by David Henry
Motown president Berry Gordy Jr. invited him to audition for a role in a movie he was developing with Paramount, a biopic of Billie Holiday starring Diana Ross. The part was so small the script didn’t even give him a name. He was simply “Piano Man.”
Right around that time Paul Mooney came knocking at Richard’s door, rousing him from his stupor, telling him to get his shit together. Enough with the wizard hats and dashikis and tie-dyed flower power. It was 1972. L.A. was the place to be. Johnny Carson had just moved The Tonight Show from New York to Burbank. And a new club had opened on the Strip where Ciro’s used to be. The place was owned by TV skit writer Rudy De Luca and old-school gag man Sammy Shore, whose regular gig was opening for Elvis in Las Vegas. They called it the Comedy Store. Sammy Shore didn’t know the first thing about running a club, but his wife Mitzi, did.
TV and movie producers were at the Store every night, booking talk-show slots and tossing out deals left and right to a whole new breed of comics. And, in case Richard didn’t know it, he could run circles around them all.
A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY
On Friday, January 14, 1972, NBC broadcast the first sitcom—the first network show of any kind—to star an all-black cast since Amos ’N Andy was taken off the air in 1953.
Producers Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin based the show on a British sitcom Steptoe and Son set in the Shepherd’s Bush area of West London featuring Albert Steptoe, a crusty old rag-and-bone man who mocks, belittles, and actively sabotages the social aspirations of his thirty-seven-year-old son, Harold. For their version, set in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood, Lear and Yorkin cast Redd Foxx in the father’s role and gave the character Foxx’s birth name, Sanford.
After thirty years as a top comic in black clubs and on adults-only “party” records, Redd Foxx became a star overnight. (It’s fun to imagine fans of the show who’d never heard Foxx do stand-up before—and that would include most of them—picking up one of his Laff LPs at the mall and hearing this on side 1, track 1: “Did you ever stop to think that if the Pilgrims had shot bobcats instead of turkeys we’d be eatin’ pussy on Thanksgiving.”)
Right away there was trouble with the network. Despite having the full weight and support of Lear and Yorkin and their hit series All in the Family behind him, Foxx ran into a brick wall when he insisted that black writers be hired for the show. Specifically, he wanted Richard Pryor and Paul Mooney. NBC wouldn’t budge, despite both their track records and the unassailable authenticity they would lend to the show.* None of that mattered. The network insisted on using “established” writers. As Mooney has often observed, racism trumps capitalism. And nobody, it seems, likes being told that they don’t understand the black experience.
When Richard returned to Los Angeles from Berkeley, in the spring of 1972, he came back inspired to speak truth, using the raw language of the streets. He embraced nigger as an empowering term of endearment and spoke with startling candor about things many people at that time were uncomfortable admitting even to themselves: his homosexual experiences, masturbation, racial anger, his physical abuse of women, drug addiction, feelings of self-loathing, and the guilt he felt as a conflicted champion of black pride who also had an irresistible lust for white women.
I’m nervous up here. I ain’t had no cocaine all day. I love cocaine.
People don’t talk about nothin’ real, like jackin’ off. A lot of people didn’t jack off. I did! I used to jack off so much I knew pussy couldn’t be as good as my hand.
You go out with a white woman and sisters look at you like you killed your mama.
You can’t talk about fucking in America, right? People say you’re dirty. But if you talk about killing somebody, that’s cool. I don’t understand it myself. I’d rather come. I’ve had money and never felt as good as I felt when I come. Nothing else matters when you’re gettin’ the nut. Especially if it’s a girl.
Never fuck a faggot, ’cause they will lie. They always say, “I won’t tell.” They lie. They can’t wait till you finish fucking them. (miming telephone) “Well, guess who was here, honey. Girl, looka here, the nigger got more bitch in him than me.”
And the punch line? There wasn’t one. He wasn’t telling jokes, he was telling the truth: “Y’all act like you ain’t never sucked a dick or something. Y’all be, (white voice) ‘No siree, bob, never touched a penis in our life, we’re real men.’ I sucked a dick. You can get a habit from sucking dick. Become a dick junkie. You can only do it maybe three times. You do it more than that you get a habit.” It slipped the noose of anything that would have previously passed for nightclub comedy. To his amazement, audiences of all races loved it—and loved him for it.
—————
Richard had planned to kick off his return with a performance at the Apollo. Mooney suggested he woodshed his new act at the Comedy Store first. With one caveat. The Store was full of white comics, Mooney warned, who would steal his best lines and run with them to Vegas or The Tonight Show. Richard knew better. “Ain’t nobody gonna steal nothing off me,” he said. “Motherfucker wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
No other comic ever used Richard’s material. It simply couldn’t be done. It wasn’t a matter of repeating his words but of taking possession of them. One would have to capture the genius of his performance. One might just as well caution Caruso or Michael Jordan against performing in public lest competitors try to copy them. Anyone was welcome to try. The exception proving the rule came when Eddie Murphy, employing his extraordinary skills at mimicry, included some ten or twelve minutes of vintage Pryor in his early concerts and called it homage.
When Richard took the stage at the Comedy Store, it was as if, in Mooney’s words, all the “copycat Cosby bullshit” had been burned off while he was in Berkeley. He had rid himself of all the impurities, like firing up some base. “This was the pure shit.”
Bill Cosby himself attended a pivotal performance: “Richard took on a whole new persona—his own—in front of me and everyone else. Richard killed the Bill Cosby in his act, made people hate it. Then he worked on them, doing pure Richard Pryor, and it was the most astonishing metamorphosis I have ever seen. He was magnificent.”
It was a metamorphosis Richard had labored over for years. Over the previous decade and a half, Richard had crossed paths with so many masters, stumbled onto so many pivotal scenes, and soaked up so many influences, from the African American traditions of boasts, toasts, and signifying that he’d learned from street-corner raconteurs and vaudeville holdovers in the clubs of Peoria, to touring the “black belt” nightclub circuit opening for the singer who inspired Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll,” to sharing bills with the likes of Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Richie Havens, and George Carlin in the Greenwich Village of the early sixties, to Sunday nights on The Ed Sullivan Show and weekday afternoons on Merv Griffin, to mingling in Rat Pack–era Las Vegas; from West Hollywood clubs of the late sixties and guest roles on sitcoms and TV shows such as The Young Lawyers, The Mod Squad, Wild Wild West, and The Partridge Family, to his eye-opening and mind-expanding friendships with the Black Panthers and literary lights in Berkeley at the dawn of the seventies.
—————
There had been glimpses of a new Richard Pryor in the monologue sequences scattered throughout Dynamite Chicken, for the few who ever saw the movie. A still-rough-around-the-edges version of his new self could be heard on his second LP, Craps (After Hours), an underground hit for West Coast indy label Laff Records, best known for the bacchanalian cover photos, replete with comic-strip speech balloons, that graced “adults only” party records such as Wildman Steve’s Eatin’ Ain’t Cheatin!!! and That Ain’t My Finger . . . It Just Ain’t Your Day by the team of Mantan Moreland and Livingood. Laff producer David Drozen went through hours of material recorded live at the Redd Foxx Club in Hollywood in January of 1971 and spliced together a ragtag assemblage of thirty-one tracks, sixteen of which were less than a minute long, with some clocking in under twelve seconds, such
as “Being Born”: “I’m one of the few people that remember being born. And I’d like to do it for you. (beat) Could I have a lady volunteer?”
But when Richard reemerged on the scene in West Hollywood, he blew everything wide open. As when Dylan released “Positively 4th Street” as a single, a whole crop of young songwriters saw that songs could be about anything. Joni Mitchell remembers it was unlike any song she had ever heard: “I remember thinking ‘the American pop song has finally grown up.’ You can sing about anything now. ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.’ Just in that statement was a different song than any I had ever heard. . . . The potential for the song had never occurred to me. . . . But it occurred to Dylan. I said, ‘Oh God, look at this.’ And I began to write.”
Stanley Kubrick undertook 2001: A Space Odyssey in part to test his conviction that “if it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.” Kubrick believed that filmmakers should grant themselves the same freedom a novelist has when buying a ream of paper. Young comedians began to see their craft in the same light. Freed from the conventional setup–punch line–topper formulas that had been around since vaudeville, the world of stand-up opened wide, as the music world would for hip-hop artists a decade later. Stand-up comedy was suddenly the freest art form ever, able to absorb and incorporate any and all of the performing arts from dramatic acting, mimicry, burlesque, music, magic tricks, improvisation, mime, buffoonery, confessional memoir, poetry, Pentecostal preaching, social commentary—they could take it anywhere. Comics could lip-synch to a phonograph playing the Mighty Mouse theme song, if they wanted, or smash watermelons with sledgehammers.
—————
Change was in the air. Everyone could feel it. The old ways were unraveling. And there was plenty more excitement where that came from. On the other end of the continent, nighttime security guard Frank Wills noticed that someone had put tape over the latch of an office door to keep it from locking. He peeled off the tape, closed the door, making sure the latch caught, and thought little of it until he came back around an hour later. When Wills saw that the same door had been taped back up again, he called the D.C. police. Something fishy was going on at the Watergate complex. It would prove to be the single greatest gift this generation of TV and nightclub comics could ever hope for.
It’s cold-blooded in jail. Nixon wouldn’t have lasted two days. They’d have turned him out. Niggers was waitin’ on Nixon to come to jail. “What’s happenin’ Tricky Dick? Ha-ha-haa. Yeah. I’m gonna see how tricky you are.” Can’t you just see Nixon? “Let me make one thing perfectly clear . . .”
The divide between so-called serious art and popular entertainment—between high and low culture—fell apart, revealing itself as a sham, a figment, a judgment. Village Voice columnist and downtown theater critic Laurie Stone had this epiphany while sitting through yet another solo performance in some forgotten loft space. The show’s absurdist confessional humor wasn’t working. No one in the theater was buying it. She could almost smell the tang of flop sweat emanating from the actor onstage, yet everyone sat there, silent and respectful. Stone endured it for the duration only because she was getting paid, and the thought occurred to her, “There are comedians in clubs doing better monologues than this.” She persuaded her editors at the Voice to allow her, henceforth, to review stand-up comedy in the same space as serious solo theater.
* Eventually, Richard and Mooney were hired to write a total of two episodes during the show’s second season: “The Dowry” (September 29, 1972) and “Sanford and Son and Sister Make Three” (December 1, 1972). Comedian Daryl Mooney fondly recalls the times Richard came to their house to work on those scripts with his father. Richard would be at one end of the table with his Courvoisier and cocaine, while Paul Mooney sat at the other end with a secretary stationed between them, taking it all down. “Our father would have to temper him and make it clean,” Daryl says. “Richard would throw out lines like, ‘We’ll have Redd say to Aunt Esther, “Bitch, shut the fuck up. Eat your own pussy” . . . My father would be like, ‘Richard, TV, bro—we can’t do that, Richard, this is TV.’ ”
“NIGGER, COME OUT OF THAT BLACK SKIN AND BE BLACK, NIGGER”
Al Bell couldn’t believe his ears when this skinny guy started his set at the Comedy Store. As the head of Memphis-based Stax Records, Bell commanded one of the largest African American–owned businesses in the United States, second only to Berry Gordy’s Motown.
Richard did this one bit—a routine he’d continue to refine over the next few years—where he imitated a guy on an acid trip. “I couldn’t believe what I saw,” says Bell. “The story he was telling as he played out the character was really penetrating as far as black people are concerned.” At the end of the routine, as the guy was coming down, his last line was, “Nigger, come out of that black skin and be black, nigger.”
“It left the audience stunned,” Bell recalls. In that one line “he had exposed so much about black people.”
The line was not some bumper-sticker slogan. It was mind blowing, like some kind of Zen koan. No matter how you turned it over in your mind, or it turned your mind over in you, you could never plumb its depths. The line kept turning in on itself, refusing to be translated into anything other.
“This man is a genius,” said Bell. “When you listen to the intelligence behind what he is talking about you really realize you’re talking about a literal genius.”
Bell had gone to catch Richard’s act at the behest of Forest Hamilton, son of jazz drummer Chico Hamilton and the head of Stax West, the record company’s new division based in Los Angeles. The twenty-six-year-old Hamilton’s job was to scout West Coast talent and establish Stax within the motion picture and television industries. Bell was in town to organize a daylong concert commemorating the seventh anniversary of the 1965 Watts rebellion.
Wattstax, as the concert came to be known, took place on Sunday, August 20, 1972, at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum featuring Stax recording artists Rufus Thomas, the Staple Singers, Kim Weston, Albert King, Little Milton, William Bell, Carla Thomas, The Bar-Kays, Luther Ingram, and Isaac Hayes among others. The Reverend Jesse Jackson flew in from Chicago, landing with less than an hour to spare, to deliver the invocation and to lead the crowd in his “I am somebody” call and response.
With more than one hundred thousand mostly African Americans sitting out in the hot sun all day in celebration of Watts, local media were just waiting for the whole thing to blow up. Security was minimal. Stax had requested that the LAPD assign only African American officers to work the event. It all wentbeautifully. The Stax organizers were pleased and relieved that not so much as a scuffle had been reported, but it didn’t necessarily make for engaging cinema.
Stax had hired director Mel Stuart (Four Days in November; If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium; Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) to helm a documentary of the event. The music was superb, of course, but even when interspersed with documentary footage and interviews filmed in area restaurants, barbershops, and on front stoops, the movie still felt incomplete. What the movie needed, Stuart decided, was “someone who would sum up what the picture was about, would lead us on to the next step, would really be the voice of the community.” A chorus, like the one in Shakespeare’s Henry V—“O for a muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.”
Al Bell knew just the guy. “Hey, man,” he told Forest Hamilton, “go find Richard Pryor.”
Hamilton tracked him down at a small club in Watts. When they first walked in the place, Stuart recalls, “this rather big gentleman walked over to me and grabbed me and said, ‘What is this honky doing in my club?’ I thought my life was over. . . . Forest Hamilton, who weighed about three hundred pounds, grabbed this man, threw him against the wall, and the guy went down. Forest went over to him and said, ‘He’s got expertise, motherfucker!’ The guy looks up at me and says, ‘Shit, man, I didn’t know you had expertise. Come on in, man, come on in.’ ”
&nbs
p; Less than five minutes into Richard’s set, Stuart knew that he was in the presence of a comedic genius. “I knew this was the chorus. Everything you see in this film is improvised by Richard. There’s no script. And he is the soul of the film.”
The decision to cast Richard as the film’s “wickedly funny commentator” was a superb stroke, according to Newsweek magazine’s reviewer. “Perhaps not even Dick Gregory can shape accumulated black experience into such biting bits of humor. [Pryor] is reason enough to see Wattstax.”
Richard’s role in the film was to spin documentary straw into comic gold. In one of the documentary segments shot in a Watts restaurant, a man tells how his “high yellow” brother made him first realize he was a nigger. The two had been playing with a group of white kids who excluded him, yet bonded with his lighter-skinned brother. When they got home, his brother called him a nigger and declared himself white. “I didn’t know what a nigger was,” the man says. “But my mother’s bad. Check this out. She said, ‘Cool. All right, then, I ain’t your mother because all my kids are niggers.’ ”
Richard wraps up the segment with this:
I think, like, niggers are the best of the people who were slaves, you know what I mean? That’s how we got to be niggers. Cause they stole the cream of the crop from Africa and brought them over here. And God, as they say works in mysterious ways and so he made everybody “nigger.” Cause we were arguing over in Africa about the Watusi and (riffing on African-sounding tribal names) the Ojuomboo, and Zamunga . . . in different languages. So he brought us all here. The best. The kings and queens. Princes and Princesses. Put us all together and called us one tribe: Niggers!
Watergate notwithstanding, the single greatest stroke of luck to ever befall the new wave of stand-up comedians came in December 1973 when Sammy Shore, called back to Las Vegas for a months-long engagement at the Hilton, left his wife Mitzi in charge of the Store.