Part of the allure of the 90s sitcom “Martin” was watching comedian Martin Lawrence and actress Tichina Arnold, who played Pam, roast each other. Their sparring became a core part of the show, which aired from 1992 to 1997; however, not every viewer appreciated the interactions.
In August 2025, songstress Ari Lennox admitted that Lawrence’s jokes towards Arnold’s character rubbed her the wrong way.
“The thing that pissed me off about Martin was how much he was goin’ in on Pam and this is coming from a girl who loves a joking a** movie and even when the joking movie is like ‘Damn, that was f**ked up.’ There are some things where I draw the line,” Lennox said at the time, alluding to colorism being the root, per Complex. “Pam was so f—ing beautiful and so fine, and I just feel like growing up as a chocolate girl, I don’t even know if I was able to understand the greatness of Pam.”
Fast forward, six months later, Arnold addressed Lennox’s controversial comments during an appearance on Deon Cole’s show “Funny Knowing You.”
“She felt like Martin was bagging on me because I was brown skinned, because she was a brown skin girl,” Arnold told Cole. “I understand completely what she what she said and I get it.”
However, while she understood what the “Shea Butter Baby” singer was saying, the “Martin” star explained that colorism was not the intent behind the jokes viewers saw.
“This is a little backstory. Pam was originally [written as] a heavyset girl, so all the jokes on my audition were fat jokes. I’m literally auditioning with fat jokes, right? They ended up changing it when I got the role, obviously, because that’s when my body was banging. I was thin. I was, like, ‘Yeah, what y’all doing with these jokes? What’s happening…that’s not gonna happen.’”
“So what happened was they ended up changing the jokes, but when I tell you if you were around our Martin days and on that set, all the funny really happened when those cameras weren’t rolling,” she continued, explaining how castmates would compete to crack the best jokes about each other. “Anything he and I did off the set, it would be in the script… so it was out of love. That’s what we did it. It had nothing to do with color.”
“Those jokes were never written from [a place of] malice. It was written [based on] who’s got the best joke,” she said before giving a piece of advice to Lennox. “Ari, we understand how you feel. It wasn’t meant that. And so maybe Ari, you need to talk to your friends and the people that you were around during that time who made you feel that way… Somebody may have done or said something to you which allowed you to look at things a little differently and not receive them in the spirit that they were given.”
