Wyatt Cenac
Appearances
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
hey, if this works, then maybe we could also take the characters from In Living Color and put them in the Pepsi challenge. And so we'll take like Homie the Clown and do some Pepsi challenge spots with Homie the Clown.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
And we'll take, you know, the Men On guys and put them in some Pepsi challenge things, which now is a thing that you see more commonly where you do see like sketch characters from SNL. All the time. being used in commercials. This was the proto of that. But the live in living color, they were so disruptive and so like- It's insane to watch it.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
They pushed the boundary so far, one of which making a joke about Richard Gere that there was- Oh my God, yes. There at the time had, there had been a- We all grew up with the gerbil story.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Sure, yes. But there might be younger audience members who are not familiar with this, but there was a time where it had been intimated that Richard Gere had gotten intimate with a gerbil.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yes. Yeah. As one might. Allegedly. Yeah. And so they make a joke about that, which they got past the censors. They made a second joke that got past the censors. And both of those things were the bridge too far for Pepsi, which... where they then said, you know what? Never mind. We're going to cancel this deal.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
I mean, this show is just what you find out. It's not about what you ask for.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yeah, to sort of silence tiny little Fox at the time. And they went and they got Michael Jackson, the biggest pop star of the moment.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yes, and it sets the precedent.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
But it also then set the precedent and set the standard for the NFL that, well, we got to do this every year now. And so then every year it became, all right, who's a giant sponsor we can get? So Pepsi, even though they initially were going to be in bed with Fox and In Living Color, They were like, ah, we're good. Oh, Michael Jackson?
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
We've already started three different text threads.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
The Super Bowl? Yeah, you can have our money. There's nothing controversial about this.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
But also age poorly... seven months later because the first Michael Jackson child abuse allegations came out that summer. So that Super Bowl, Michael Jackson performs, and not just performs, does a whole section about kids and wanting to love and protect the kids. We are the world with a children's choir.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
And then does a thing where the audience participation is holding up little stick figures of children while he goes and stands among children and picks them up and is like doing a whole thing. That summer is when... Those allegations come out.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
When I was in college, I auditioned to be the mascot and I didn't get it. At Carolina? At North Carolina, yeah. What's the Rams name? Ramses. They put a lot of thought into it. What was that audition like? They put you in the costume and then you got to like dance around and do stuff. And I didn't really know what to do. I just thought it would be fun.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Jocelyn Wildenstein.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yeah, Jocelyn Wildenstein lives rent-free in my brain. Also, hashtag rest in peace, Jocelyn. She just passed away.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
We lost her in 2024.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Catnap in peace. You sweet, sweet Sheba.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
I'm sorry. I just go to sleep hard and I wake up hard.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yeah. Yeah, Brian, you need to work on that endurance, my man. Get your numbers up, Brian. His phallus turgid.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
And so I put it on and I think I just did a bunch of like... hip thrusts and crotch grabs, and they were like, that's enough, and told me I had done things in that costume that had never been done before and should never be done again. Somehow you were too horny for the Ram mascot.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
I mean, you get three to five guys in a room and there's nothing on TV. It's at some point. I think just naturally the conversation is going to wind its way to boner data.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
No, that's, I mean, there's a very weird part of like... Just skimming over it. I mean, well, even as you said it, it is like... When you put it like that, I mean... He's sharing his son's medical data, which also feels like a violation.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yeah. Those mascots are here for our sexual pleasure.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
And everything about it, what you've shown me, what I've read about it, what I see in that dynamic with the son, if there's anyone I am horribly worried for, it is Talmadge Johnson. Because at some point, Brian is going to realize... Maybe there's science where I could just put my brain in Talmadge's body. Like he's saying, oh, I want us all to live forever.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Like he wants to get out his own son.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Or Talmadge might already be in the sunken place.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yeah. He's a smoke show.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yeah.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
I'm 85. What the f*** are you talking about? Yeah. It's called melanin, my friend.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Get you some. Yeah. He doesn't need 130 pills. Just get some melanin.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
So today I brought, we do have a Super Bowl coming up. There's a lot of talk about. Not familiar. Oh, well, there's a Super Bowl. There's a sport called footsball. Are you aware of that? Go on. It's different from the English footsball. but it's still with people, not with feet. But Super Bowl halftime show, Kendrick Lamar is performing. A lot of big conversation around that.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
With the NWSL and the things that they've put forward, is that also something that exists in the European League? Yeah. Are there things that the NWSL are doing that aren't just the same as what you're seeing in the European League, but maybe even a step further?
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Now that Taylor Swift will be in attendance at the Super Bowl, maybe Taylor Swift will be leaving the skybox to make a surprise appearance. Who knows?
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
But it's corporate socialism, which capitalists have never had a problem with corporate socialism. It's not socialism for the individual, the player, the collective in that way. Capitalists love corporate socialism.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
They do. That's relevant. Yeah, exactly. Or maybe Taylor Swift just sings it from the skybox. They just hand her a microphone and she slides the glass open and is like, I'll do my part. Sure.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Pablo, I found out that you need to do an episode where you take 130 vitamins a day and find out what happens to you. Will you get younger? Will you become more virile? Yes.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yeah, I feel like it's a health crisis. We need to perhaps look at it as a health crisis that we need to save these men from themselves and tax them fairly.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
The biggest show on turf. And it wasn't always recognized as that. But there was a time when the halftime show, it would be like Up With People or a high school marching band. And it was just kind of filler while everyone went to the bathroom and no one really saw it.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Exactly, yeah. Those were the good old days. You could just smoke in the locker room.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yeah, get drunk a little bit. So just in thinking about that, That's what the halftime show was, and then something had to change it.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
There was some moment that was that sort of catalyst moment that said, your tube is not good enough. And the thing that changed it was the sketch show in living color.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Right. Yeah. You didn't believe me at first when I just told you this. I did not. And then you said we had to look into it.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
I don't know. It makes pretty good sense to me. Roll the credits. Show's over. This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
I don't know that that wasn't a good impression of you. Mildly disrespectful. No, this is my impression of you.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
I grew up watching In Living Color. It's a show that I enjoyed as a kid. It was one that inspired me to do what I do. But then also, a few years ago, I had been having some preliminary conversations to make a documentary about In Living Color. No way!
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Unfortunately, it fell through. There, I think, were just too many things, one of which being Disney owns the IP. And so there's a lot of stuff there to navigate. And then with all the cast, they are all giant megastars.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Jennifer Lopez, yeah. Rosie Perez was the choreographer. Right, this was a sketch comedy show on Fox. It ran for five seasons. And in that time, in that short amount of time, has done so much as far as, like, given us so much entertainment, both the show itself, but then the people who came from that show, that there's no real story about it. Like, I remember when...
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
the show had had, like, its 10-year anniversary and its 15-year anniversary, and nobody would write about it. Like, there was never, like, the Vulture article that was, -"Hey, here's a--" -"The oral history that we've seen for so many other things."
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yeah, and so in doing the research for it, to kind of pitch the idea, one of the things that I got really into was at the time that CBS at that moment had the Super Bowl, that Fox, as this kind of upstart network, had decided... we want to do something outrageous. What if we could steal some of the Super Bowl audience?
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
And what could we do to do that? And initially they said, what if we got MC Hammer to perform and then we could get, like, In Living Color is our big show. What if we got them to do some live sketches? Right. This is 1992. Right.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
And every network at that time had just ceded that to the NFL, that whatever network it was on, if it was on CBS, then we're never even thinking that halftime could be a thing or even counter-programming. against the Super Bowl.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Right. Yes. And so that's what they started talking about. And they said, yeah, what if we get MC Hammer and then we'll have the In Living Color folks just do a couple sketches. And then when it was presented to Kenan and the folks at In Living Color, they said, f*** that. What if we do a show and MC Hammer can be our musical guest? And so the network was like, all right.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
They started going for it. They got some corporate sponsors. It was taking too long. MC Hammer eventually dropped out and was replaced by, if you can't get MC Hammer, who do you get? You get Color Me Bad.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yeah. I mean, when you got mascots, what else are you going to do? That's the theme song for every mascot, as I learned it. That was the music I asked to play when I auditioned for Ramsey's. That's Ramsey's. I was like, I brought my own music here. Here you go.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
So yeah, they get Color Me Bad and they do this.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Because CBS had planned their Super Bowl halftime show would be a promo for the upcoming Winter Olympics, which would be a salute to the Winter Olympics that would feature two small ice rings.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Thank you so much. That really means a lot. No, I'm a fan of yours as well. I was wondering if we had met before. But yeah, I've always been a big fan of you. And I miss seeing you on Around the Horn because you were so much fun on that show. Yeah.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Yeah. They also have jet skis, but the jet skis are on wheels. So they're like, they're being like held up on wheels and so they can drive around everywhere.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
All the bears were getting poked that day. Yeah. And the whole show, I mean, everything was just sh**ting all over football, and people loved it. They drew... a huge portion of the audience away. Yes. And even kept some of it. And so the gambit worked. And it was successful. And after that, the decision was made, we have to do something different.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
And we can't, there became a fear that now this is like, we have shown a weakness. We have to come back with the most strength possible.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Well, and also what's wild too is thinking about just how cautious those networks get because at that time, so they had two sponsors that were interested in being the corporate sponsor for the In Living Color halftime show. One was Frito-Lay and the other was Pepsi. And at the time, Pepsi was really excited about this idea and they started talking about