Official David Alan Grier Website

The Inception

I went to Yale School of Drama and in my second year, I went to New York City to perform at the Improv. I wanted to do stand up. Why? I don't know. I didn't go on until two in the morning; I was on line with everybody else. There I met Keenan Ivory Wayans and he was the only "regular" who was good to me. He stopped and talked to me, "Hold the mic like this. Don't be too crazy. Make sure you tell all of your jokes. Make sure people can hear you." I had never gotten that. The other guys were total assholes.

Cut to a few years later, I was doing a movie called "A Soldier's Story," I met Robert Townsend on that. I thought Robert was the most brilliant comic I had ever seen. He was doing his jokes, then he would do Keenan's and Damon's jokes. And I am laughing so hard, I'd be like "Where did you get this bit?" He said "Oh, that's my friend Damon Wayans." I go out to Los Angeles for pilot season, and started hanging out with Damon, Kim and all the other Wayans'. Robert was talking about how he was going to produce and direct this movie "The Hollywood Shuffle" and they were writing it together. For an independent film, it became a mega-hit. After the success of "The Hollywood Shuffle," Keenan was offered... EVERYTHING! Everybody was saying "You want to do a TV show? What do you want to do? Do you want to do a play? What do you want to do?"

He said "I want to do the black version of SNL." So this was the idea that floated around for a while. It would be so funny to do an all black version of SNL. Nobody else could have ever pulled it off. He asked me to be on it but I kept up turning it down. I was not a stand-up comic. I did not come to the table with a lot of characters. Everybody else did. In my mind, it was crabs in a barrel. I did not want to be in a cast of 900 funny dudes with everyone fighting for their sketch. So I said "No" several times. I moved back to New York from LA, and auditioned for thirty pilots where I was always "the other choice." It was either Albino Midgets or it's David. Casting would say, "Hey let's call David... maybe this character is black!" So, I was that guy.

In the end, I just did "In Living Color" because I knew it would be fun. I never thought it would get on the air because it was too outrageous.

Creating Characters

We did the pilot, it was an hour long, and it took almost a year to get picked up. I remember I did an episode of "Alf" in the meantime, among other jobs. And whatever set I was on, the crew had all seen "In Living Color," and they were passing a tape around. They were like, "Dude, what the fuck? This is the funniest shit I have ever seen in my life." The pilot actually got reviewed in Vanity Fair before we were picked up. But we were picked up. FINALLY! I was in hit after years and years of trying.

I made up my characters out of desperation. Damon came in and said "You've got to come up with something." I said "Like what?" and he sat there and bled Calhoun Tubbs, the old blues guitarist, out of me. He was based on this guy Shakey Jake, who was this really horrible blues player I used to see in college. He could not play the guitar, he couldn't sing and he had no talent. He was just old and black, so it was based on that guy.

Keenan and Damon were originally doing "Men on Film" and they were going to be brothers, Dickie and Donnie, but I had a different take on it. Originally, those two characters were reviewing made up movies. This was not that funny, I thought. The humor would flow if they reviewed real movies. When I lived in New York there was this public access show called, something like, "In the Closet." You never saw this dude and he had this real creepy voice: "Alright guys.. now we are gonna take a look at the shower scene from Top Gun." Then when it was over he would say "Ooooo, Nice one." So it was clearly for a gay audience, right? You'd never thought it would be. He would take only straight movies and find the gayness in them. That was the key. Once we decided we were doing that, it was off and running.

The Censors

As a performer, the set on "In Living Color" was totally free. I never had to deal with censors. Now on Chocolate News, as producers, we have to make a call and argue every point. We'll give the network that word if they let us do this. A lot of the stuff on "In Loving Color" the censors didn't know. When we did the Heddler's, the Jamaican family, those white people didn't know what Jamaican curse words were like {DAG *****}, Then Jamaican viewers started writing in "Do you realize what they are saying? This is what they mean." From then on we would bombard them with such profane shit, that they wouldn't know what to cut out. In "In Living Color" we didn't work under the guise that we could say "shit" or "fuck" and they would just bleep it like they do on Comedy Central now. We couldn't say it but now the networks have come around.

The Super Bowl Incident

In 1992, we decided to do "Men on Football" live to air concurrently against the Super Bowl half time show, which featured Brian Boitano and Dorothy Hamill. I was doing the movie "Boomerang" and "In Living Color" at the same time. So I would fly to New York, shoot "Boomerang" then fly back for "In Living Color" in L.A.

I was ready for the Super Bowl show, but I didn't know how big it was going to be. I left the hotel room that morning and all the guys who were parking the cars were saying, "You better be fuckin' funny!" These guys were all gonna be watching? I was like "Whaaaaat? Oh my god."

We were on the soundstage shooting and there was a party on the next stage. So the after party was going on while we were shooting. Sam Kinison and all these other people were there; it was packed. That's when I realized how much pressure there was. So we kind of went through it, by then the characters weren't really well known, and we had planned certain things that FOX didn't want us to do. For example they didn't want us use a blue ball, because it was too anatomical. So I hid one. A lot of the shit we were doing because we were just trying to have fun. We were trying to make each other crack up. We never did a real run through, because they would have cut it. Now the story I heard is that Barry Diller was watching it and no one hit that little button. We had an eight second delay. They just let us run and we ended up hijacking the whole audience for the Super Bowl. If you look back, that's why they started adding bigger acts to the Super Bowl like Michael Jackson, Queen Margaret... bigger and bigger acts for the half time show at the Super Bowl because they didn't want that to happen again.

And it never has.

ON DVD

Fox controls the DVD's now. They took out the music because they didn't want to pay for the rights. Back then FOX was a network until you got to the residual payment. That's when they would say, "Oh, no we're just a little fledgling couple of stations." They recut the shows and the DVD's are not in the form in which they aired. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that BET started running the original shows in their actual form.