Damon Wayans is opening up on the circumstances surrounding his firing from “Saturday Night Live” in 1986, admitting he “purposely” got himself canned.
The Emmy-nominated comedian, known for roles in “In Living Color,” “My Wife and Kids” and “The Great White Hype,” revisited his short-lived stint on the iconic sketch comedy series — which is looking back at its 50-year history in the new Peacock docuseries “SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night.”
“I felt like I was born to be on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ so I was not nervous for the audition,” he reflects in the series, but says he was warned by Eddie Murphy about all the problems he could face 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,” he says of Murphy, who walked away from “SNL” in 1984. “But they would shoot my ideas down. Everything Eddie said came true.”
The 64-year-old Harlem native says he often clashed with the show’s white writing team about roles that depicted stereotypes, and that he finally reached a breaking point on the March 15, 1986 episode.
In the infamous “Mr. Monopoly” sketch that was broadcast live, Wayans went off-script by playing his cop character as an effeminate gay stereotype who leaned his crotch into host Griffin Dunne’s character.
“I snapped. I just did not care,” Wayans explained. “I purposely did that because I wanted [“SNL” creator Lorne Michaels] to fire me.”
Michaels said letting Wayans go was “really, really hard, but it had to be done.”
Despite unceremoniously leaving the show after just 11 episodes, the “Poppa’s House” star didn’t do too bad for himself.
As a breakout star of “In Living Color” a few years later, Wayans — along with Jamie Foxx, Jim Carey, David Alan Grier and his siblings Keenen Ivory Wayans and Kim Wayans — enjoyed beating “SNL” to win the Emmy for Outstanding Variety, Music, or Comedy Series after its first season in 1990.