He’s ready for prime time and beyond
The TRICKIEST part of trying to take the measure of a comic such as Damon Wayans is that it’s hard to know what part of a radically disparate career to look at first.
He burst onto the pop culture scene as a fired “Saturday Night Live” player who joined his family in building their own celebrated, politically incorrect comedy sketch show, “In Living Color,” for Fox. Then, earlier this decade he buckled down to star as suburban dad Michael Kyle for five years on the made-for-mainstream-consumption ABC sitcom “My Wife and Kids.”
Now, after his latest sketch-comedy show, “The Underground,” lasted only a year on Showtime, he’s got another family sitcom in the works for ABC, possibly for the upcoming TV season.
Even he isn’t exactly sure how to categorize himself.
“I can work in prime time, I’ve done stand-up comedy for conventions, I know how to tone it down and be funny,” says Wayans, 48. “It’s just the artist in me would rather be edgy.”
Think of him as the love child of Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, a constant balancing act between being both out there and commercially viable that Wayans also brings to his stand-up comedy gigs in Las Vegas, where he’s playing this weekend. The Vegas audience is a cross-sectional representation of America, only a little less uptight because they’re, well, in Sin City, he says.
“What I love about Vegas is I can be as out there as I want there, but then you always want to be accessible to people who may have never seen you before,” Wayans says. “So instead of being rude and crude, I’m trying to be well-rounded in terms of my subject matter.”
By contrast, at comedy clubs in other cities, Wayans talks to the audience more. In Vegas, “it’s more of a show. I’m not there to talk to the guy in the front row. In comedy clubs, I’m trying to connect to the people.”
Those are the people he hopes will connect to the TV pilot he’s finishing up for ABC, “Never Better,” about a recovering alcoholic played by Wayans who is trying to make good with his wife and family. It’s a rare instance of Wayans performing material he didn’t create -- it’s a remake of a British sitcom -- but he says he sympathizes with his character, noting that he himself is “just a drink away from doing some things I shouldn’t do, so I’m not drinking right now.”
Wayans’ own family life is the stuff of legend -- a group of 10 siblings who have spread themselves across the TV and film worlds as writers, directors and performers in a way that has little precedent, even in the showbiz culture that produced the Osmonds, Jacksons and Baldwins. It may seem strange that a group of brothers and sisters so involved in irreverent, cutting-edge humor has emerged from a Jehovah’s Witnesses household, but Wayans says their father’s faith was surprisingly liberating for them.
“God’s sense of humor is higher than ours, and the thing that man says that is wrong is probably not wrong,” Wayans says. “He’s the same God who made the dolphin and the platypus. If it were up to man, there’d only be the dolphin, because they’re cute. So our sense of humor’s nothing compared to his.”
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DAMON WAYANS
WHERE: The Orleans Hotel & Casino, 4500 W. Tropicana Ave., Las Vegas
WHEN: 8 p.m. Fri.-Sun
PRICE: $66 to $99
INFO: (702) 284-7777, orleanscasino.com
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