In an appearance on Shannon Sharpe's Club Shay Shay podcast, Damon Wayans Sr. offered sympathy for the artist formerly known as Kanye West but compared him to a mentally unstable homeless person.
Around the two-hour 24-minute point of the episode, seen above, Sharpe asked if there were any celebrities he would love to do a sketch about if In Living Color was still going, and suggested Kanye. "Yeah, but you know what, I love Kanye," Wayans replied. "What he's doing is wild, but, you know when you see a homeless person in the street and they talking to themself? You can't be mad at them. Something wrong, they sick. Kanye, there's something wrong with him."
He said that when he sees someone who is clearly mentally unwell, he doesn't take what they say literally. "I don't listen to the homeless man yelling stuff and think, 'Oh, he mean that,'" he continued. "He don't mean that, it's just coming out. ... You need an uncle, grab him say, 'Hey come here boy, let me talk to you. You don't say that, you don't do that.' Somebody who he loves and respects. Does he have that in his life? I don't know. But I love Kanye, he's a musical genius."
In recent months, Ye has doubled down on his infatuation with far-right extremism and Nazis, even going so far as to wear a black KKK-style hood in an interview with DJ Akademiks.
He's also been open about his refusal to receive mental health treatment, despite his increasingly erratic behavior. Last month, he accused his ex-wife Kim Kardashian and her family of sex trafficking and then said they were trying to get him committed against his will. Recently, he previewed a song in which he suggested that Bianca Censori, his current wife, has left him and tried to get him to go to a mental health hospital.
Several people who were formerly on good terms with Ye have said that he needs to seek help, including controversial Kick streamer Adin Ross, who was horrified when he heard a new song in which Ye raps about Hitler.