Damon Wayans wants to be funny, not offensive, because he understands that times have changed, which means comedy has changed. The stand-up OG has 30-plus years in the game and has been successful with his jokes on stage, television, and the big screen. But with comedians being canceled left and right for “punching down” on groups of people — much like Dave Chappelle has been accused of doing in his controversially nuanced Netflix specials — Wayans remains confident that his sense of humor can trump this era of social reckoning.
“I don’t believe in cancel culture. I believe that people still want to laugh, and I think at this present time people really want to laugh, and we need to laugh because we haven’t had the sigh of relief,” he told “The Big Podcast with Shaq” hosts Shaquille O’Neal and Adam Lefkoe. The latest episode of the series was published on Wednesday (Feb. 26), where the jokester recalled the history of televised sketch comedy beginning with “Saturday Night Live” in 1975 in the wake of the nation being divided after Richard Nixon’s presidency. But for the past decade, Wayans believes comedy has been missing a sense of unity about “how stupid we are” that no-holds-barred comedy is meant to provide, without prejudice.
“It’s all in the presentation… If you present it right, people are gonna laugh… They can’t help but laugh because the characters are funny, they’re not offensive. If you do it with love, you get the laugh,” said the Major Payne actor. But hands down, the entertainer’s Handi Man character, a handicapped superhero on “In Living Color,” would definitely be crossing a boundary for some if he were on screen today. The inspiration for the caped caricature came from his experiences as a child with a clubbed foot and being placed in special education classes despite not having a cognitive disability.
“They were my buddies,” he recalled about his peers. “In my stand-up, I talked about having my clubbed foot, and I was saying that, you know, I wasn’t a tough kid, my mouth was what got me in trouble, and I said, ‘I guess you don’t find that many [handicapped] bullies.'… It was funny, and it came from an honest place… that’s what I’m saying about presentation. You know, if I were to just go up on stage and start doing [handicapped] people, I would get crucified.”
The world of comedy might need a family like the Wayans to set the example of how to tell jokes about sensitive topics from a place of love. He offered up, “They should do ‘In Living Color’ specials. Don’t bring back the show, bring back specials… Give us an hour and we’ll prove to you that people really wanna see this, need to see this.” Wayans even revealed that his brood of talented comics even considered doing a Wayans Family roast at one point in time. However, the “Poppa’s House” star now thinks that “roasts have just gotten mean.”
He compared the 1977 roast of Richard Pryor to the 2024 roast of Tom Brady as an example, expressing that the former is the one that got it right. “It gets too mean,” he said, adding, “It’s like when you start touching people’s souls, it’s like you’re crossing, to me, the boundaries of what’s funny, you know what I mean? There’s certain things, yeah, you can joke about, but then there’s other things that, you know, a person may not be the same after that one.”
One thing is for certain, the Wayans family has a legacy of delivering laughs that has endeared fans to its generations of talent. Check out the full podcast episode below.