Key Takeaways
- Carl Anthony Payne II says roughly 80% of Martin’s physical comedy and wildest moments were improvised, reflecting the creative freedom that distinguished it from The Cosby Show.
- He cites the New Jack City parody’s fake-dog sequence—created after the real animal failed to appear—as an unrehearsed “magic moment you can’t recreate.”
- Payne says the cast only grasped Martin’s broader influence at their Emmys reunion, while the franchise now expands with The Varnell Hill Show and Martin Lawrence’s return as Martin Payne.
Some of Martin’s funniest moments were never supposed to happen.
According to Carl Anthony Payne II, who played the lovably clueless Cole Brown on the Fox sitcom, much of the show’s physical comedy and rapid-fire chaos came from the cast making things up in the moment. “More was scripted on the page for The Cosby Show than on Martin,” Payne told Brandon ‘Scoop B’ Robinson. “I’d say 80% of the stuff—especially the physical stuff and things of that nature—was made up on the fly.”
Payne pointed to the show’s infamous New Jack City parody, where Cole winds up dealing with a fake dog. The production had spent the week preparing to use a real animal. Then shooting day arrived—and the dog didn’t.
“We rehearsed all week without a dog, saw the dog the day before, and then on the day of shooting… no dog!” Payne recalled.
What followed was created on the spot: “Everything that transpired with the fake dog was genius, in the moment, and kept on camera. It was almost like a sketch. One of those magic moments you can’t recreate.”
Payne knew his way around a sitcom set long before Cole started wearing those tiny hats. He previously played Walter “Cockroach” Bradley, Theo Huxtable’s friend on The Cosby Show, before joining Martin Lawrence, Tisha Campbell, Tichina Arnold and Thomas Mikal Ford on Martin.
The difference, Payne said, was how much room Martin gave its cast to play.
That looseness helped turn the series into one of the defining Black sitcoms of the 1990s, but Payne said nobody on set was thinking about legacy while they were making it.
“Not a clue,” he said when asked whether he realized the show would still resonate decades later. “We were just showing up every day and doing what we loved to do.”
At one point, the experience became so enjoyable that Payne remembers thinking, “Why are they paying us to do this? This is the best job on the planet.”
The size of that legacy became harder to miss when the surviving Martin cast reunited at the Primetime Emmys. Payne said comedians including Jo Koy, Ken Jeong and Trevor Noah approached them backstage as fans.
“We knew what we meant culturally to our culture, but not necessarily to the industry as a whole,” Payne said. He added that seeing how many performers and audiences were influenced by the sitcom ultimately mattered more than whether Martin won major awards during its original run.
The show’s universe is now expanding again. Lawrence is producing The Varnell Hill Show, with Tommy Davidson returning as the outrageous talk-show host who originally appeared on Martin. Lawrence is also reprising Martin Payne on the show, although he has repeatedly ruled out a traditional reboot after Ford’s death in 2016.
