In Living Color found a new streaming home earlier this year on The Brick TV, a Black-owned platform built around preserving culturally significant television. For a series that ran on Fox from 1990 to 1994 and has spent long stretches unavailable outside of DVD box sets, that access changes how a new audience encounters Kim Wayans' run of music parodies — and it gives longtime viewers a reason to revisit sketches that landed very differently the second time around.
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Kim Wayans Parodies: From Crystal Waters to Vanessa Williams
This episode explores Kim Wayans’ influential run of music parodies on In Living Color, showing how her characters used humor to critique how Black women are treated in p...
Wayans carved out a niche within the show's ensemble: parodying Black women pop and R&B stars at the very moment several of them were dominating the charts. On DJ Sir Daniel and Jay Ray's Queue Points episode covering the parodies, the hosts trace how Wayans turned Salt-N-Pepa's 1987 single "Push It" into "Cook It," a kitchen-set sketch performed alongside castmates T'Keyah Crystal Keymáh and Kim Coles. "Push It" had already gone platinum and cracked the Billboard Hot 100 top 20 by the time the sketch aired, meaning Wayans was working with material the audience already knew note for note.
That pattern held across her other targets. Crystal Waters's 1991 house single "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)" became "My Songs Are Mindless," a parody built around the song's wordless "la da dee, la da da" hook. Waters has said in interviews that the hook and lyrics were drawn from a real woman she used to walk past outside a Washington, D.C. hotel — a homeless woman who wore a full face of makeup and sang gospel songs on the street. That backstory wasn't widely known when the parody aired, and Sir Daniel and Jay Ray note that the joke leaned on the song's surface-level catchiness rather than its origin.
The Vanessa Williams parody carries important cultural impact. Williams, who became the first Black Miss America in 1984, was forced to resign months later after Penthouse published nude photos taken of her without her consent, making her the first Miss America in the pageant's history to give up the crown. By 1992, she had rebuilt her career as a musician and actor. One of Williams’ biggest hits was the single "Save the Best for Last," and Wayans' parody, "Kiss My Ass," reframed that comeback as a pointed response to the treatment she'd received eight years earlier.
Wayans' Tracy Chapman bit works differently — it's aimed less at Chapman and more at the music industry around her. Chapman's "Fast Car" won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the 1989 Grammys after also earning Record of the Year and Song of the Year nominations. The sketch imagines Chapman narrating her own life into lyrics in real time, a bit about how quickly the industry pressures an artist to replicate a hit rather than a joke at Chapman's expense.
"Rhythmless Nation" still ranks among the most talked-about sketches In Living Color ever aired. It took Wayans' Whitney Houston impression and mashed it up with a Janet Jackson parody based on "Rhythm Nation." It was funny at the time, but Houston has since opened up about how brutal that stretch of her career actually was. Knowing that now, it's hard to watch the sketch as pure comedy anymore. There was a real person absorbing real damage to her mental health and public image behind the joke.
"What we're gleaming from these performances of Kim Wayans, and her parodies of these Black women specifically, is that she did them with some care." — DJ Sir Daniel
"What me and Sir Daniel are talking about is squarely within Black tradition. She's telling a joke, right? But she's offering clever critique indirectly." — Jay Ray
The episode also traces Wayans' appearance as the unnamed Lounge Singer in her brother Keenen Ivory Wayans' 1988 comedy I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, a blaxploitation parody that arrived a year after Keenen co-wrote Hollywood Shuffle with Robert Townsend. It's a small role with essentially no dialogue, but it previews the physical, unrestrained comedic instincts that would define her In Living Color work two years later.
Editor's Note: Blog post was developed using AI assistance to repurpose content from our original episode, Kim Wayans Parodies: From Crystal Waters to Vanessa Williams, and was subsequently reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the Queue Points team to ensure accuracy and voice.