Damon Wayans ‘Purposely’ Got Himself Fired from SNL After Getting Cautionary Advice from Eddie Murphy: ‘I Snapped’

Damon Wayans is reflecting on his brief time as a cast member on Saturday Night Live.

Wayans is one of many funny people looking back at the weekly late-night staple’s place in comedy history in the Peacock docuseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night. Recalling his time on season 11 in the fourth episode, “Season 11: The Weird Year,” Wayans said he didn’t feel a lot of nerves about auditioning or making the cast — at first.

“I felt like I was born to be on Saturday Night Live and so I was not nervous at all for the audition. I was like, ‘All right, bring it, let’s go.’ I had been working on characters.”

He initially felt confident he’d be able to bring something new to the cast and creator Lorne Michaels, though always had SNL alumnus Eddie Murphy’s cautionary advice in mind.

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“I knew Eddie Murphy and Eddie’s advice to me was, ‘Write your own sketches. Otherwise they’re going to give you some Black people s— to do and you ain’t gon’ like it,’ ” Wayans, 64, recalled.

When the season struggled, Wayans was eager to help suggest ways to get it back on track.

“I could feel something was wrong and that’s why I was like, ‘Hey, give me the ball. I know what this needs.’ But they would shoot my ideas down,” he shared.

“I brought [writer] Al Franken a sketch called ‘The Gifted Rapper,’ and he read the sketch and was like, ‘I just don’t get the rap thing.’ and I was like, ‘Yeah but 50 million other people do.’ ”

Wayans found that eventually, “Everything Eddie said came true.”

“They started writing me in their sketches and there was one sketch in particular and I’m like, ‘Hell nah, my mother’s gonna watch this show. I can’t do this. I won’t do this.’ ”

Jon Lovitz, who was a writer and cast member on the show at the time, expressed, “He was mad because he felt like he couldn’t be funny the way he’s funny. We were very young and there’s a lot at stake.”

Things came to a head during a “Mr. Monopoly” sketch in which host Griffin Dunne “played a sort of Scarface-y kind of guy.”

The sketch didn’t feel strong to Wayans, but it was picked after dress rehearsal, while a sketch Wayans had presented was not selected. He felt frustration as, from his standpoint, his sketches were often getting cut.

“And I snapped. I just did not care,” Wayans said, abandoning the script and doing his own thing in the sketch.

Lovitz recalled Wayans “doing his line like a very effeminate gay guy.” Wayans admitted, “I purposely did that because I wanted [Lorne] to fire me.”

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

In a previous interview that was reshared in the documentary, Michaels said, “It was really, really hard. But it had to be done.”

Other contributors in the docuseries said that Wayans “broke the ultimate golden rule” — “no surprises” — when he made his move.

Andy Breckman, who wrote the sketch, called Wayans’ choice “career suicide” moments after it happened. But, as Breckman recalled in the doc, his colleague corrected him.

“Tom Davis said, ‘No, no, no,’ ” Breckman recalled. ” ‘We are all going to be standing in line within three years to see a Damon Wayans movie. That was not career suicide: that was a career move.’ ”

While he was fired, it wasn’t the last time Wayans would appear on SNL, even that season. In a show of good faith, he was invited back to perform standup in the last episode of season 11.

“Lorne is a very forgiving man and I think he just wanted to let me know he believed in me,” Wayans shared. “But so much was going on. SNL was on the verge of being canceled.”

SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night is streaming now on Peacock.