Wayans family

The Wayans family /ˈweɪ.ənz/ is an African-American family including a number of successful directors, screenwriters, comedians and actors.

Dwayne Kim Wayans

(born July 20, 1956), American writer and composer

Keenen Ivory Wayans

(born June 8, 1958), American actor, comedian, director and writer. He has five children, four daughters and one son.

Damon Wayans, Sr.

(born September 4, 1960), American actor, comedian and producer. He has four children, two sons and two daughters.

Kim Wayans

(born October 16, 1961), American actress

Shawn Wayans

Damon Wayans

Damon Kyle Wayans, Sr. (/ˈdeɪmən ˈweɪ.ənz/; born September 4, 1960) is an American actor, comedian, writer and producer, member of the Wayans family of entertainers. Wayans performed as a comedian and actor throughout the 1980s, including a yearlong stint on the sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live, although his true breakthrough came as a co-creator and performer on his own sketch comedy show, In Living Color, from 1990 to 1992. Since then he has starred in a number of films and television shows, some of which he has co-produced or co-written, including The Last Boy Scout and Major Payne, and the sitcom My Wife and Kids.

Early life

Wayans was born in Harlem in New York City, the son of Elvira Alethia (Green), a homemaker, singer and social worker, and Howell Stouten Wayans, a supermarket manager. He has five sisters, Elvira, Vonnie, Nadia, Kim, Diedre, and four brothers, actors Marlon Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Shawn Wayans, and Dwayne Wayans. He was club footed as a child. This attribute would also be given to his character in My Wife and Kids and his character on the cartoon series Waynehead. Wayans attended Murry Bergtraum High School.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Gail Winfrey, born January 29, 1954, is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is now North America's first and only multi-billionaire Black. Several assessments regard her as the most influential woman in the world. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

The Wayans Bros.

The Wayans Bros. is a sitcom that aired from January 1995 to May 1999 on The WB. The series starred real-life brothers Shawn and Marlon Wayans. The series also starred John Witherspoon and Anna Maria Horsford (season 2 onward).

Premise

Shawn and Marlon Williams (Shawn Wayans and Marlon Wayans) are brothers who live in an apartment on 126th street in Harlem. Shawn owns a local newsstand, where he and his brother Marlon work on a daily basis. In the show's second season (in 1995), the newsstand and Pops' Joint (the restaurant owned by their father, John "Pops" Williams (John Witherspoon) were moved downtown into the fictional Neidermeyer Building, in Rockefeller Center, where Dee Baxter (Anna Maria Horsford (season 2 onward) works as a security guard.

Season 2 Transitions

Many transitions were made in season 2:

Marlon Wayans

Marlon Lamont Wayans (born July 23, 1972) is an American actor, comedian, screenwriter, and film producer, beginning with his role as a pedestrian in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka in 1988. He frequently collaborates with his brother Shawn Wayans, as he was on The WB sitcom The Wayans Bros. and in the comedic films Scary Movie, Scary Movie 2, White Chicks, Little Man, and Dance Flick. However, Wayans had a dramatic role in Darren Aronofsky's critically acclaimed Requiem for a Dream, which saw his departure from the usual comedies.

In 2009, he appeared in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. In 2013, he had a leading role in A Haunted House and co-starred in The Heat. A Haunted House 2 was released on April 18, 2014. Marlon has partnered with former Funny or Die co-founder Randy Adams to create What the Funny, an online destination for urban comedy. Marlon created the comedy competition television show, "Funniest Wins", which aired on TBS in June - August 2014. As of 2014, Marlon and his brothers have been traveling the U.S. with "The Wayans Brothers Tour".