Damon Wayans On ‘SNL’ Sketch That Got Him Fired: “I Snapped, I Just Did Not Care”

Damon Wayans is opening up about his short stint on Saturday Night Live and the sketch that got him fired from the NBC late-night sketch show.

The actor appears on Peacock’s docuseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, discussing his time on the comedy show.

“Yeah, I got fired. We gonna talk about it,” Wayans says in the fourth episode of the series titled “Season 11: The Weird Year.”

Wayans said he felt he was “born to be on Saturday Night Live” and had already been working on characters that would later become part of his sketch show In Living Color.

When Wayans joined SNL, he didn’t have much experience on screen, except for a role in Beverly Hills Cop alongside Eddie Murphy who shared some advice after his exit from the sketch show.

“Eddie’s advice to me was, ‘Write your own sketches. Otherwise, they’re gonna give you some Black people s*** to do, and you ain’t gonna like it,” Wayans recalled.

The comedian said that he tried to pitch his characters on the show, “but they would shoot my ideas down,” adding, “Everything Eddie said came true. They started writing me in their sketches.”

Wayans said they were giving him stereotypical roles and, at times, had to put his foot down, saying, “I’m like, ‘Hell no.’ I said, ‘Listen, my mother’s gonna watch this show. I can’t do this. I won’t do this.’”

Although he fought to hard against playing Black stereotypes, he leaned into a gay stereotype for a sketch that ultimately got him fired.

In Episode 12 of the season, Wayans and co-star Randy Quaid played cops in the “Mr. Monopoly” sketch. During rehearsal, Wayans played the character as the writers envisioned it, but during the live show, he went off script and played the character as an effeminate gay stereotype.

Guest host Griffin Dunne said, “I thought it was weird, but people still laughed. And then Lorne fired him pretty much as he walked off the stage.”

Wayans added, “I snapped. I just did not care. I purposefully did that because I wanted [Michaels] to fire me.”

Lorne Michaels said firing Wayans was “really, really hard, but it had to be done.”

Although Wayans was fired from Season 11, he was invited back to perform stand-up in the season finale. Wayans would later star in his own sketch show, In Living Color, and have a successful comedy career. He returned to SNL as host almost nine years after he was fired.

“Lorne is a very forgiving man and I think he just wanted to let me know that he believed in me,” Wayans added.

Watch the SNL sketch in the video below.