by Paul Mooney
BLACK IS THE NEW WHITE
BLACK IS THE NEW WHITE
A MEMOIR
PAUL MOONEY
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mooney, Paul
Black is the new white / by Paul Mooney.
p. cm.
1. Mooney, Paul, 1941– 2. Television comedy writers—United States—
Biography. 3. African American comedians—Biography. I. Title.
PN1992.4.M66 2009
792.702’8092—dc22 2009019572
ISBN 978-1-4165-8795-8
ISBN 978-1-4169-6853-5 (ebook)
To my beloved Mama
FOREWORD
BY DAVE CHAPPELLE
When I was a young black boy growing up in Washington, D.C., during my formative years, my comic inspiration came from various comedy idols, particularly Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy.
Richard meant so much to me. Richard Pryor was the real King of Comedy. Then I found out that Paul Mooney was the writer behind my idol!
We all remember that famous sketch from Saturday Night Live’s first season, where Pryor plays a prospective employee playing a “word association game” with the interviewer (played by Chevy Chase). The two get into a verbal fight when Chase’s character begins to use racial slurs.
Well, Paul Mooney wrote that sketch!
To see a black man on TV, holding his own with a white man, that was television history. It changed everything, not only TV, but also my course, and it gave me the direction my life was meant to go in.
The Eddie Murphy Raw tour in the 1980s was the hottest ticket in town. When the fans came in wanting to see Eddie Murphy, for the first half of the show, they got Paul Mooney. I thought, That nigga had a lot of balls to open up for a crowd that was only there to see Eddie Murphy.
Years later, I asked Eddie about it: “Why did you put Paul Mooney on to open for you?”
“When you have Paul Mooney in front of you,” Eddie said, “you have to be on the top of your game when you come out to perform. You can’t slack if Mooney is the opening act.”
I had the good fortune to work with Paul on Chappelle’s Show and I have some stories of my own. Paul Mooney is a genius, brilliant, a legend, and a force to be reckoned with.
But I will say this: you don’t fuck with Paul Mooney, you don’t fuck with his writing, his material, his sketches … and you certainly don’t tell him what to do! Trust me, I’ve learned, especially when I worked with him on my own show.
When I started gearing up for my show, I knew I needed Paul Mooney to be part of it. I just wanted his comedic genius. I wanted to be around someone who has so much history and success. Mooney was the writer, the casting director, and the director for some segments of The Richard Pryor Show in 1977 for NBC.
That was classic television, never to be duplicated. Working on The Richard Pryor Show, Paul Mooney helped launch the careers of so many talented comedians and actors: Robin Williams, Brad Garrett, Shirley Hemphill, Marsha Warfield, Johnny Witherspoon, Tim Reid, and Sandra Bernhard, to name a few.
There are a lot of things people remember about my show. Some things that I did, yeah, but a lot of people remember “Negrodamus” and “Ask a Black Dude.” It was classic Mooney.
Now, many of you reading this book may not have even heard of Paul Mooney, and that’s a shame. Why isn’t Mooney a mainstream star? As you read through the pages you will find out why … Paul Mooney was too black for Hollywood!
Say what you will about Paul Mooney, he always delivers the goods. What comes out of his mind is comic genius at its best.
Paul Mooney: the face that launched a thousand quips
RICHARD
CHAPTER 1
I’m sliding into a booth in a coffee shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, slapping the table to wake Richard Pryor from his hangover nod.
“Man,” I say to him, “I just saw a lady so pretty, somebody should suck her daddy’s dick for a job well done.”
Richard stares at me. Early afternoon, too early for Richard. I smell the brandy he doses his coffee with. He is a little slowed-down by all the poisons in his blood, but even slowed-down Richard Pryor is quicker than any other human being on earth.
He laughs. I’m not saying Richard just laughs like an ordinary person laughs. I mean he laughs. His face lights up like a Times Square billboard and his whole body wags like a dog happy to see its owner.
You know you can die happy when you can make Richard Pryor laugh. It’s this huge blast of appreciation, hipness, and intelligence. He gets it. His laugh is like ripping open a bag of joy, letting loose a storm that blows you head over heels. It is that powerful.
The greatest comics—and Richard is bar none the great-est—always have the greatest laughs.
Later on, as the hard living takes its toll and the MS takes over, most of Richard’s laughs will turn into fits of coughing, as though he’s trying to hack up his liver. But a Richard Pryor laugh is still and always will be like getting a high five from God.
California yellow sun and Pacific blue sky. That September day in 1968, Richard and I are in Duke’s Coffee Shop, the original one, in the old Tropicana Motel. Two dudes, two dudes, like Richard starts one of his routines. We are the only black guys who can make the scene in Hollywood. We are groundbreakers, accepted at all the clubs, invited to all the parties. When we break into it, Hollywood is still a closed, racist town. The place has never seen anybody like us. We are fearless. We go everywhere. We break down barriers. We still get harassed by bigots and cheated by the system, but it never stops us.
Later that night my wife, Yvonne, gets dressed up and we go to Troubadour on Santa Monica to hear Richard perform his stand-up routine. He’s a different comic when I am in the audience. He hears my laugh and he shifts gears, elevating his act to a higher, edgier level. I can tell he is trying to make me laugh, but I’m not going to give it up that easy. I make him work for it. He pushes himself.
From the stage of the Troub that night, I hear Richard do the line I gave him earlier in Duke’s coffee shop.
“Coming here tonight, I saw a woman so motherfucking beautiful gorgeous that it made me want to suck her daddy’s dick for a job well done.”
The joke kills. The way Richard tells it, it kills. The audience practically vomits laughter.
Later that same night—or is it early morning by then?— Richard tells me to hold my arm out.
<
br /> “What for?”
“Just hold it out, motherfucker.”
He slips a watch on my wrist. A good watch—I can feel its heavyweight mass on my arm—a $10,000 beauty. The kind of watch you call a timepiece.
“What’s this for?”
“The bit,” he says.
“What bit?” I play dumb.
“The suck-her-father’s-dick bit.”
“Oh, that,” I say. “That’s just you and me talking. I could hardly tell if you were awake when I told you that.”
“Take the fucking watch. You don’t like it, motherfucker, sell it. Take the money, Mr. Mooney.”
He always calls me that. Mr. Mooney. Off that character on the The Lucy Show.
I take the watch.
The funniest man on the face of the earth wants me to write for him. It begins to click. I think: This thing we have, this Batman-and-Robin thing, can somehow turn into something that means money and good times for both of us. I toss lines to Richard. He puts them out to the audience. The audience flings money at him. Richard throws money at me.
The truth is, it’s never about the money for me. I love Richard. I am his biggest fan. I get off on him doing one of my jokes. It means so much to me. I want Richard to be happy and to succeed. My loyalty is to Richard, and my relationship with him is authentic, as though he is my brother. On all of Richard’s albums, you can hear me laugh. I always laugh long and loud.
Those first days together in 1968 are the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
CHAPTER 2
First time I meet Richard Pryor, it’s in the late 1960s at a crowded party in my bungalow on Sunset. The place is full of people.
Richard walks in, and right away I sense he is different. Out of the corner of my eye, I chart his course through the party people. He has a woman with him, but she trails behind as though he has forgotten all about her.
He is smiling and laughing. Everything pleases him. He knows there are lots of women and drugs around, and that fills him with childish delight.
Like a kid in a candy store, I think.
He is the eternal child. That is Richard’s whole secret, right there. A lot of us swallow our childlike side, beat it down, scorch it clean. Not Richard. He speaks with the vulnerability of a child, and that’s what makes people love him.
So he makes his way through the party, and finally he arrives at me, and right away, the first thing out of his mouth, he says he wants to go to bed with me.
Not me, personally. Ain’t nobody straighter and more pussy-crazy than Richard. He means he wants to go to bed with me and the women I am with and the woman he’s with and whatever other women he can convince to jump in with us. All of us together.
“Let’s all get in bed and have a freak thing!” he says.
The first words I ever hear out of Richard Pryor’s mouth.
Only, the woman I am with is my half sister, Carol LaBrea. Carol is drop-dead gorgeous. She’s a model, the first black woman ever to make it on the cover of a white fashion magazine, French Vogue. Naturally, Richard is knocked out by her.
Carol knows the woman Richard’s with, a cute little girl who works for pro football Hall of Famer and actor Jim Brown. Carol and she moonlight as go-go dancers in the cages at Whisky A Go Go on the Strip.
Hollywood, 1968. Everyone in town is talking about a new movie being shot at Columbia Pictures. A free-love kind of movie. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice it’s called when it comes out, but right now everyone refers to it as “the Natalie Wood swingers movie.” Or “Elliot Gould’s thing where he winds up in bed with everybody.”
I always call it Bob & Carol & Ted & Lassie.
Orgies are in the air back then.
I look at Richard, and I’m thinking, Who is this freak?
I laugh and say, “You just say whatever comes into your head, don’t you?”
Richard laughs. “Let’s go, let’s do it, man, look at these ladies!”
Who is this … child? Because that’s how he strikes me right away. A lot of people might come out of the bag at him, get all pissed because he’s suggesting an orgy. I have all the more reason to be affronted, since Carol is my half sister.
But from the very start, from that first meeting, I find it impossible to get angry at Richard. He’s so obviously without guile. He just has no inhibitions. Like a baby—I want the tit, and I am going to grab for the tit.
No other considerations figure into his actions, nothing else other than “I want it.” No ideas like, Well, this might not be cool, or, maybe I’m being rude—nothing like that. The man is short on impulse control.
For everybody else in the world, an attitude such as this comes off as totally insufferable. But Richard makes it work because he’s completely open and vulnerable. Sure, he’s selfish. But he’s selfish with the innocence of a four-year-old. He’s like the way I used to be when I was a child. He makes me feel protective toward him.
I tell him no, I am not going to get into an orgy with him.
Richard slides away from me like the iceberg sliding away from the Titanic. I watch him as he continues on, crashing into other groups and couples at the party. Wanna do an orgy? I have to laugh. I don’t feel any blowback or negativity from him because I refuse. He just moves on to the next possibility. But that brief run-in gives me a strange gut feeling, as though everything in my world is going to change.
“If he keeps that up,” Carol says, “he’s going to get himself a beatdown.”
“If he keeps that up,” I say, “he’s going to get himself laid.”
Two weeks later, I bump into him again at a Trini Lopez concert in West Hollywood. I see him at the after-party backstage, and he runs around pretending to hide from me. When I finally corner him, he fake cowers and says, “Don’t hit me!” I can’t help laughing.
“If I’d a known she was your sister, I never would have said that,” Richard says.
“How’d you do that night?” I ask him. “You ever find an orgy?”
“Oh, I did okay,” he says, laughing. But not before I catch something vague about his response.
“You don’t remember what happened that night, do you?” I say.
“I must’ve been high,” he says. He shrugs.
It’s the first hint I get of Richard Pryor’s Eternal Present. Maybe I should just fade away from him right now, I think. Avoid a lot of trouble. Then Richard laughs, and I know I’m hooked. We have a drink together, and just like that, we are best friends. It’s as though I have known him all my life. It’s that deep, that quick.
Even though I have a feeling that sooner or later it’s all going to crash, I still accept Richard’s friendship. He is irresistible.
CHAPTER 3
In 1968, Richard has one foot in the straight world and one foot hovering in midair. He’s in the process of stepping forward into a new style of comedy of his own making, but he’s still wondering how it’s going to play onstage. He’s off balance.
Bill Cosby represents straight success, straight comedy, straight laughs. He is monster, the most successful comic of the day. Hit albums, riffs that are being copied in every schoolyard in the country, kids acting them out line by line. Funny, funny shit.
For white people, Bill is the perfect Negro. He’s the Sidney Poitier of comedy, very clean-cut and articulate. White folks love to use that word to describe us. Articulate. It means we don’t grunt like jungle savages.
Richard thinks he wants to be Bill Cosby. For a long time, that’s what he goes for. Richard is talented in so many ways that he can do it, too. He does a physical-comedy routine where he imitates a bowling pin waiting to be knocked down by a ball coming down the alley. He flinches because the pin boy’s hands are cold. He dodges and wobbles and finally remains standing.
Cosby would be comfortable doing that routine. He wouldn’t do it as well as Richard, but it’s in his wheelhouse.
Pryor-doing-Cosby is pretty successful. Ed Sullivan has him on the show. Richard does his act in prime ven
ues all over the country. He plays Vegas. It’s all starting to rain down on him—the money, the women, the fame.
So Richard has one foot in Cosbyland. But there’s something inside him that knows it’s not quite right. He wants to do something else, something truer to his experience.
Richard doesn’t fucking bowl. He doesn’t hang out in bowling alleys. Pin boys are vanishing, replaced by automatic pinsetters. So why is he doing a routine about bowling? He’s trying to please people.
That’s where comedy is back then. It skates on the surface. It makes the audience members laugh but doesn’t give them anything heavy-duty to take home. Going for the laugh is fine, but going for the laugh and the thought and the emotion all at the same time is better. Richard is taking a step in that direction, and so am I.
When I see Richard’s act, I think it’s all right. Not great. Just all right. I laugh. I know that somewhere underneath all the bullshit, he’s a natural. But what he’s doing doesn’t hit me in the heart. It doesn’t hit Richard in the heart, either, and that’s part of the problem. He’s a kid in a candy store who is craving steak. He can get the sugar-sweet laughs easy enough, but he wants something more substantial.
And the only way to do something more substantial onstage—then and now—is to discuss one of the defining features of the American experience: race. I don’t know how anyone, black or white, in America can stand up in front of an audience with a microphone and never mention it. It’s as if there’s an elephant in the room, and it’s spraying out elephant diarrhea all over everyone, and no one’s mentioning it. It’s surreal.
My impulse is always to call people’s attention to the situation. Uh, the elephant? Shitting on you?
I never hear Richard’s comedy god Bill Cosby make a race-based joke or observation in his act. Before my time, when he’s just starting out, he tries race-based humor, but gives it up. He attempts the impossible: racial neutrality.