June 2 - Wayne Brady

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On this day, in 1972, Wayne Alphonso Brady was born in Columbus, Georgia. The son of West Indian immigrants, Wayne moved to Orlando, Florida as a young child to be raised by his grandmother. In his mid-teens, he started performing in local community theaters and became part of the improv troupe at the SAK Comedy Lab in downtown Orlando. He graduated from Dr. Phillips High School, an arts magnet school, in 1989 and began attending classes at the University of Miami. A degree wasn’t in the cards for young Wayne, however, and by 1996, he’d moved to Los Angeles, California to see what fate had in store for him.

Fate has blessed Wayne with at least a constant flow of employment opportunities if not many that could be considered long-term. His first television appearances came on a late-night syndicated show called Kwik Wit. It pretended to be an improv show but in reality, while based on popular improv games and original material, was pretty rehearsed. It did, however, lead to regular appearances on the British improv show Who’s Line Is It Anyway? during its final season, which was taped in Hollywood. That rolled into the American version of the show and real nationwide exposure for Wayne. In 2003,  Wayne’s work on Who’s Line won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding  Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program (try saying that with a mouthful of pretzels), making him one of only a handful of people to win that particular award for a regular series as opposed to a one-off special.

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In 2001, Wayne had his own short-lived variety show. The show only lasted a partial season but the name, The Wayne Brady Show, lived on for two more years as a daytime talk show, which earned its namesake two consecutive Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Talk Show Host. Over the next several years, Wayne enjoyed a whole slew of guest appearances.  He guest starred on both of The Drew Carey Show’s live episodes. He starred as Neil Patrick Harris’ brother on How I Met Your Mother. He appeared on a Canadian sitcom, Getting Along Famously, with former Who’s Line costar Colin Mochrie. He spent two seasons as the host of Don’t Forget the Lyrics!, a game show on Fox. And those are just the highlights.

Wayne finally got a real long-term gig in 2009 when he was asked to be the host of a new version of the classic game show, Let’s Make a Deal. Updating the format a bit with a liberal dash of (what else?) improv (the show's announcer, Jonathan Magnum, is also quite adept at it and was also part of the first Wayne Brady Show), Wayne has been making deals with guests for a decade now, every weekday on CBS. Incidentally, CBS's two daytime game shows owe quite a bit of their continued success to Who's Line Is It Anyway? Their other one, The Price Is Right, has been hosted by Drew Carey since 2007.

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Wayne is no stranger to stages around the country either. In 2004, he made his Broadway debut when he joined the revival of Chicago as the smooth talking lawyer, Billy Flynn. In 2015, he returned to the Great White Way, taking on the role of Lola in Kinky Boots for six months. The following year, he was in Los Angeles playing Charley Kringas in a production of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. Then Wayne wowed audiences in Chicago (the city, not the show this time) when he spent four months portraying Aaron Burr in Hamilton.

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Wayne's connection to Disney goes way back. One of his first jobs as a teen was in the entertainment department at Walt Disney World (rumor has it he was good friends with Goofy). Since then, both versions of the Wayne Brady Show aired on ABC, he wrote and sang the theme song for The Weekenders and he sang "Beautiful" along with Jim Brickman on Jim's Disney album. Sharp eared listeners will recognize Wayne's voice behind Don on an episode of Phineas and Ferb called "Where's Pinky?" and he was a regular cast member on the short lived ABC improv show Trust Us With Your Life in 2012. He's also made an appearance on Dancing With the Stars, not as a contestant but as a performer in a tribute to James Brown. Wayne sang a version of The Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room for the 2008 album Disney Music Block Party and produced an album of children's songs he helped write called Radio Wayne (inspired by the Radio Disney network) in 2011.

Image copyright CBS

Currently, Wayne is busy taping episodes of the next season of Let's Make a Deal (for which he finally won an Emmy last year after being nominated seven times) while simultaneously making appearances on the CBS soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful as Reese Buckingham. Will there be more improv shows in his future? Probably and when they pop up, you can be sure they'll be funny and look effortless (which really describe's Wayne's basic mode of operation). Happy 47th birthday, Wayne and here's to many, many more!