DVD offers fans a chance to revisit 'Color'

By Daniel P. Finney, KRT Campus

The trouble with topical humor is that it’s like a gallon of milk. It’s really good when it’s fresh out of your grocer’s refrigerator, but it goes bad after a while.

For a good many of the sketches on “In Living Color,” the former Fox network comedy that arrived Tuesday on DVD, the expiration date has long passed.

The show probably was funny in 1990, when it debuted, with sketches on the lameness of Milli Vanilli and “The Exxon Family.” The latter, for example, lampoons the life of the captain of the Exxon Valdez, the oil tanker that spilled 53 million gallons of oil on Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989.

In their time, those gags were probably guffaw-inspiring, or at least chuckle-worthy. But in 2004, they’re more of a sepia-tone yearbook photo than cause for good comedy.

The real value of “In Living Color,” it seems, is as a pop culture history book. Sketches on Oprah Winfrey’s constantly fluctuating weight, Mike Tyson’s bizarre behavior and Michael Jackson’s (allegedly) multiple plastic surgeries show us that some narcissistic celebrities, freaks and nutjobs have been with us a very long time, too long, in fact.

To be fair, when watching sketch comedy such as “In Living Color” or its elder brethren “Saturday Night Live,” one must remember that for every inspired sketch, such as “SNL’s” “Land Shark” or “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood,” there are umpteen hundreds of forgettable and truly unfunny bits that faded into obscurity.

To the show’s credit, “In Living Color” boasts its own cadre of elite sketches that compete with the greats produced during the prime years of “SNL” or “The Carol Burnett Show.”

Damon Wayans turn as Homey the Clown is timelessly funny, as is Jim Carrey’s portrayal of media mogul and weirdo Ted Turner in “Ted Turner’s Very Colorized Classics,” during which Turner recasts old classic movies with famous black actors. Alas, Carrey’s grotesque Fire Marshal Bill did not appear in the first season.

And Damon Wayans work with David Alan Grier on “Men On Film,” playing two homosexual movie critics, still inspires hysterics, even if the movies they reference are long forgotten.

What won’t be forgotten about “In Living Color” is that it brought real color, as in racial diversity, to previously white-dominated sketch comedy.

“ So much of what was on TV at that time had nothing to do with black people’s lives,” says cast member Tommy Davidson in one of the episode commentaries. “On this show, we talked like we talk.”

As hard as it is to imagine, hip-hop slang and music were hard to come by in 1990. “In Living Color” brought African-American music, jargon and fashion to prime time and helped jump-start a cultural shift that eventually ended with hip-hop becoming the dominant music genre of today.

In the tradition of “SNL,” the “In Living Color” players were not afraid to get political. Homey the Clown was an ex-con bitter at “the man” who was keeping him down. The predominately black cast of “In Living Color” skewered institutional racism as easily and deftly as it mocked exaggerated African-American celebrities and politicians of the era.

Still, in a time when Bill Cosby tried to represent the African-American experience by playing a rich doctor married to a rich lawyer with mostly well-behaved children, “In Living Color” was the rare black-centered show that, to use the hip-hop vernacular, kept it real.

So, while the gags may seem dated, they’re definitely worth remembering.