The Genius of Wayne Brady

THE MASKED SINGER

In the tremendously tense moment --final episode, 2020-- of "The Masked Singer" --right after the host broke the news that the fox was the winner, and just before the winner revealed his identity, suddenly the fox spoke.

The squeals and clapping of the audience grew silent.

“I didn’t know until this moment,” said the fox, “exactly how much winning this would mean. “This is, this is all I’ve done my whole life. And I’ve been blessed enough to be able to make a lot of people happy, but I haven’t always been happy myself."

His digitally-disguised voice broke with emotion.

"It’s taken me all this time to find my joy again—wearing a mask and having no preconceived notions from anyone about what I can do, and I just want to thank the show for making me one happy fox.”

The host roared, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we’ve just witnessed greatness.”

One of the judges told the fox, “You’re the most complete performer that we’ve ever seen on ‘The Masked Singer’”.

The enormous fox’s head was peeled off to reveal the winner: Wayne Brady.

“Wayne Brady. Superstar. One of the most talented people ever to walk the face of the planet. Host, actor, broadway star, wow,” said the host, over the cheers and squeals of the audience.

Wayne Brady stood center stage in the winning spotlight, eyes shining.

“This has been the coolest, most amazing, most touching, most challenging, weirdest experience," he said, "I’m gonna take this with me, forever.”

One of the show's judges noted the weight of this win among winners. “Somebody who could pull that off, sing all those different styles, there’s only a few people in the business, like that.”

One judge said she was afraid to guess any celebrity's name. “I thought any name wouldn’t even come close to the talent that was in front of us. You just proved to the world that you are a true legend and an icon.”

"DON'T EVEN WORRY ABOUT BEING FAMOUS."

It helps to know something about Wayne Brady's life story to understand the power of this moment to Brady personally, and how this meant so much more than the moment on competitive talent show when a brand new star is suddenly discovered.

Wayne's win was a moment when a known performer --who had been successful in Hollywood for decades, but had been boxed in by assumptions about what he was capable of performing-- was able to earn fresh, from-scratch validation.

And Wayne Brady had one thing more, a thing that's pretty ironic for a famous guy: a distaste for fame.

Fame blocks greatness because it can block freedom, he explained last year in a Sway's Universe podcast: "When you're no one, name wise, in the entertainment business, and you're trying to get someplace, you have a latitude and a freedom that you are not afforded later on when you are a fixed presence in someone's mind.... so when you have your anonymity, you have that freedom."

If artists creates something that they really believe to be great --even if it's something that only ten people really love, he later explained, "That feels way better than seeking mass approval".

He describes himself as a Swiss Army Knife. It's a description that works. He's adaptable, versatile, skilled and practical, but definitely not in a hardware kind of way; he works in a blind-you, wow, how-does-he-do-it, strobe lights-not-footlights kind of way. Just watch him do improv in "Whose Line is it Anyway?" Dazzling. Watch him freestyle rap, on the "Late Late Show with James Cordon", or on "Sway's Universe", or in an encore performance, impromptu, after "Hamilton". Stunning.

His phenomenal talent contrasts with his inner life, however. Brady revealed a few years ago that he'd actuall been "a superintrovert" offstage, with a severely depressed inner life. He decided, in the wake of Robin Williams' death, to come out publically with his struggles with depression and his need for therapy.

He revealed that he used to isolate himself and spend a lot of time just crying in his underwear. He carried secret sadness around for years, while making the world happy onstage. When he began to talk about his depression, his depression became more manageable, his career became more meaningful, and started to mentor more than ever before.

HE MADE IT IN HOLLYWOOD-- AND CHANGED HOLLYWOOD.

From the beginning, Brady had never planned to be a comedian or a freestyler. He'd planned the opposite-- to be a dramatic actor like Sidney Poitier.

“My own route to comedy was very circuitous and weird, because I never considered myself a funny person, and comedy was not on my radar,” he told Dennis Miller in an interview last year. “I started off doing musical theater, and doing Shakespeare".

But when he was invited to take an improv class, his world changed. “It opened my eyes, because when I learned what the basics of improv were, and [the instructor] broke it down, and sketch comedy, I realized it was the same things that I’d been doing in my bedroom by myself for years".

"I was able to take the acting, the singing and dancing, all of that shiny stuff, and lay it on top of the improv. They worked with me and they taught me. These are the beats, this is where you hold, this is how you read an audience... If you use too many words, you’ve over-explained and you lose their attention, if you use too few, then you look like you don’t know what you’re talking about, but if you can say just the right amount, and a pause there, a look there, and you learn which words are funny and you learn body language. That’s funny. That was my bootcamp."

Having learned the science of comedy, he wanted to do it. He headed to L.A. to try to "make it". But his father died when Wayne had recently arrived there. So Brady took the responsibility of taking care of his mother, even though he was already months behind on rent and had his car repossessed.

Although he was poor, married, and jobless, he felt so passionate about performing that he would not turn down any job, as long as he was performing. He sang at Bar Mitzvahs. He was a mascot at a Taco Bell. He was a Power Ranger and made balloon animals at children's parties. He portrayed the Wolf Man and Dracula at Universal Studios. He was Santa at Christmastime. He once stole toilet paper from a hotel where he'd performed at a wedding, because he and his wife had been taking showers in lieu of buying toilet paper. Then there was a three-month job in Japan as a lounge singer, which ended horribly with a Japanese police officer beating Brady for defending himself against gropers.

HIS FIRST BIG BREAK

Finally, his first big break came. It was a comedy role, doing improv on the show: "Whose Line is it Anyway?"

Wayne Brady --and comedy improv-- would never be the same. He stunned audiences and cast members in the show. On top of comedic invention he layered musical invention, singing, and dance. No one else could come close to doing what he was quadruple-threat pulling off on that stage-- and that was a talented cast.

Meanwhile, other offers came up.

He rejected the opportunity to host "Let's Make a Deal" twice, thinking that being a game show host would carry a stigma. "In my mind, just like a weatherman, just like a bad version of a radio shock-jock, there are stereotypes of certain professions," he explained, "Uh, no guy smiley."

But when the show's producers asked him what he would imagine doing differently, he said, "I would use improv games to give away some of the prizes. I would make the zonks funny." He would focus on making contestants' experience of being on the show, funny --regardless of whether they won prizes or not. The producers bought it, and he went on to make that vision real.

With the freedom to create and improvise on "Let's Make a Deal" he felt like "one of the luckiest cats on t.v.". He said, "I get to make people happy day in and day out, and I get to make myself happy 'cause I'm just clowning."

What's "clowning" to him was successful innovation to the entertainment industry. Brady's mold-breaking work in the industry included historically defining moments: He was the first African-American to host the Miss America pageant. He changed the meaning of what a game show could be, with his limit-pushing creativity, his dances, his sketches, his improv games that included audience members, as host of "Let's Make a Deal". He produced the completely unique song about being divorced and also being friends/family: "You and Me".

The song led to going with his ex-wife on t.v. interviews to help bring awareness to the kid-supporting idea that exes can incorporate kindness and partnership into their lives. He says that ex-spouses, being civil and helpful, should not be "a circus sideshow".

While promoting depression awareness and divorced-family civility, he was also making tv shows, releasing R&B albums, and continuing to star in musical theater. He's starred as Billy Flynn in "Chicago", crooning "All I Care About is Love"; as the incredible Aaron Burr in "Hamilton", and as beautiful, transgender Lola in "Kinky Boots".

He's been nominated for nine Daytime Emmys, and won three. He was nominated for three Prime Time Emmys, and won one. He was nominated for a grammy for Best Male R&B and won an Emmy for Best Original Song --for a song that his ex wife said that he made up on the spot.

He's a freestyle rap prodigy, and calls a bluff if anyone says, "I was writing a freestyle last night". He demands of himself and other people that freestyle composition should be as live as lightening-- hot and on the spot.

He absolutely thrives in the moment of fear when he's onstage: "When you're searching for words, and you're trying to put stuff together, and you've got naked fear in your heart, but you're able to use that fear". Victory over fear as fuel for comedy-- that's courageous. But Wayne Brady is still a humble guy. He says, "This is what I was built for. I can't save a life; that's why I didn't become a doctor. I can't drive a 16-wheeler. There are a lot of things in life I can't do, but I'll be damned if I can't get on a stage and entertain."

COMEDY I.Q.

In 2020 Brady produced something truly unique. He created, hosted and produced an innovation he called "Wayne Brady's Comedy I.Q." a t.v. show which features young comedians who win, or avoid being cut from the competition, by succeeding in challenges for ten weeks of a comedy improv bootcamp.

He and co-producer (and ex-wife) Mandie Taketa selected a handful of teenagers from auditions held across the nation, to create "Comedy I.Q." The teenagers weren't that funny, at first, but they had what Brady summed up as "good personalities" --and each one had talent, whether singing, acting, or dancing-- enough that Brady knew he could work with them.

He'd first imagined the show because of a question.

“The argument was, can you teach someone to be funny? Well, I never thought I was naturally funny, so I wanted to teach these teens that were around the same age I was, when I started acting.

For teens who could dance, Brady taught lessons on how to use their physicality to create humor. For those who could sing, he taught lessons on how to write a song on the spot. By the end of the ten weeks, the teenagers who had not been eliminated, soared. (Some of those who were eliminated early on were brought back as guests in other episodes.)

"I have to tell you, the experiment was a success," Brady said, "You had kids who really didn’t know anything about funny... By the end of it, I had them on the stage at "Second City" --actually making people laugh, doing improv, and doing sketch."

It was, actually, phenomenal.

WHO YOU ARE IS ALL WE HAVE.

Being real, he told the kids that he mentored on the show, is key to being funny. "There's no ego in comedy," he said, and repeated all season long. The contestants used that whenever they felt themselves slipping into embarrassment or fear.

"I love comedy. I love the science behind comedy. I love knowing that I can elicit a response, so I'm a student of that thing," he said, "Comedy's important because we're human. It helps you laugh at yourself, and it helps you laugh at other things."

Being concerned about what others thought limited Brady for years. Now he works "to empower other people and young performers to get out of their heads. Don't give a damn about what other people think."

But people do. It's an obstacle to beat. Like anyone else, the teens arrived at "Comedy I.Q." with set perceptions of what funny should be. They, struggled to be true to themselves, to be real, to bring something new to comedy. If they couldn't, Brady warned, then their comedy would fall flat, and they would be eliminated.

In order to make the point about being real, real, Brady created a perfect situation. Contestants learned that their next challenge would be to perform a dance and song for a Hollywood VIP birthday party. They were incredibly excited. They really prepared.

They arrived. It was not a swanky mansion as they'd envisioned the party. It was a birthday party for young children in a Hollywood park. The contestants were being tested: would they sing, dance, and interact as well for a child as for an A-list bunch of Hollywood actors? Could they entertain with balloon animals? Could they paint faces in a way that delighted their clients? Could they sing and dance to entertain this brand of a hard-to-please audience? Some of the contestants did not do well in this challenge. In fact, one young man named TJ threw a bit of a fit.

He was put on the bottom of the might-be-eliminated list that day. But something about TJ reminded Brady of himself as a kid. Brady said that TJ was “Such a funny kid, and I told him, I said, if things go right for you, you’re gonna be a star." But in the next few challenges, Brady made sure that TJ's lessons got even harder.

Brady had invited his friend, famed comedian Sinbad, onto the show to help coach the kids for the stand-up comedy challenge.

And TJ loved to do stand-up comedy, but he had a problem. Brady explained, "TJ had grown up in this culture, in the Instagram and Facebook culture, where people call themselves comedians... but really it boils down to them either taking ideas that are recycled --or just horrible things with no taste."

TJ had a go-to act that Wayne Brady and his guest, comedian Sinbad saw as a cliche. It was called the "hot sauce". TJ was making a joke about his supposed uncle who kept saying that he was "hot sauce, hot sauce". Brady and Sinbad stopped TJ.

Brady remembers the moment. "I said, 'Dude, what are you doing right now?' And Sinbad asked him, 'Does your uncle really talk like that?' 'No sir.' 'Do you know someone that actually talks like that?' 'No sir.' His whole thing was built because of an image that he felt that he had to have, because he was black, and he felt he had to live up to whatever that thing was."

Sinbad told TJ, "Who you are is enough. Who you are is all we have."

Brady told TJ to ask himself who TJ really was, and that answering the question would create something real-- which would be something funny. When TJ realized that Sinbad and Wayne Brady were coaching him to drop using cliches as crutches, he shifted his focus and answered the question: who was TJ, really?

Brady said that after that, everything changed for TJ, who "wrote this standup set that was out of this world, about a being the kid who was taken out of private school, and dumped into this public school where he had to prove himself daily to the other black kids, and to prove his blackness and what it meant to him inside. He shared his story, and all of a sudden, the kid was on fire."

On fire, fresh, and funny. Like Wayne Brady. Real, and brave, and great.

"Don't even worry about trying to be famous," Brady told the kids again and again, "Fame is not a destination. You should want to be --great."