Black is the New White

by Paul Mooney

  Offstage, Cosby does talk about race. “If you’re really going to do a show about the black family,” he says, talking about his obsession, the TV sitcom, “you’re going to have to bring out the heavy. And who is the heavy but the white bigot? This would be very painful for most whites to see.”

  Years later, in 1984, when Cosby does a popular sitcom about the black family, he doesn’t “bring out the white bigot” at all. The Cosby Show is like a race-free zone. I don’t get it. Why the disconnect? Because nobody wants to rock the boat. No one wants to disturb the white audience.

  I don’t believe in racial neutrality. It’s always a lie. White comics can ignore race because they’ve been trained their whole lives to turn a blind eye to the big, loose-boweled elephant. That’s what white people do. They only bring up race when it suits their purposes.

  Black comics have a “double consciousness,” in the way W. E. B. DuBois uses the phrase, meaning they have one self for the master and one self that’s “just between us.” Back in the sixties and seventies, when I first hit the scene, the stage is definitely the master’s territory. If they want to gain a wide crossover audience, black comics have to be careful what they say.

  But that’s not me. I don’t have a double consciousness. I am who I am. I’m the first comic to bring a “just between us” black voice to the stage, to any stage, any audience, white, black, or mixed. I’m not a different person onstage and off, like Cosby used to be. I don’t do one act in South Central and another on the Strip, the way Redd Foxx used to do.

  Fuck that shit. I keep it real.

  Richard plays the middle, too—until the effert of trying to balance voices and audiences makes his head explode on-stage. It’s a legendary incident in stand-up comedy. He is at the Aladdin, with Dean Martin in the audience. He’s doing his Bill Cosby–Ed Sullivan routines. Surefire laugh-getters.

  And suddenly he stops. He stares out at the audience. He has a slow-motion breakdown. The gap between what he’s saying and what he’s feeling is just too huge.

  “What the fuck am I doing here?” he says, and he walks offstage.

  His meltdown is already a year in his past when I start hanging with him. Richard likes to think that the Aladdin moment is an epiphany. That’s how he describes it to me. He wants it to be clear-cut, as though there is a before and an after, the “hi-ya-Dean-o!” Aladdin Richard, and then the cooler, hipper, realer post-Aladdin Richard.

  But when I meet him, the changeover is still nowhere near complete. He’s still channeling Cosby. He’s still unhappy with himself.

  “I was thinking about Mama,” he says, when I ask him about what happened that night at the Aladdin.

  Richard and I both have grandmothers we call Mama. It’s one of the things we have in common that bonds us. My mama is my mother’s mother, Aimay Ealy. Richard’s mama, Marie Bryant, is a tough-as-nails brothel keeper in Peoria, Illinois.

  “I was looking out at the audience,” Richard says, “and it hit me that all those motherfuckers out there wouldn’t make room for Mama if you put a gun to their heads.”

  No room for Richard’s Mama in the audience, and no room for the real Richard behind the microphone. That’s why he says “fuck it” and walks away.

  But total transformation isn’t so easy. He can’t just snap his fingers and make it happen. One of the reasons why he gloms onto me, I know, is that he sees something in the way I carry myself that he wants to emulate.

  “Thing about you, Mooney,” he says, “you don’t give a shit. You ain’t scared of white people.”

  He laughs like the idea tickles him.

  It’s true. Whatever the quality is that white people enjoy in black people, I ain’t got it.

  Or maybe it’s a question of what I do have—my self-assurance. I try to keep it real, I always have. But not many white people like it “real.”

  It’s as though when black people’s hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. When it’s nappy, they’re not happy. And I have a nappy mental attitude.

  Richard brings me to a small party in Venice, near the beach. I see right away that it’s not my scene. Dope smoke in the air. Cocaine on the table. It’s my nightmare in the flesh. I’ve been at enough parties like this to know that I hate them. Sometimes it seems like everyone in L.A. is high but me.

  “Hey, man,” I say to Richard. “I’m going to cut out.” I head for the door.

  “Mooney!” Richard comes after me. “What’s the matter?”

  “I got to go.”

  “We just got here!”

  “You do what you want. It’s just not the kind of scene I’m into.”

  “No blow?” Richard stares. “You don’t smoke dope, either?”

  “And I don’t drink. Not the kind of drinking that’s going on around here.”

  “Motherfucker,” Richard says, shaking his head, baffled. It’s difficult for him to comprehend. “Are you a motherfucking Mormon?”

  “I’ll see you later.”

  He gets a hurt, childlike look on his face because I am rejecting him. Then his face brightens. “Hey, you know what? Come back, we’ll hang out.”

  He grabs my arm and physically ushers me back into the living room.

  “Mr. Mooney’s cool,” he announces. “He is keeping it straight. Mr. Mooney doesn’t do none of this shit.”

  Everyone’s staring at me. “That’s okay, that’s okay,” Richard says, sitting down and pulling a mirror toward him that has a half dozen rails laid out on it.

  “I get Paul’s share,” he says, snorting a generous noseful. “More for me.”

  He cackles.

  I hear that same line again and again during the whole time I know Richard. “I get Mooney’s share,” he says gleefully. I’m his shadow partner. I automatically double his drug intake.

  The Venice party is like a fork in the road for me. Decision time. I can back away with a “Thanks, but no thanks.” I can leave the dope room, like I usually do. Or I can stay.

  I stay. I slide into the role. I’m the only straight person in the whole crowd that flocks around Richard. I’m the one who can find the car. I’m the one who remembers what street the party’s on. I’m the one who doesn’t get us lost.

  As Richard’s shadow partner, I witness more drugs being smoked, snorted, and swallowed than any other straight person on the face of the earth. It doesn’t bother me. If it bothers anyone else, Richard makes it right.

  “It’s cool, real cool,” he says, laughing, elbowing his way to bend over the coffee table trough. “I get Mooney’s share!”

  At the Venice party, I get that kid-in-the-candy-store vibe again. There’s something desperate about Richard stuffing his face with dope and drink. Something is bothering him, something deep down at the root of his soul.

  Richard has to get out more, I think. A pretty funny thought, since all Richard seems to do is go out and party. I decide to push him a little bit. Or maybe just lead and let him follow.

  Two dudes: Richard Pryor and me out on the town

  CHAPTER 4

  On the club scene in Los Angeles in the late sixties, the main turf for comics is the Strip—the section of Sunset Boulevard that’s now incorporated as West Hollywood but back then is still wild and lawless Los Angeles County. It’s patrolled not by the Gestapo LAPD but by the more lax L.A. County Sheriff’s deputies.

  On the Strip, comics open for rock acts at Whisky A Go Go, Bido Lito’s, the Trip, or Ciro’s, and do sets at the Fifth Estate, the Stratford Hotel, or Troubadour, just down the hill on Santa Monica Boulevard.

  But there’s a whole different scene that happens a long way away from Sunset Boulevard. Down on Crenshaw and in South Central, a few clubs bring in black audiences and feature the kind of comedy that nobody is ready for on the Strip. Not coon comedy, not clowning, but comedy that talks about what is going on in front of everyone’s faces and no one usually dares to mention onstage.

  Redd Foxx has his own club a few blocks south of the freeway, Jaz
z Go-Go, on Adams off Western. He mixes stand-up, music, and strippers. He’s got another club on La Cien-ega, which is named after him. Richard idolizes Redd. He is the true groundbreaker. In a lot of ways, he is the anti-Cosby.

  We all cut our teeth on Redd’s party albums, like You Gotta Wash Your Ass! They’re blue, blue, blue, but funny, funny, funny. In his clubs he’s always introduced with the line “The two funniest four-letter words in the English language—Redd Foxx!” He never holds back on the street talk.

  Yeah, I said the word shit. I said “shit” not to shock anyone but because I’m too old to stand up here and say “doo-doo.” If you tell the truth, you know you say “shit,” too. If you ain’t said “shit” before, come out in the parking lot with me, and let me slam the car door on your hand. You’ll say “shit” and “motherfucker” both. Shit! Motherfucker!

  When idiots ask Richard why he drops the M word so much, he says that it’s because America slammed the car door on his hand. Nobody knows what he means when he says that, but I remember Redd’s riff and I laugh.

  Farther south on Crenshaw is another club, Maverick’s Flat. John Daniels takes an old Arthur Murray dancing school and decorates it in late-1960’s-style funk. Fluffy sofas, glass-tile tabletops, freaky Bitches Brew paintings a couple of years before Miles ever comes out with his album Bitches Brew.

  The Temptations open the place in January 1966, and later come out with a song about it, “Psychedelic Shack.” “Psychedelic shack, that’s where it’s at … I guarantee you this place will blow your mind.”

  The football great Jim Brown backs Daniels with money and with his celebrity juice. Jim Brown is like the Great Black Hope. He’s everywhere. He does so much for the community. He takes care of children, he counsels dropouts, he pumps money into businesses.

  Pretty soon after Richard and I start going to Maverick’s Flat, it blows up big. White hipsters like Steve McQueen and Marlon Brando are showing up. It becomes a favorite place for them to slum. The comic Flip Wilson is around, too, just on the cusp of getting his own TV variety show.

  Richard is a little dubious about Maverick’s at first because Daniels runs the place as a private club and serves no liquor, only ice-cold Coca-Cola. But soon enough Richard realizes that he can easily get from other clubgoers a supply of his three major food groups: booze, cocaine, pussy.

  Maverick’s is open late, after the clubs on the Strip close at 2 a.m. I like the place because of its dance floor. Deep down I think of myself first as a dancer. There is a silhouetted Arthur Murray logo embedded in the floor at Maverick’s entrance, and I always tap it with my foot for good luck as I head inside.

  Richard can’t dance worth shit. But John Daniels likes him. “I can’t dance, but I can move,” Richard says, doing some sort of pimp strut-roll that makes everyone laugh.

  At those Crenshaw clubs, Maverick’s and Redd Foxx’s, I watch a snake shimmy out of its skin—or maybe a butterfly come out of its chrysalis. Richard leaves behind his Bill Cosby–style routines and begins fumbling around for his new voice. Daniels hires him to do a few shows. Redd Foxx gives him a microphone any time he wants it.

  One night, Richard puts on an outrageous character I instantly recognize from my childhood. It’s the kind of pompous, self-inflated preacher every black churchgoer knows.

  “I first met God in 1929,” Richard says, drawing out the year with a flourish straight from the pulpit. “Twenty-naaaahn.”

  I’m walking down the street, eating a sandwich, and I hear a magnificent voice calling to me out of a dark alleyway. I recognize the voice of God right away, since it is deep and glorious and sounds sacred. But I don’t go down into that dark alley, in case there were three niggers down there waiting for me with baseball bats.

  A-men, reverend. It feels right. I hear the true voice of the preacher in the bit, and the familiar street wisdom so common in the ghetto. It helps that I’m out there in the audience. Richard hears my laugh and it eggs him on.

  I realize that he’s doing something different. He’s not doing jokes so much anymore. I’m still feeding him laugh lines, and they still pop up in his act. But he’s moving beyond that now. Jokes are Cosbyland to him.

  He’s beginning to do characters, situations, street arguments, weird-shit human behavior.

  Comics are like trapeze artists—some can’t work without a net, some can’t work with one. Comics like George Carlin are crafting every line, every pause. It’s funny, but it’s all completely canned. When Richard gets up onstage at Maverick’s, he never knows what he’s going to say. The words just spill out.

  I’ve done enough improv to know how tough it is to do what Richard’s doing. Just a man and a microphone, saying whatever’s on his mind at that moment, developing it on the spot into a routine. It’s the purest kind of improvisation, and Richard proves himself brilliant at it. Every night is different. Richard plays off the audience. If they’re with him, he rises to meet them. If they’re cold, he’s cold.

  Richard’s favorite word is motherfucker. Richard loves him some “motherfuckers” in his act. I always joke with him that I am going to get my own mama to go on TV with a lobbying campaign against the “M-word.”

  His second favorite word at Maverick’s and Redd’s is nigger. When he’s up onstage, he speaks what he hears on the streets, at parties, and during drug transactions. What Richard does is knock down the walls between who he is onstage and who he is off it, until there’s less and less of a difference between the two.

  His routines are no longer comic confections whipped up in some comedy kitchen. They come straight out of his bent life.

  Sitting in Maverick’s, listening to Richard’s new routines, I think, My God, he’s left jokes behind. Then I think, Am I in trouble? Is he going to leave me behind, too?

  CHAPTER 5

  I love jokes. I love gags. I love punch lines. That’s who I am.

  I know this puts me totally out of step with the times. Every stand-up comic in the universe nowadays runs away from jokes like they are the Black Plague. (Why was the plague black? Didn’t it kill mostly white people? Shouldn’t it be called the White Plague?) Jokes are old-fashioned. Comics do situations now. But I love jokes because they’re street.

  Tell a joke, and if it’s a good joke, it turns into a virus. Spreads faster than a flu. If there actually ever is a real Killer Joke, we’ll all be dead. It’ll hit us quicker than a jab from Ali’s right hand.

  Walking down One-Two-Five in Harlem, corner of Lenox, I hear a street peddler tell a joke to a B.I.D. lady. I keep walking, and before I get two blocks, I hear a stumble-bum tell the same joke to a little audience of hustlers outside the Uptown Wine Pantry near Madison. Punch lines travel quicker than I can walk.

  Jokes are the original Internet. They connect people.

  Jokes travel through time, too. A joke dies and it lies there asleep and then someone comes along and spills water on it and it comes alive again.

  The original joke is all God’s. It’s the gag he’s playing on each and every one of us. It’s called life. God’s joke is the funniest of all. An oldie but goodie. The Big Bang is the Big Punch Line.

  A joke once freed a slave. This is true. Master is moaning to his house servant, “I’m so homely, I’m so homely, my face could crack a sink. No woman will look at me. I go out, I scare the horses.”

  Slave shakes his head in sympathy and keeps on sweeping the parlor floor. “I know what you can do,” slave says.

  “You do?” says the master, overjoyed. “Tell me!”

  Slave smiles, shakes his head, and sweeps.

  “You tell me the answer,” Master says, “I’ll free you right away.”

  That perks the slave up and makes him stop his broom.

  “Tell me,” Master pleads. “How can I stop this homely face of mine from scaring people?”

  “All right, I’ll tell you—you can keep your ugly ass at home!”

  Comedians don’t tell jokes. Not anymore. The only people who tell
jokes are me and police and sanit-men and salesmen and B.I.D. ladies and long-haul truckers and nurses and exterminators and stumble-bums and addicts and jet-jocks and golfers and car mechanics and frat boys and children.

  Children tell jokes. We’ve got to listen to the children.

  A seven-year-old comes into her parents’ bedroom with her little six-year-old friend. Her mom and dad are in bed, and they’re tearing it up, Mom giving Dad head like she’s Monica and he’s Bill. Hoovering it down like she could suck the chrome off a hubcap.

  Seven-year-old turns to her friend and says, “Can you believe it? And they give me an ass-whipping for sucking my thumb!”

  Listen to the children. Listen to the children!

  Twelve-year-old kid goes into his parents’ bedroom and sees his mom and dad really going at it. Dad’s got Mom spread-eagled and he’s pounding her like a pile driver. Dad looks over his shoulder and sees the kid and laughs. Heh, heh, heh. Haw!

  A month later the dad comes into the kid’s bedroom, the kid’s got Grandma spread-eagled and he’s really giving it to her, wailing away. Dad freaks out. Kid looks over his shoulder at Dad, says, “See, it’s not so fucking funny when it’s your mama.”

  Listen to the children. Listen to the children!

  So jokes are who I am. If Richard is leaving jokes behind, should I be worried? Will there be no more seeing Richard kill with the jokes I wrote for him? No more gold watches slipped onto my wrist out of gratitude for giving him a great punch line? Most of all, no more feeling the high five from God for making him laugh?

  But at Maverick’s Flat back in 1969, I don’t think about that at all. I’m too busy laughing.

  At this point, Richard’s making maybe $50,000 a year. (He’s blowing about a hundred dollars a day on coke.) He has an album, Richard Pryor, out from Reprise that year. He’s been on TV, he’s appeared in Las Vegas. Richard’s been in films—a shitty flop of a film called The Busy Body, plus a war movie called The Green Berets, with his hero John Wayne, in which his role was left on the cutting-room floor. But at least he has movie credits under his belt.