BLACK
CHAPTER 31
In 2001, my darling youngest son, Symeon, is murdered. It’s a mean, ugly death. He’s shot from close range in a car parked in an alleyway in L.A. The kid who shoots him, somebody he knows and hangs out with, later drives to Las Vegas, checks himself into a hotel, and commits suicide.
I’m in New York when it happens, and my close friend Eric calls me and tells me that Symeon is gone. My son is in the police station morgue for hours before he is identified. All the morgue knows is that it is holding the body of someone with the last name of Mooney. At first the news organizations think it’s me who has died. My close friend, the actor Glynn Turman, sets the situation straight at the morgue.
Symeon is always the kind of child who makes things hard on himself. He even whistles backward. In his late adolescence, he falls in with Ramone, the son of my cousin Raquel. Symeon and Ramone add up to a bad combination. The streets kill my son and send Ramone to prison.
RIP: My son Symeon, who died tragically
When a child of yours dies, you join a very exclusive club. Your children are supposed to outlive you. That’s the natural order of things. The only ones who really understand are those who have had this particular tragedy befall them. It’s pure torture. The whole family is emotionally wrecked by it. I am only glad that Mama, my dear Mama, is gone so she doesn’t have to feel the pain. She passes away the year before in Oakland, and I am at her bedside.
Suddenly it seems I am surrounded by death. Nothing feels funny anymore. It’s the most difficult time in my comedy career. I have to work, I have to support my family. But I feel as though I am two separate people. Mooney at the microphone, and Mooney who has to live his life in grief.
It takes me a long period before I am back on my feet professionally. When Dave Chappelle creates a new sketch comedy TV show on Comedy Central in 2003, I recognize what it is right away. It’s got an informal, just-friends-hanging-out-at-a-party vibe and a familiar edge to it. Chap-pelle’s Show is done as if Playboy After Dark collides with The Richard Pryor Show.
One way to tell that someone is good is when Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with them. For years, I run into Dave Chappelle on the stand-up scene around the clubs and I see how funny he is. He comes into the Store and asks if he can do a set in front of my audience. When we talk, I always like him personally. I meet his mom, Yvonne, and really like her. Dave is raised in a middle-class household in Washington, D.C., with his father and mother both college professors.
So of course a smart, funny black man like that has trouble finding his place in Hollywood. He turns down the role of Bubba in the movie Forrest Gump because he sees the de-meaning bullshit behind the character’s shuck-and-jive smile. He gets his own sitcom, Buddies, a spin-off of an appearance on Home Improvement, Tim Allen’s joint, but Dave’s show gets cancelled right away.
Dave doesn’t come into his own until Chappelle’s Show, which starts out small on cable but blows up huge on DVD. In Living Color, Chappelle’s Show, they all come from The Richard Pryor Show. They grow from it. That ain’t an insult. It’s a natural thing.
When he sees Chappelle’s Show, Richard talks about “passing the torch” to Dave, which considering his relationship with torches and fire, is pretty funny. He’s not threatened by Dave, and neither am I. The mothership isn’t threatened by all the other ships coming up to it to suck teat.
Dave puts together an ensemble that includes Charlie Murphy (Eddie’s brother), Bill Burr, and Donnell Rawlings. Dave asks me to write for Chappelle’s Show and I lay out my conditions for him right away. “I’ve been in this business too long,” I tell him. “I can’t get into another bullshit situation where I have producers and executives picking apart my shit.”
“I won’t let them f*ck with your stuff,” Dave promises.
It ain’t the easiest work in the world, running interference for me with Hollywood people who don’t understand comedy and never will, but Dave does it like a pro. But it’s like I’m seeing Richard’s response to Hollywood playing out in Dave’s experience, too. They’re both comic geniuses. They’re both trying to maneuver through the Hollywood minefield. They both feel stressed out by white people loving their shit so much, as though that means they aren’t keeping it real. And they both wind up fleeing Hollywood for Africa. Seeing the way things turn out, I feel bad that I probably added to Dave’s stress level. But I can only do what I do.
One thing I like to do is f*ck with things that white people consider their own. White folks love them some mysticism. They like funny-ass religions like Buddhism and Scientology because it helps them get out from under the Ten Commandments. They like tarot cards and aliens and all that shit. And they believe in Nostradamus seeing the future. Nostradamus is a French druggist from half a millennium ago, and white people are reading books about him, nodding their heads like he’s Dionne Warwick down at the Psychic Friends Network.
White people have Nostradamus, so I give Chappelle’s Show Negrodamus. We intro the bit with trippy music and random voices asking questions.
What’s the meaning of life? Am I going to find a husband? Who is my real father? Does God really exist? [female announcer] For centuries, people have turned to one man for the answers to life’s great mysteries. That man is Negrodamus.
I come on tricked-out with a burgundy fop hat, a French beard, and a doublet. I field questions from the audience.
Audience member: Negrodamus, what mistakes did Michael Jackson make before he was arrested?
Negrodamus: Michael Jackson should not have been a singer. He should have been a priest. That way, he would have just been transferred.
Audience member: Negrodamus, why is President Bush so sure Iraq has weapons of mass destruction?
Negrodamus: Because he has the receipt.
I also f*ck with movie review shows like Siskel and Ebert, because none of them ever use a black critic. For “Mooney on Movies,” I ask Dave to hire me the “whitest white girls you can get.” I have blond actresses on either side of me, playing the kind of women whose media-created opinions come out of their mouths totally prefabricated.
White woman #1: Our first film is Gone With the Wind. This film is an epic romance centering around Scarlett O’Hara, a damsel in distress during the Civil War. It is a must-see, must-own movie. I highly recommend it.
White woman #2: I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve actually seen Gone With the Wind thirteen times since I was ten years old, no kidding.
Mooney: You must be on crack. I don’t think we’ve seen the same movie. I thought Scarlett was a ho’, because she went to bed with everybody but Mammy. I love Mammy. The best scene in the movie is when Mammy told the people, “Get off my porch, white trash.” I stood and I applauded. I liked every bit of it.
White woman #2: I liked Mammy. I thought she was great, I thought she had a great role.
Mooney: It was Hattie McDaniels. Do you know in real life they wouldn’t let Mammy go to the opening? Hollywood goes too far. She’s dead, but everybody comes back to get their money. She came back as Oprah Winfrey.
A couple of things are going on here. I’m playing a role, a movie critic. Even though the title of the bit is “Mooney on Movies,” I’m not being me. I’m sending up a TV movie critic such as Roger Ebert. Also, I’m getting at something that has happened to me again and again: a white person and a black person encounter the exact same material, and they come away with opposite reactions to it as different as black and white.
I get more street recognition from Negrodamus and my other characters on Chapelle’s Show than I have ever gotten before. Even with no advertising push behind it, the program is huge. It sells like ice in hell on DVD, moving more than 3 million copies, becoming the best-selling TV show on DVD ever, ahead of even The Simpsons. America is like a thirsty dog at its water bowl. It drinks that shit up. Richard Pryor has been away from the scene too long. But Dave Chap-pelle gives them the next best funnyman.
As a result of my new high profile, the BET channel folks invite me to appear on their awards show in September 2005. It doesn’t turn out well. They hire Mooney, they get Mooney. Maybe they were under the mistaken impression that they had hired Mickey Rooney. I give my Nigger Wake-Up Call Award, with the nominees being Diana Ross, Lil’ Kim, Michael Jackson, and Oprah Winfrey.
Diana Ross, Diva! They arrest her for DUI, and she says, “Do you know who I am?” They say, “Yeah, you’re the bitch who’s going to jail!” She’s in the jail hallway [singing “Love’s Hangover”], “If there’s a cure for this, I don’t want it, don’t want it.” “Get back in your cell, bitch, and shut up!”
Diana Ross’s daughter Tracee is in the audience that night, and she runs out of the auditorium crying. I get slammed left and right. My bit is almost completely edited out of the broadcast. I never felt the love at BET, which I call “almost black television,” because I know it’s owned by white folks. But getting f*cked with for doing my own comedy is too much. I watch Dave Letterman and Jay Leno every night. They f*ck with celebrities and get off scot-free. When folks start calling them down, start criticizing them, then they can start in on me. Until then, don’t bother me. I’ve got shows to do.