Keenen Ivory Wayans is an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. He is also famous for being a member of the Wayans family of entertainers.
Keenen Ivory Wayans:
He was born on July 23, 1958, in Harlem, New York, USA. He is the son of a supermarket manager father Howell Stouten and a social worker and homemaker mother Elvira Alethia. Keenen grew up with four brothers, Damon, Shawn, Dwayne, and Marlon, and five sisters, Elvira, Kim, Nadia, Deidra, and Vonnie. He belongs to African-American and part Oceanian heritage and holds an American nationality.
Keenen graduated from Seward Park High School and further attended Tuskegee University where he gained a scholarship. However, he decided to drop out and focus more on his career as a comedian.
Keenen Ivory Wayans’ Professional Career:
Initially, Keenen did stand-up comedy at The Improv in New York. He met Robert Townsend, who helped him very much to learn more about the comedy industry. Together, they moved to cross country to Los Angeles in 1980. There, he portrayed a soldier on a regular TV series For Love and Honor. Likewise, he portrayed a famous NFL linebacker on Hill Street Blues.
Townsend wrote, starred, and directed the film Hollywood Shuffle where Wayans worked as a co-writer and co-star. The movie became commercially successful and collected enough money for him to make I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. He even wanted to make shows similar to Saturday Night Live, with diverse people of color. Furthermore, he wrote, created, and starred on the Fox Network sketch comedy In Living Color from 1990 to 1994.
Fox gave him a lot of freedom with his series even though Fox executives were concerned about the show’s content prior to its debut. Wayans has also appeared in many movies like A Low Down Dirty Shame in 1994, The Glimmer Man in 1996, Most Wanted in 1997, Scary Movie in 2000, My Wife and Kids in 2001, Happily Divorced in 2013, Last Comic Standing in 2014, and more.