“I felt like I was born to be on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Damon Wayans during an interview featured in Peacock’s new documentary series, SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night.
As it turns out, Wayans’ dream job wasn’t all that he thought it would be. Wayans was a member of the Saturday Night Live cast during season eleven when Lorne Michaels returned after a brief hiatus. When the legendary comedian made his way onto the show, he received a bit of useful advice from one of the show’s most successful stars — Eddie Murphy.
“Eddie’s advice to me was, ‘Write your own sketches. Otherwise they’re going to give you some Black people s—t to do, and you ain’t gon’ like it,'” Wayans recalled.
Murphy’s advice eventually came into play when Wayans pitched a sketch called “The Gifted Rapper” about a gift wrapper who could actually rap and was immediately shot down by writer Al Franken.
“He read the sketch and was like, ‘I just don’t get the rap thing.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah but 50 million other people do,’” he remembered.
Wayans’ idea was shot down, but he was later cast in stereotypical roles across various sketches and became fed up. Things came to a tipping point when a cast called “Mr. Monopoly” was selected instead of one of his sketches. In response, he “purposely” messed up his lines in order to get fired.
“I snapped. I just did not care,” Wayans said.
“I purposely did that because I wanted [Lorne Michaels] to fire me.”
As Wayans expected, he was fired immediately after stepping off stage.
“Having not fired anybody for the first five years, it was really, really hard,” Michaels said.
“But it had to be done.”
However, Michaels invited him back to perform stand-up comedy during the season’s finale. “Lorne is a very forgiving man, and I think he just wanted to let me know he believed in me,” Wayans explained.
