Legendary actor-comedian Damon Wayans Sr. was an open book on his new CBS Sunday Morning segment over the weekend.
To promote his new sitcom Poppa's House, which premieres on Monday (October 21), Wayans, 64, spoke to CBS correspondent Tracy Smith about his journey from mailroom worker to entertainer.
Early in the conversation, around the 2:50-minute mark of the video below, Wayans detailed that he and his nine other siblings, including Keenen Ivory Wayans, Shawn Wayans and Marlon Wayans, slept four to a room in their cramped family apartment in New York.
"To sleep with someone’s foot in your behind is pretty much my childhood," Wayans told Smith.
The circumstances also inspired Wayans' comedic material. "In my stand up I talk about how my mother would tell us, 'There's no food, you can each have a little bit of toothpaste so you have something in your stomach.' That’s real."
But before Wayans made his big break, he was a first-time father and worked as a mailroom worker at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, where he followed his older brother, Keenen, and delivered to the likes of Henry Winkler and Eddie Murphy.
Wayans would work alongside the latter in 1984 action-comedy Beverly Hills Cop, and would later succeed Murphy on Saturday Night Live. But Wayans would only last on the show for one season.
"He said write your own sketches," Wayans recalled of the advice given by Murphy. "Otherwise you're going to be doing white people stuff, and you're going to hate it. And he was right."
Keenan would soon develop 1990s variety show In Living Color, which Wayans was a long-running cast mate in. But it was his 2000s sitcom, My Wife and Kids, that was a refuge while Wayans was divorcing his ex-wife, Lisa Thorner, whom he was married to from 1984 to 2000. The ex spouses share four children, Damon Wayans Jr., 41, Michael, 39, Cara, 37, and Kyla, 33.
"People don't know that in 2000 I was going through a divorce while we were 'Wife and Kids.'
On whether it was "painful" to work on the show during his divorce process, Wayans said, "No, comedians live for that."
"It's like I get to a car accident and I go up on stage and I talk about my neck hurting and people are laughing. My neck doesn't hurt as much."
Now just over four decades into his career, Wayans looks back with fondness while moving ahead to his new television project, which airs 8:30 p.m. local tonight and streams on Paramount+.
"I've reached an age where I'm content," he said. "I got tired of chasing happy, because happy is fleeting. There's nothing I need except my health and well-being. And guess what? Happy moved in next door to me. Now every day is just like a blessing. Ten grandkids, one great-grandkid, it's like life doesn't get better. It doesn't."