Three years after delivering a stand-up comedy special for Netflix, Marlon Wayans, the youngest of the Wayans Brothers, has a new hour for HBO Max, filmed outdoors in Miami this spring, in which he wasn’t as concerned about the pandemic as he was about outie belly buttons and the sex lives of his two kids.
The Gist: Of all of the Wayans Brothers, perhaps it’s the youngest, Marlon, who has shown the most range in his 30-plus years in front of the camera.
Between sitcoms from the late 1990s and the late 2010s, The CW’s The Wayans Bros. and NBC’s Marlon, he has managed to carve out a career that has included supporting roles in critically acclaimed dramatic movies such as Requiem for a Dream and Heat, a big film franchise part as Ripcord in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, hosted a reality comedy competition featuring a then-unknown Tiffany Haddish (Funniest Wins for TBS), starred in broad over-the-top comedies such as White Chicks and Little Man, and wrote/produced/starred in multiple parody franchises, most notably the Scary Movie and A Haunted House series.
He delivered his first Netflix comedy special, Woke-ish, in 2018. His follow-up, You Know What It Is, now out on HBO Max, examines his fears, which at least for this hour, focus on people with outie belly buttons, the sexuality of his son and daughter when they were teens, and that his own infidelity to their mother may have had something to do with it. It’s Marlon’s first project through an overall deal he made with HBO Max.
The title of his hour is reminiscent of a line of dialogue from Netflix’s The Irishman, in which the mafia explains their inevitable hits on people with the phrase, “It is what it is.” Only in Marlon’s world, the phrase gets turned around by muggers and himself alike to explain themselves, delivered to us as: “You know what it is.”
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: It retraces some of the ground from Woke-ish, so if you already watched that, then this should remind you of that!
Memorable Jokes: Marlon works up a sweat pretty early with a bit in which he describes his childhood bully as a bow-legged monster, demonstrating by walking on the sides of his feet with a stool atop his head (to represent the bully carrying his own little brother on his shoulders) while dragging the microphone along the ground and filling a saggy diaper and smoking his mother’s cigarettes. Can you picture that? It’s even more when Marlon’s acting it out.
Marlon also name checks several rappers in his rant against outie belly buttons, and tags the whole thing with a jab at the white insurgents who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6., which firmly places this special within the timely context of 2021.
And yet the remainder of the hour goes back in time with Marlon indulging in multiple fantasies involving first his daughter, and later his son, on their prom nights, receiving their potential dates (or in Marlon’s world, sex partners) and how he might respond to their suitors depending upon their sexuality.
In a later bit, he talks about the generational and cultural divides among parents when it comes to spanking, wondering if he made the right decisions with his kids.
And as you could see from the trailer, Marlon also manages to impersonate his three famous older brothers, Keenen, Damon and Shawn, all within the context of them mocking him for getting caught cheating on his longtime partner and mother of his kids. All of which he traces back to an inopportune celebration of his 2013 movie, A Haunted House, by going to the island of St. Barts with a friend and making new ones along the way.
Our Take: As I wrote in my review of Woke-ish three years ago, Marlon Wayans is still trying to grow out of the shell of his family’s and culture’s history with homophobia. He even prefaces this hour by acknowledging that anything he hates comes out of fear, and anything he fears comes out of worries about how things reflect upon himself.
And yet.
He hasn’t seem to have grown much in the ensuing three years post-Woke-ish. In fact, his material has regressed. Sure, he gets a couple of applause breaks for saying he loves his daughter no matter what, but before, after and in between those moments of applause, he’s describing and acting out his daughter’s potential sexual encounters, and later his teenage son’s imaginary gay sex, which is not funny but just gross.
It looks and sounds, too, as if he tries to compensate for this by adding a line in post-production. In the 31st minute, while the camera is shooting Marlon from behind, we hear him say in a slightly different volume and tone from the rest of the special: “This is a real issue for fathers. Especially in the Black community.”
Because Marlon’s far from the only Black comedian to still make homophobia a big part of their hours. If only he had more of a point or a message behind his.
Then again, perhaps Marlon knows that even at age 49, he still has a lot of growing yet to do. As he joked, too: “And see, I put Google Alerts on myself, because as you all see from this set, I can say a lot of stupid shit. So I need to know the stupid shit I say so I can call my publicist so she can put the stupid shit I say and say it was a lie, when it probably was the truth.”
Our Call: SKIP IT. At the end of the hour, I felt a little bit like Marlon had robbed me with all of his mugging. That even though he could regale us with all of his memorable TV and movie credits, reminding us of the joy he has brought, he felt somehow obligated to indulge us with this lackluster hour. Because, well, it is what it is.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
Watch Marlon Wayans: You Know What It Is on HBO Max