Comedy legend Damon Wayans admitted to being fired from Saturday Night Live on purpose. The actor and producer was once part of the cast of the variety sketch series back in 1985 for Season 11, which turned into a memorable season for all the wrong reasons that nearly led to a cancellation. Via Deadline, Wayans appeared on the Peacock docuseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night in the fourth episode, “Season 11: The Weird Year.”
“Yeah, I got fired. We gonna talk about it,” the Poppa’s House star said. He admitted he felt he was “born to be on Saturday Night Live” and was already working on characters. Aside from his role in Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop, Wayans didn’t have much on-screen experience, but Murphy offered advice to him, telling him to write his own sketches. Wayans did exactly that, but “they would shoot my ideas down. Everything Eddie said came true. They started writing me in their sketches.”
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It only got worse, as Wayans said he was given stereotypical roles, and he tried to put his foot down. “I’m like, ‘Hell no.,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘Listen, my mother’s gonna watch this show. I can’t do this. I won’t do this.’” Wayans eventually went for a gay stereotype for a sketch that wound up getting him fired.
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The sketch in question was in Episode 12, where he and co-star Randy Quaid played cops in a “Mr. Monopoly” sketch. Even though Wayans played the character as written during rehearsal, he went off script during the live show, playing the character “as an effeminate gay stereotype.” Guest host Giffin Dune revealed he thought “it was weird, but people still laughed. And then Lorne fired him pretty much as he walked off the stage.”
Damon Wayans confessed he “snapped” and “did not care. I purposefully did that because I wanted [Michaels] to fire me.” The legendary creator and producer said firing Wayans was “really, really hard, but it had to be done.” Surprisingly, his firing didn’t stop him from coming back to perform stand-up in the Season 11 finale or be invited back to host nearly nine years later. At the very least, the firing led him to create his own sketch show, In Living Color, and use the characters he initially wanted to use for SNL. Not to mention that his comedy career is still going strong.
“Lorne is a very forgiving man, and I think he just wanted to let me know that he believed in me,” Wayans said. It sounds like there is no bad blood between Wayans and SNL, or at least Wayans and Lorne Michaels. SNL has made headlines before for stereotyping, and for Wayans, he knew that something had to be done, even if it meant costing him his job, which turned out to be the best path.