Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Marlon Wayans: Good Grief’ On Prime Video, Coming Home To Roost, Roast And Pay Homage To His Late Parents

Native New Yorker Marlon Wayans, the youngest of the 10 Wayans Brothers (and Sisters), returned to the Big Apple to mourn the loss of his parents; the matriarch, a proud Baptist, died in 2020; their father, a Jehovah’s Witness, died last year. In this hour taped at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Marlon remembers caring for each of them in their final years in sometimes raunchy graphic details, but also with measures of reverence for how they did good in raising a comedy dynasty. Where does Marlon himself thinks he stands in the family’s funny pecking order? We’ll find out!

MARLON WAYANS: GOOD GRIEF: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: After releasing his debut stand-up comedy special on Netflix in 2018, Marlon Wayans had an overall deal with Max which saw him put out two more specials and host another, before now moving to Amazon and Prime Video for his latest hour.

Of course, comedy fans know the youngest Wayans even more from his acting on the small and big screen alike, whether it’s his early gags such as Scary Movie, White Chicks, or Little Man, or his more recent prestige work, which includes Prime Video’s Nike movie AIR, the Aretha Franklin biopic, Respect, or his current project, starring in the sports thriller Goat from Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions.

You don’t need to have seen any of that or know any of it to understand what he has to say in this hour, which focuses on the “good grief” he has processed since the deaths of both of his parents.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Using the death of a parent as a catalyst for a cathartic hour of comedy isn’t a novel idea, but I’m not sure I’d compare the path Marlon Wayans takes to other recent specials on the subject, because how many comedians talk in-depth about changing their octogenarian mother’s diaper?

Memorable Jokes: So yeah, listening to Marlon not only describe what he thinks his mother’s vagina might look like after 80 years, but also go into detail about what he finds changing her diaper and how much he asks her about her sex life in retrospect is something that’ll likely stick with you, for better or for worse.

But before he gets into all of that, Wayans reminds us that he grew up in a fairly untraditional household in Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s, and if his mom wasn’t so fiercely Baptist, none of the Wayans kids would’ve ever celebrated their birthdays or Christmas because dad was a Jehovah’s Witness. He shares a cute story about how his mom even took the kids Christmas caroling, changing the lyrics to fit their living conditions, and how her gifts, no matter how inexpensive, “those was little boxes of hope.” In retrospect, Marlon suspects dad chose that religion because they grew up poor and his dad was cheap. Which prompts this zinger: “I think Nick Cannon should become Jehovah’s Witness.” 

He also cracks that his dad cracked the proverbial whip a bit too much, although Marlon also conceded: “I probably deserved 87.3 percent of those ass whippings.”

But it turns out Marlon didn’t just lose his parents in the pandemic (he doesn’t say exactly how each of his parents died, although he blames liquor for his dad’s demise), but also almost 60 other friends and family members in the first three years of the pandemic. Good grief, indeed.

He says he has gotten by through looking at the brighter side of life, which includes the fact that he’s still alive, as well as some nasty jokes about who else has survived or not. He’s cool with Coolio’s passing, but not over Kobe’s sudden death. “Don’t take the greatest Laker! Take Derek Fisher,” he jokes, before getting even darker by suggesting that Shaquille O’Neal isn’t long for the world and going on an extended riff wondering “what the f–k kind of AIDS” Magic Johnson contracted that has allowed him to live with it “for 50 years” (for the record, Johnson announced his HIV diagnosis in 1991) and become even more successful in the interim. “What kind of AIDS is this: Financial aids?”

Our Take: The tone of the hour may seem dark, but as Wayans readily concedes, he got depressed after his mom died and still cries describing the scene at her deathbed in June 2020.

“My humor has gotten darker because my life has gotten darker,” he says.

But he braced us for that right at the top of the hour, telling the audience that everyone is an a-hole, himself included, bragging that he started the taping three hours late just to see how much his audience still adored him. He also warned us that people will disappoint us (whether it’s our parents, kids or anyone in between), so not to have too high expectations of them.

However much you love his acting work, his stand-up skills took a while to catch up, and it wasn’t until his 2023 Max special, God Loves Me, where he really seemed to find his footing and express a singular point of view onstage.

Marlon jokes about how we all have this yearning to portray ourselves as victims, or to compare our lives with one another and claim we had it the hardest, when the stark realities always remind us that “there’s always somebody who had it worse.” In his case, that even includes his older siblings, because by the time he came along, his older brothers already had begun to make it in show business, and their success changed the entire family dynamic. “I had the easiest version of my parents,” he recalls.

There’s a moment in this hour where he relates a lesson on masculinity that he learned from his father, which may resonate more with viewers who have grown up struggling against the system. His dad’s definition of a man? “A Man: He takes of himself and he takes care of his responsibilities. A man protects and provides. A man puts his woman and his children before himself. They are first. A man is the first one up, he’s the first one at work, he’s the last one home, and damnit, he’s the last one to eat. That’s a man.” That definition may seem antiquated to some, or reinforce stereotypes that hurt more than help, but it earns a healthy applause break from Marlon’s audience at the Apollo in Harlem.

Knowing what we know about Marlon Wayans and his kids now, though, it’ll be fascinating to hear how Marlon himself pivots in his next hours whenever he decides to talk about his own trans son, and how that changes his views on what it truly means to be a man. But that’s what’s yet to come.

Our Call: STREAM IT. This might not be his best hour in terms of joke-writing, per se, but it shows Marlon Wayans at his most intimate and personal so far as a comedian, and anyone looking to know more about why the Wayans family has at least five comedic legends (six, if Marlon himself says he doesn’t get smited by God for some of his least tasteful jokes) would do well to watch this hour. As Marlon says: “Life is good. Please enjoy every minute that you can.” He clearly is.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.