Doubling down on his belief that it takes offensive material to reach some heights of comedy, Marlon Wayans compared a sour movie deal with the Weinstein brothers to the scores of women who accused Harvey Weinstein of rape and sexual assault.
The comments came from an interview with The New York Times’ David Marchese, released just nine days after the shock overturn of Weinstein’s New York conviction. Marchese asked Wayans if it irritated him that a new Scary Movie had been announced, since Wayans and his brothers had created that project only to be shut out of the franchise by the third installment. Wayans initially responded that it didn’t bother him, but followed up with a dig at the Weinsteins when Marchese asked if he still got paid from those projects.
“No, that’s a whole ’nother conversation. I like to say that you know, those Weinsteins,” Wayans chuckled, “they raped everybody.”
“Not the same,” Marchese countered.
“Businesswise,” Wayans clarified. “Literally and businesswise. We all got a little taste. They were some terrible people,” he added.
Wayans has maintained that Bob and Harvey Weinstein stiff-armed him and his brothers out of the Scary Movie franchise without warning, and that the deals were made behind his back. Bob Weinstein denied that the decision to move on without the Wayans was aggressive, according to the Times.
Circling back to the Weinstein joke, Marchese pressed Wayans further, asking him about the thought process when deciding whether or not to tell an offensive joke. Wayans answered that he considers the audience, then expanded on the Weinstein joke: “I was gonna say: he didn’t just rape women, he raped —– too, we did business with him.” (Wayans used an expletive that was bleeped out of the podcast recording by the Times. The entire joke was unprintable in Marchese’s article.)
When Marchese responded “Oof” to that joke, Wayans seized on it and revealed the special phrase he and his brothers had for pearl-clutching reactions to offensive jokes.
“Do you see your response? Me and my brother, we used to be in a writer’s room. We’ve always been edgy with our humor. So when people have that reaction, like, Oh, God, we used to call that ‘getting on a whitey bike.’ Brothers would crack up at that, but white people: Oh, I don’t know about that, and they start pedaling backward,” Wayans said.
“When you’ve been in a situation — I can talk about things from a different perspective,” Wayans continued. “When I talk about Bob and Harvey and I say that, it’s because there’s damage there. Because we have been victims. But in business, not physically. I think a monster is a monster, and those monsters showed up in business as well.”
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