Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  “Instead of looking all shiny and Mylar, it looked sort of run-down and beat-up, like New York City did,” said Michaels.

  The show’s cast and writers weren’t necessarily plugged in to the New York standup scene—although hosts and guest stars like George Carlin, Robert Klein, Lily Tomlin, and Andy Kaufman were. Much like that scene, SNL was overwhelmingly white. The show’s lone black cast member, Garrett Morris, had originally been hired as its lone black writer. His participation and impact were laughably minimal. As with the clubs in New York, this isn’t to suggest there was a racist conspiracy afoot or that either the show or the scene was populated by small-minded bigots—though, there may have been some. These on-the-ground facts were the legacy of a two-track culture of unequal opportunities that went back generations, if not centuries, and a rather blasé attitude toward remedying them. Lorne Michaels was a Canadian, and when he and the team behind SNL started working on the show, they were coming from the worlds of improv, standup, and television variety shows. When it came time to cast or hire writers and crew, the people they knew, the people the casting directors knew were from those same worlds, all of which were—like just about every corner of mainstream entertainment—very white.

  There were some efforts to redress this imbalance at SNL, most notably enlisting Richard Pryor to host the show during that first season. By December 1975, Pryor was years into his personal reinvention. Since emerging from his woodshedding period in Berkeley around 1972, his standup had begun introducing audiences to the parade of fuckups, assholes, and malcontents that had shaped Pryor’s life—Pryor, himself, being the chief fuckup, asshole, and malcontent of all. He rendered them in details vivid enough to be equal parts charming, disturbing, and hilarious. His act read like a satirical commentary on the failures and hypocrisies of post–civil rights America, and as such, rarely seemed all that funny on paper. It was only the way Pryor inhabited the characters, the material, and the emotions that made laughter a more natural reaction than tears. His willingness to flout convention and stoke controversy made him widely revered—his 1974 album That Nigger’s Crazy had won a Grammy and the follow-up, Is It Something I Said?, released earlier in 1975, had already sold half a million copies—but also widely feared. Given his popularity and critical acclaim, it made sense that Michaels would want to work with him. But he had a well-earned reputation as an incorrigible drug addict and an unmanageable pain in the ass. When NBC balked at hiring him as a guest host, Michaels resigned.

  NBC eventually caved, but that wasn’t the end of the story. Michaels flew to Florida and met with Pryor at a jai alai arena. Pryor insisted the only way he’d host is if SNL also hired a black actor named Thalmus Rasulala; a black musical guest, Gil Scott-Heron; a black writer, Paul Mooney (a standup comic who wrote with Pryor); Pryor’s girlfriend, Kathy McKee; and Pryor’s ex-wife, Shelly, for the episode. Michaels agreed to all of it, mumbling to his traveling companions on the way back to New York, “He’d better be funny.”

  He was. To their credit, neither Pryor nor the SNL cast and writers skirted the elephant in the room: race. In one sketch, he plays an author who had whitened his skin in order to experience life as a white man. In another, a father’s fears that blacks are taking over the neighborhood are mockingly realized when his children turn black. In a recurring gag, Gilda Radner pops up repeatedly to pick Pryor out of police lineups. Gil Scott-Heron performs his anti-apartheid anthem “Johannesburg.” Pryor even manages to name-drop Dick Gregory, a pioneering, politically charged black standup, into one sketch, and get screen time for the ever-marginalized Garrett Morris. But the coup de grâce was a short sketch in which Chevy Chase is interviewing Pryor for a job as a janitor. They play “word association,” which starts innocently enough—Chase says “tree,” Pryor says “dog,” Chase says “fast,” Pryor answers “slow,” etc.—before devolving into something infinitely more prickly. Chase says “Negro,” and Pryor answers with “Whitey,” then comes “Jungle Bunny” and “Honky,” and eventually “Nigger” and “Dead Honky.”

  Mooney, who wrote the sketch—at least according to Mooney; Chase also claims authorship of it—called it the easiest sketch he ever wrote. As a writer and a standup, Mooney was a flamethrower who saw the world in black and white. He didn’t believe in sugarcoating the truth, and he’d been a huge influence on Pryor’s comedic transformation. Having Chase call Pryor a “nigger” on national television was, in Mooney’s view, just vocalizing what white America thought every time they looked at Pryor or Cosby or Gregory or Mooney. In his own memoir, Black Is the New White, Mooney is only slightly overstating it when he says the sketch was “like an H-bomb that Richard and I toss into America’s consciousness. All that shit going on behind closed doors is now out in the open. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.”

  NBC was enamored enough with Pryor’s SNL appearance that they gave him a prime-time special, which went so well that they then offered him his own ten-episode comedy-variety series in 1977. Pryor’s career was near its apex—he’d just starred in Silver Streak with Gene Wilder, giving him his first mainstream box office hit and pretty much inventing the modern white guy–black guy buddy comedy formula still beloved in Hollywood today—and NBC was television’s lowest-rated network, which led Pryor to believe he’d have a free hand creatively. He didn’t, in fact, have the creative freedom he expected, though that might not be why Pryor made only four episodes before the whole thing fell apart.

  The story of the rise and fall of The Richard Pryor Show is amusing, infuriating, and in many ways, completely predictable. There was trouble from the outset, coming from multiple directions. At the press conference announcing the show, it wasn’t clear Pryor even knew what he’d signed up for. He told an NBC publicist he was just doing a few specials, apparently unaware he’d been contracted for a ten-episode series. Pryor was immediately concerned whether he had enough creative juice or the discipline to produce an hour of television every week. According to Mooney, Pryor was indulging mightily in booze and cocaine, which wasn’t helping with the discipline part of that equation. He was also concerned that NBC would never let him do the kind of cutting-edge comedy he’d worked so hard to discover in himself. He was tortured by the idea that he might be selling out. As Mooney put it in his book, Pryor’s “main stressor, one that he can’t resolve, is that whenever he does something popular, he’s afraid he’s not keeping it real.”

  But when the show’s creative team—which included Mooney, producer Rocco Urbisci, and writer-producer David Banks—initially began meeting at Pryor’s home to write the first episode, there was ample reason for optimism. The ideas they were conjuring imagined the sketches Pryor had done on SNL as a jumping-off point for the new material, but these would go farther, probe deeper, and be much, much stranger. Mooney recruited a talented young cast that included Robin Williams (in his first television appearance), Sandra Bernhard, Marsha Warfield, John Witherspoon, and Tim Reid. As Warfield recalls, most of the cast were just happy to be asked.

  “You have to remember, we were peons and Richard was a god, so we were just lucky to be in his orbit,” she says.

  For the first episode’s opening sketch, Pryor wanted to throw down the gauntlet and make clear how uneasy his alliance with NBC was. An initial idea to show him undergoing a Frankenstein-like operation to be implanted with the brain of an inoffensive white guy was considered but ultimately jettisoned. In its place was Pryor, initially in a tight shot framing just his head and shoulders, introducing the show and addressing very real doubts—including his own—that a comedian as transgressive as he was could possibly work on prime-time network television.

  “People say, ‘Well how can you have a show? You’ll have to compromise. You’ll have to give up everything.’ Is that a joke or what? Well, look at me: I’m standing here naked.” At this point, the camera pulls back to reveal that Pryor is, in fact, naked. “I’ve given up absolutely nothing!” The full reveal now shows that the completely nude Pryor
has been literally neutered—his dick and balls smoothed over to look like the undercarriage of a Ken doll. “So enjoy the show!”

  NBC wasn’t happy and told Urbisci on the morning the show was to air that they wanted the segment cut. He refused to edit it out and was fired. When Pryor was told, he held a press conference to announce he was quitting. “Everybody will say I’m crazy if I quit, that I’m the crazy nigger who ran off from NBC, but this is stifling my creativity. I can’t work under these conditions.” (Ironically, the opening sketch was probably more widely seen on newscasts covering the censorship than it would’ve otherwise been.)

  Three episodes were already in the can and a fourth was done filming. The four episodes that aired offered a tantalizing look at what might’ve been. With the planned cold open pulled, the first episode instead begins with a sketch in which Pryor plays the proprietor of the “Star Wars Bar.” Playing off creatures who only speak in unintelligible grunts and moans, Pryor mostly improvises. At one point, he surveys a hulking, troll-like monster in a cloak, shrugs, and says, “You look just like a nigger from Detroit I know.” The line got huge laughs in the studio and the control room. According to Urbisci, NBC wasn’t comfortable with it but “couldn’t cut it because Richard said it. To cut it would’ve caused more controversy. So the N-word got on TV in prime time.” Pryor, it turned out, was so blackout drunk when he filmed the take that he didn’t even remember doing it.

  Later in the episode, Pryor plays a fictional black president conducting a press conference. He proudly announces that Huey Newton—Pryor’s old Berkeley buddy—is being nominated to be FBI director, promises more black quarterbacks in the NFL, and refuses to quit chasing white women. Finally, a white reporter stands and asks, “After your tenure, if your mother goes back to being a maid, will your mama do my house?” It’s a punch line that reiterated the point the “Word Association” sketch had made two years earlier on SNL: No matter how African-Americans look, no matter what they achieve, they’ll always look the same in the eyes of white people—or at least some of them.

  The episode ends with Pryor waving to the audience. “Good night. See you next week,” he says, as a jail door closes and it’s clear NBC is holding him against his will.

  In a sketch in the second episode, Pryor is the lone black man on a team of explorers who find the Book of Life in an Egyptian tomb. As Pryor begins reading from the ancient text, he discovers written proof that civilization was created by black people.

  “There ain’t nothing here about Whitey!” he declares. “This is ours! Wait till the brothers hear this!” As he grows excited, his white colleagues quietly back out of the tomb and seal it up.

  “Get the bulldozers,” says the lead explorer. “There’s nothing here.”

  Not everything on the show was even comedy. In the third episode, Pryor is doing a Little Richard impression when suddenly the screen goes fuzzy and black. When it flickers back on, a young woman is sitting, talking to the camera, telling multiple versions of a story of a sexual encounter with another woman. The effect is neither titillating nor comic but still undeniably compelling. The fourth episode features more than fifteen minutes of a raucous roast of Pryor by the cast and producers, as well as a final speech from Pryor as a drunken Santa Claus which is interrupted a dozen times by a buzzing black screen with the word “CENSORED” on it.

  And that was that. After four episodes of this bizarre television experiment, Pryor and NBC were happy to be rid of each other. Pryor complained that the network wouldn’t let him do what he wanted—which they wouldn’t—but, as Sandra Bernhard recalls, there were other problems too.

  “Richard didn’t like the medium,” she says. “He didn’t like having to be there every day and having to be creative in that way. He’s a very interior person.” The show’s ratings started off low and kept going down, so NBC wasn’t exactly pleading for him to return. Although many in retrospect have called the show a classic, the fact is, very few of them were watching it in 1977. But one of those few was Keenen Ivory Wayans. Echoes of the Pryor show and its gleefully skewed view of the white world through a black man’s eyes would eventually reverberate on In Living Color more than a decade later. To Keenen, there was something boundless about Pryor’s comedy. Even when it didn’t work, when bits fell flat, they fell flat reaching for something.

  “Other comedians worked within the confines of their time,” said Keenen. “Pryor broke that mold. He redefined what you were able to do.” Seeing Pryor embrace the sides of himself that weren’t necessarily appealing or commercial or even funny was inspiring. “I was always a weird kid, but I just couldn’t figure out what was strange about me. Watching Richard Pryor, I got a sense that it was my humor that made me different.”

  5

  “There’s a New Sheriff in Town”

  In 1980, Saturday Night Live collapsed. Relations between Lorne Michaels and NBC had been strained, and once contract negotiations with Michaels broke down, it all fell apart. After five seasons, the entire cast left, as did all the writers. NBC pressed on, with a new producer, Jean Doumanian, and a new writing staff. Doumanian hired six white cast members—Charles Rocket, Ann Risley, Gail Matthius, Denny Dillon, Gilbert Gottfried, and Joe Piscopo—but two months before the sixth season was set to premiere, she was still looking for an “ethnic” to fill out the cast.

  In September 1980, the show held a special series of auditions that drew a few dozen black actors and comedians. The producers initially seemed to settle on Charlie Barnett, the energetic, charismatic comic known for dazzling crowds in Washington Square Park, but there were reportedly issues with his ability to read cue cards, and he was sent packing. With Barnett no longer in contention, it appeared Robert Townsend had the inside track. There was just one hiccup. Eddie Murphy, who had missed the auditions because he was performing in Florida, kept calling Neil Levy, the show’s talent coordinator at the time, asking if he could audition.

  “Eddie would call as different people, different characters, and he’d somehow get through my assistant and make me laugh,” says Levy. “I’d heard that Jean had already settled on Robert, so I’d tell him we’ve already got our cast. He wouldn’t give up.”

  He wore Levy down. Eddie was invited to the SNL offices on the seventeenth floor at 30 Rockefeller Plaza for an audition. He did some standup and sketch work, which included reading Pryor’s part in the five-year-old “Word Association” sketch, opposite Piscopo. Everyone was blown away except Doumanian, who, according to Levy, still wanted Townsend.

  “I lost my head,” says Levy. “I threatened to quit, and in that moment she said, ‘okay.’ ” Townsend hadn’t signed his contract yet, so he was jettisoned and Eddie was hired.

  Richie Tienken, Eddie’s co-manager at the time, recalls the sequence of events differently. In his telling, Eddie had already auditioned for SNL but was passed over in favor of Barnett. After Barnett was let go, Eddie was in Florida with Tienken when SNL called asking to see Eddie again. Eddie’s initial reaction was, according to Tienken, more along the lines of “Fuck them! They saw me already!” But Tienken convinced Eddie to fly back to New York, and soon enough, the part was his.

  Initially Eddie, then nineteen, was only a “featured player,” not a full cast member, and was treated as such. In the first two episodes of the season, both of which were viciously panned by critics, Eddie appeared on-screen a grand total of one time, as an extra sitting on a couch with no lines. The show was bleeding viewers, and behind the scenes, Eddie was being ignored by most of the all-white writing staff. But in the third episode, he finally got his chance during a “Weekend Update” bit in which he plays “Raheem Abdul Muhammed,” a high school basketball player upset at a recent court ruling in Cleveland that insists that all teams have at least two white players. Eddie’s short monologue was not only funny, it was a pointed commentary on race from a series that had generally avoided the subject.

  “Anytime we get something going good, y’all move in on it,” Edd
ie’s Raheem says. “In the sixties, we wore platform shoes. Then, y’all wore platform shoes. Then in the early seventies, we braided our hair. In the late seventies, y’all braided your hair . . . I don’t see no judge saying that every two bathroom attendants have to be white!”

  The speech was less than a minute long but made an impact. Eddie’s stage time steadily increased after that. His characters and sketches often grew out of improvising with the writers, particularly Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield, who became his favorites. John DeBellis, who’d known Eddie from the New York clubs, got a job writing on the show that same year.

  “Eddie was very cocky,” says DeBellis. “I got along with him, but I remember how confident he was, how relaxed he was—so relaxed that it gave him that presence.”

  Still, it was the middle of the season before Eddie was promoted to full cast status, something he held against Doumanian for years afterward. As he put it to TV Guide, “She tried to Garrett Morris me—turn me into the little token nigger.”

  That 1980–81 season is widely considered the low ebb in a series that has seen plenty of peaks and valleys during its forty-plus-year run. Doumanian was ousted midway through the season. Eddie was generally the only reason to watch, and when the season finished, there was a purge of the cast and writers. Among the performers, only Piscopo and Eddie survived.

  Eddie’s four-year run on SNL did more than make him a big star. It injected an often defiantly black voice onto American television in a way that hadn’t been consistently seen before. Sure, he was still on a predominantly white show, with predominantly white writers, but Eddie had such force of personality that he quickly became the show’s creative center. Even in sketches in which he was a supporting player, his blackness nearly always lent the proceedings another layer, a different viewpoint. Everything bent toward him. And much like Pryor before him, Eddie appeared to delight in skewering his employer. In one of his earliest appearances on the show, he delivers a “Weekend Update commentary” on the military draft, in which he makes the case why he, Eddie Murphy, shouldn’t be drafted.