand as his most significant contribution to the show: "Oh, homey don't play that!"

Although Mooney never wrote any sketches, in a roundabout way, he was responsible for the creation of one of ILC's most enduring characters, Homey the Clown.

"It's funny because people will attribute Homey to Paul but in the wrong way," Keenen explains. "Paul didn't come up with Homey. Paul was the inspiration for Homey. Homey is Paul Mooney. Instead of an angry comedian, he's an angry clown. He's a guy whose job is to be funny but he's the antithesis of that."

Matt Wickline, one of the show's writers, conjured the idea for Homey after watching Mooney around the office. Damon Wayans, who played Homey, added elements of a character called the Angry Comic that he'd been doing in his standup.

"The voice of Homey is from the Angry Comic," says Damon. "Basically, he comes out and goes, 'Good evening, Whitey. Or would you prefer Ofay white devil cracker honky trash? A very funny thing happened on my way down here tonight: I killed three white people. I guess you had to be there. You would've been dying.' That was Homey's voice."

In the first Homey sketch, he's performing at a children's birthday party, but when a little girl asks him to "Do a silly clown dance," he refuses to "degrade" himself. "I don't think so. Homey don't play that," he says, smacking the child with a weighted sock, and coining a catchphrase in the process. For a magic trick, he takes a dollar from one kid, folds it up and puts it in his pocket. "Let's get something straight, kids: Homey may be a clown but he don't make a fool out of himself."

"Homey," like "The Wrath of Farrakhan" before it, was a sketch that ticked all the boxes for ILC. It's undeniably silly, but Homey's sense that the white world is against him, however exaggerated, is funny because of the nugget of truth at its core. As the character developed over the course of the coming seasons, Homey often felt like an alternate mouthpiece for Keenen and Damon to express their frustrations with the show, with Fox, with their own careers and with the wider world. Homey the Clown was, in some sense, In Living Color's aggrieved, outspoken id.

In the second Homey sketch, later that first season, Homey is entertaining carnival-goers with a well-dressed, blond-haired ventriloquist dummy he calls "Mr. Establishment."

"Now tell the nice people how you've tried to keep Homey down," he says.

The dummy answers: "Well, I've structured society in such a way that men like Homey face nearly impossible odds of achieving any sort of educational opportunity. Therefore, they're unable to obtain gainful employment, thus forcing them to resort to an alternate source of income. Sooner or later, they just end up in jail, just like Homey!"

"Now let's show the nice people how Homey gets back at Mr. Establishment." With that, Homey thrashes the doll, bashing it repeatedly into a table.

Much like Mooney's humour, the joke here is less a joke than a truth packaged as an incitement. Underneath the grown man in a clown costume holding a dummy is a historical grievance answered with furious violence. To play that for laughs takes some insidious genius. Keenen may have known, as he'd told David Steinberg, that if he aired his politics too nakedly they'd "come across as angry," but here, he figured out how to dress them up in a bright red wig and floppy clown shoes, and slip them onto prime-time television.

Copyright © 2018 by David Peisner. From the forthcoming book Homey Don't Play That! by David Peisner, to be published by 37 Ink, a Division of Simon & Schuster Inc. Printed by permission.