The Super Bowl, comedy, Chaotic Good and a ginger hick laughing alone on a loveseat

Comedy is all about timing. Back in the '90s, the revolution was occasionally televised, and the gist and jabs from "In Living Color" and "The Kids In The Hall" spoke to me.

Feb 11, 2024

Over at the companion Facebook group for SportsLit, which is called “SportsLit, The Group Created To Spread Impactful Awareness of SportsLit,” I have been posting about comedy shows and episodes that centered around or incorporated the Super Bowl.

It is a way to ensure no one forgets about the Big Game between (checks notes) Kansas City and San Francisco. And it was also a prompt to remember a time, a time before even dial-up internet when you got your influencers wherever you could find them, even if they came through the static of over-the-air television.

The other posts have mentioned the episode of The League that sent up Pete Carroll coming down with stepondickitis when the Seattle Seahawks were one yard away from a Super Bowl-winning touchdown. Or the time The Mary Tyler Moore Show indirectly sent a message five decades into the future to warn us about pervasive sports gambling becoming “mechanical” and all the fun being taken out of it. And the Seinfeld where Jerry and Newman ended up sitting next to each other at the game.

The Simpsons episodes “Lisa The Greek” and “Sunday, Cruddy Sunday” rate mention.

By the by, talking about the carbon footprint of Big Sport has not amounted to a hill of beans eyeballs-wise. But this was the Strip on the eve of Super Sunday. Pollster Frank Luntz said it took an hour to drive one mile due to traffic gridlock. In all of the places where one might want to walk and see some sights.

Enough about remembering TV, how about… remembering some more TV? When it comes to 1990s pop culture and the Super Bowl, the OG, as the aging hipsters say, was In Living Color back in ’92. That era lives rent-free in my head, as you shall see.

On that Super Bowl Sunday back in the ’90s, Keenen Ivory Wayans, and Co. reminded us Chaotic Good always keeps the ball matriculation’ down the field.

The thinkpiece industry has used a lot of bandwidth to aver that the In Living Color live show that aired during halftime of the Super Bowl held in 1992 changed the presentation and staging of NFL games forever. That Super Bowl’s halftime show would be the last one to feature a marching band. The next year, after being smacked in the mouth ratings-wise by the Wayanses’ televised guerrilla theatre, the NFL and the partnered network would have Michael Jackson perform. Wayans and FOX had made them realize they had gotten passive about the search for “new audiences and new fans … counted every fifteen minutes,” as the protagonist observed in Peter Gent’s novel The Franchise.

I don’t need to focus on what The Funny was, do I? As a 15-year-old ginger hick whose family’s TV antenna did not get a FOX station, I missed seeing it live. In 1991, ’92, and ’93, In Living Color was astride a wavelength of finding out who I was in between the belly laughs over things well beyond my world. The theme song slapped: You can walk on the moon / float like a balloon / You see it's never too late and it's never too soon.

Oh, I heard about it the next day on the school bus in the cafeteria. I likely saw it within a couple of weeks. The Global Television Network in Canada likely wedged it the rotation of reruns it would put on at 12:05 a.m. on Friday nights between Sportsline and Late Night With David Letterman. I’d be splayed, and slayed, on the loveseat four feet from the TV, using a pillow as a giggle-muffler out of fear of waking up my dad sleeping in the next room. Which I often managed to do.

As a young white person, I was always eager for whatever windows into the cultural worlds of people who didn’t look like me, or reflect my cranny of rural southeastern Ontario. I would learn the term gatekeeping far too late. But it reads like compensation. Since I have defective melanin — “nature’s eyeblack right hyur,” as a scion of the Wayans comedy dynasty called it on Happy Endings — I needed to learn from others blessed with it.1

Full credit there goes to my parents for leading by example with not being judgy. Look at the effort and the thought behind the work. In sports, if you could play, you could play.

With comedy, funny was funny. Anyone who brought Chaotic Good to the party should be welcome.

In Living Color came on the air in 1990. I probably did not get wind of it for at least a year and a half, but the first encounter with Damon Wayans’ Homey D. Clown saying “Homey don’t play that way” before braining a child with a tennis ball-sock had me. Yeah, I was an antisocial child.

That also ties to an observation Paul Newman made when Slap Shot was released, which Jonathon Jackson included in his book that was recently discussed on SportsLit. Newman claimed anything truly funny is not vulgar.

And In Living Color was that on that night, and most nights. It challenged what could be on TV. It could be the first half of an “X walked so Y could run” meme with Chappelle’s Show.

Since I didn’t see it, I have to share another bit of Keenen Ivory Wayans media from around that time. I know it saw it live, with family present. I cannot find it on YouTube, but it happened.

Nineteen ninety-two was also the year of the Los Angeles riots after the acquittals in the police beating of Rodney King. Later that year, the Emmy Awards telecast was on and it had got around to the Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Program.

In Living Color was a recent winner in the category. It was up against a Late Night 10th anniversary special — and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, months after “Johnny” had signed off for the last time. Of course, Carson had to win. Fealty to his legacy demanded it.

Wayans turned it into a great bit. In an on-camera stand-up, he said, “Now I know how Rodney King felt… a Black man with his fate in the hands of an all-white jury.” He talked a bit more, then strolled out of frame, raising a hand-lettered sign, “No Emmy No Peace.”

Could not do that now. But it was effing funny and sly as hell. We need to laugh at uncomfortable truths, if not right away.

Slipping into now-we-know-better mode, I also realize Wayans pulled a fast one on me and the white audience… the premise of the joke required us to forget Rodney King was not on trial, Whitey.

Damnit, I knew that already. Of course, three decades later, the media is still encouraging that. There are only brief periods of reflecting on privileges we assume to be ours; how we rationalize those; and how unlearning seems like too much work.

The In Living Color sensibility, among others’, opened my mind. Like the NFL team that pays for the Super Bowl run now and defers the salary-cap hell till later, it could not last, but it was fun while it lasted. David Peisner wrote a book entitled Homey Don’t Play That: The Story of In Living Color and the Black Comedy Revolution that covers the development of the series, its breakthrough, and its collapse. His chapter about the Super Bowl special live show was excerpted by Rolling Stone in February 2018.

The Chaotic Good window only opens for short spans. I am lucky it was kicked open in comedy, music, and sports during my impressionable mid-teenage years back in the ’90s.

I have not talked much about the actual episode. I did watch it for review, and from corporatist-captured 2024, it is a marvel that this aired on a major broadcast network in prime time. It also beggars belief there was a time when you cheered for FOX, then a five-year-old network owned by Rupert Murdoch, for frig’s sake, as some sort of underdog.

That was how staid the three major broadcast networks that aired NFL games were at that time. Comedy on TV, outside of Letterman, was set in its ways. Perhaps the imperative, as Bono of U2 once said live on-air during the Grammys, to push to “continue to fuck up the mainstream,” really hit with Gen X and Xennials. Respectful enough of what came before; idealistic enough to think you could change institutions from within; but always outnumbered demographically. And now forever effed over since how the vibes are measured and fit into the spreadsheets is our new God. It’s just a damn a popularity contest with you algorithms!

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In that book chapter, Peisner covers how FOX needed a bleep button for ILC’s live show, and had a six- to 10-second delay. The suit dummies at the network pitched the idea to Keenen Ivory Wayans, rather than the other way around.

There are elements of that show that would get buffed out in the name of Synergy and Brand Identity. Right off the hop, Jim Carrey assures the audience, “Don’t worry, you won’t miss any of the senseless brutality!”, playing on the brain-bashing hazards of the game imposes on the players. The NFL has bent on that, but they probably would dislike a Canadian comedian being flippant about it.

A combo of taped bits played for a studio audience and live sketches followed. Wayans and his brother Damon Wayans broke out their sketchy hosts of Homeboyz Shopping Network. Carrey showed us “football and alcohol (are) a deadly combination!!” in a Fire Marshal Bill sketch.

And then there was “Men on… Football.” Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier played two stereotypically offensive gay cultural critics. This was a time when straight dudes acting gay had become tropey. It was there in my small-town white culture. Shock value while punching down on an out-group? Effin’ A.

As for the sketch, I remembered the low-hanging fruit, the double entendres about great football names such as “Dick Buttkiss” and “Bob Greeeeasy,” and Wayans’s Blaine wishing the big game matched the “Oilers and the Packers,” if you got the drift. A Richard Gere gerbil joke by Wayans and Grier giving oxygen to rumors about the sexuality of Olympic sprinter Carl Lewis got through the censors.

Why? As Piesner details, the exec whose figurative finger was on the bleep button was laughing too hard to make the call. Anything truly funny can’t be vulgar.

The last sketch was carried by Carrey and his Background Guy character. But Jamie Foxx coolly code-switches to the persona of a Southern white football coach speaking in coachspeak bafflegab. What the hell is “control-top offense”?

The outfit on Foxx is perfect: V-neck coach’s sweater tucked into beltless slacks, sneakers, and a cap of the Washington team. Tommy Davidson impersonates sideline reporter O.J. Simpson. And holy probably unintentional foreshadowing, did the Carrey character just get away with killing two people?2

It was a different time, not better or worse. It is worth watching just for the time stamps. Within two years of the broadcast, FOX would snap up NFL broadcasting rights, and it would never be able to do this again.

There are weak points and disposable stuff. The women in the cast, Kelly Coffield, T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh, and Kim Wayans, were given little to do but stand around as hype women. No Benita Buttrell, really?3

But that was the change that had to come, or it at least felt like it to a young but old-souled Sags.

Screw hierarchy; there was a need of reassurance that the thoughts and feelings that made me feel weird were normal. And we didn’t have layers of sub-Reddits yet. Football-watching a space where I could zone out.

Sketch comedy was another place. I have a memory, maybe Mandela Effect-tinged, of being on the floor watching early The Kids In The Hall. Specifically, it was the Bruce McCulloch teenage metalhead “Stop The World, We Broke Up” sketch.

Somewhere between the lyrics “gonna shave my head / start a gang / join the army / move to Spain” and McCulloch whining “It was a mutual thing!!” into a payphone, my dad could stands no more. What is wrong with you??

I still do not have an answer for him, but if I was wrong, who wants to be right?

And a year after the In Living Color show that inspired whatever this is, Late Night With Conan O’Brien debuted on NBC and Global. Watching the première in the 2020s, it is clear the 30-year-old host and his 26-year-old sidekick were out front in the TV traditionalists.

“Can you believe it?’ Richter exclaimed. “We’re on TV.”

“Calm yourself, Andy, act professional!” O’Brien says. “We can’t act like people who are too young to be on television.” And if you notice, Conan almost steps on his joke with a shit-eating grin.

It was a sign generational tectonic plates were shifting, and I was hopeful my era would be the one to unlock the gates and laugh with everyone. No one who could bring it should be deemed too ‘too something.’ Who knew getting those inside gates yourself would be frickin’ impossible?

The ‘too something meme’ is now intellectual property of the corporations that rule us. The NFL used it for a commercial where Justin Jefferson, the star wide receiver for my Minnesota Vikings, encourages children to play football. The disrupters, the slept-on, told they were too much, too loud, or not loud enough. An alien that just landed yesterday would have no idea about the G-forces of every collision between a 325-pound O-lineman and a 270-pound edge rusher with a 4.3-second time in the 20-yard shuttle run.

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