In the fourth episode of Peacock’s docuseries SNL 50: Beyond Saturday Night, Damon sat down to reminisce and laugh about his short time on the show. “Yeah I got fired. We gonna talk about it,” he said.
“I felt like I was born to be on Saturday Night Live. So I was not nervous for the audition,” he said and added that he’d already worked on crafting characters like Homey D. Clown and others, who would go on to become fan favorites on In Living Color.
Eddie Murphy, who’d recently departed from the show, told Damon, “Write your own sketches. Otherwise, they’re gonna give you some Black people shit to do, and you ain’t gonna like it.” But as Damon found his footing working on the series, he had a hard time connecting with the writers.
“Hey, give me the ball; I know what this needs,” he’d say to the writers, trying to get his own work on the show. “But they would shoot my ideas down.”
“Everything Eddie said came true. They started writing me in their sketches,” he said of the stereotypical roles he was given. He even said that there were times when he’d straight up refuse roles that the writers had created for him. “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.'”
Then, 12 episodes into the season, he decided to lean into a different stereotype for a sketch that is now infamous for all the wrong reasons. In “Mr. Monopoly,” Damon and Randy Quaid played cops questioning a suspect (played by host Griffin Dunne) whose lawyer is literally Mr. Monopoly.
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Damon did the sketch by the book during dress rehearsal but took matters into his own hands by the time of the live taping and went off-script. He played his character using an “effeminate gay guy” stereotype. “I thought it was weird, but people still laughed,” Griffin Dunne said of the sketch.
“And then Lorne fired him pretty much as he walked off the stage,” Griffin recalled. “I snapped. I just did not care. I purposefully did that because I wanted him to fire me,” Damon added. Lorne even said that firing Damon was “really, really hard, but it had to be done.”
And while the game-time decision could’ve destroyed Damon’s career, it did the total opposite as he went on to co-create and star in the sketch series In Living Color.
Damon finished by saying that he and Lorne were in good standing, and even though he was fired in the middle of Season 11, he was still invited back to perform stand-up in that season’s finale. “Lorne is a very forgiving man. And I think he just wanted to let me know that he believed in me,” he said.
Watch SNL 50: Beyond Saturday Night on Peacock.