When Damon Wayans Went ‘Rogue’ and Got Fired From ‘SNL’

Comedian Damon Wayans appears as a sort of ghost from Saturday Night Live’s past in the new Peacock docuseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night to explain why he “went rogue” and “wanted [Lorne Michaels] to fire me” after his brief stint during the show’s notoriously troubled 1985-1986 season of the show.

Wayans says in the doc, which began streaming on Thursday, that he was tired of his ideas being “shot down” as he chafed against racially insensitive sketches from the show’s writers. The comedian was trying to follow cast mate Eddie Murphy’s advice as a former Black cast member on the show.

“Eddie’s advice to me was, ‘Write your own sketches. Otherwise, they’re gonna give you some Black people s--t to do and you ain’t gonna like it,’” Wayans recalls. But getting his own ideas on the air proved difficult.

“I’m like, ‘Hell no,’” he tells the camera of the stereotypical parts he was asked to play. “I said, ‘Listen, my mother’s gonna watch this show. I can’t do this. I won’t do this.’” Wayans says he tried to steer sketch in a more culturally sensitive direction, but kept butting up against brick walls. “‘Hey, give me the ball; I know what this needs,’” he recalls saying in the doc, “but they would shoot my ideas down.”

Fed up after one of his sketches was cut from the show, Wayans says he decided to do the one thing he knew would get him fired. He and Randy Quaid played cops in the “Mr. Monopoly” sketch—and instead of playing the character how he had at the dress rehearsal, Wayans went off script —opting to play his cop character as an effeminate gay caricature.

“I snapped,” Wayans says of his decision. “I just did not care.”

Actor Griffin Dunne, that night’s celebrity host, says in the doc, “I thought it was weird, but people still laughed,” at Wayan’s performance. “And then Lorne fired him pretty much as he walked off the stage.”

“You cannot go rogue, you cannot try to steal a sketch,” former SNL writer A. Whitney Brown adds of Michaels’ decision. “A lot of people don’t know this about Saturday Night Live, but the actual amount of improvisation on that show is minuscule, maybe one line a year, I would bet one line every five years."

Wayans doesn’t regret joining the cast, however, as he explains in the doc, “I felt like I was born to be on Saturday Night Live.”

He ended up parlaying his firing into his own award-winning sketch comedy series alongside member of his famous family, In Living Color, which premiered four years later on Fox. That show also launched the careers of Jim Carrey, Jennifer Lopez, and others and even beat SNL for the Emmy for Outstanding Variety, Music, or Comedy Series in 1990 in its first season.

Despite how things ended at SNL for Wayans, there’s apparently no bad blood on Michaels’ side.

“Lorne is a very forgiving man,” Wayans notes in the series. And it certainly seems that way since he was invited back to perform stand-up on the show’s finale the season he was axed, and later hosted the show in 1995. Adds Wayans, “I think he just wanted to let me know that he believed in me.”