CHAPTER 34
Flash forward to the end of October 2008, to my appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. The whole country is swept up in presidential-election fever. Barack Obama is leading John McCain in the polls.
I’m totally tripping when Dave invites me to the couch. I’m giving voice to what I’m hearing in the streets. I know Obama is going to win.
“Obama beats your mama!” I laugh, yelling it out. “Obama beats your mama!”
A cry of victory, over and over. Dave can’t control me.
The next day I get a call from Superman’s Lois Lane, the actress Margot Kidder, who is one of Richard’s old girlfriends. I know her from way back, but she hasn’t talked to me in years. Suddenly she’s on the phone.
“How can you say that, Paul?” she says, launching right in.
“What? Who is this?”
“You’re going to stop them from voting for Obama,” Kidder says.
After my initial shock, I finally get it straight in my mind. Here’s this actress, long-ago friend, she gets brain-lock over the fact that Obama might not win, and she’s freaking out. She wants me to tone it down. She wants me to act nice and quiet and not rock the boat.
Honey, I am born rocking the boat. I don’t even have to do a thing in order to rock the boat. I don’t have to stand up and swivel my hips like Elvis did. Just me, just me being who I am, rocks the damn boat.
I ask Margot Kidder how she can tell me not to be who I am. I’m a performer. I’m on David Letterman’s show, doing my act. And you’re this Lois Lane lady who somehow thinks it’s okay to try to shush me up? You’re telling me about comedy?
After all this time, I’ve learned that people’s reactions to me often have nothing to do with me. Any of the hundreds of executives who I’ve run up against in Hollywood: It’s their trip, it’s not mine.
It’s about color. That’s what up. It’s not complicated. It’s not some paradox. It’s simple, it’s basic, it’s racial. Because that’s their problem. Their problem is with the black male. It’s true all over the world. Because we’re the shit, okay? The American black male is the shit.
I am not intending any disrespect to Africans. I know what the game is. But the American black man is a unique kind of black person. All over the world, people copy us. Our music, the way we talk, the way we walk, they are all influenced by us. We are the most imitated people on earth.
So how does that work out to disrespecting us? Because human beings always have a love-hate relationship with those in power. The black American male has so much power because he is the world’s coolest icon. People love us for it, and they hate us for it, too. Everybody wants to be a nigger, but nobody wants to be a nigger. It’s complicated that way.
Somehow I become the spokesperson for all this. Whoopi calls me up, and she’s only half kidding, but she asks for special dispensation so she can use the word nigger that weekend.
“Paul, I got some people coming over, and I know I am going to need to call them some nigger-ass motherf*ckers. I just need a pass for this one weekend, so I can use the N word, just this once. You give me a pass, Mooney?”
I’m laughing, and I give her the pass. I remember how much trouble she got into when she and her boyfriend at the time, Ted Danson, do a Friars Club roast in blackface. Ted Danson is a black man for one night, and look how much shit it brings him.
I call her up after the Friar’s roast. “Welcome to the club,” I say. I defend her on the talk shows. If they hate on Whoopi, they have to hate on everyone else who ever appears in blackface. They have to hate on Al Jolson, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, and Mickey Rooney, because they all wore blackface at one time or another.
I’m on Geraldo’s show about the Friars Club beef, and I ask him to come back to me once at the end of the program to say good night. Then I slip off to makeup. When the camera finds me at the end, I’m in whiteface. Geraldo drops the mic, he’s laughing so hard. But the bit is censored out of the show.
It’s like the joke about a white woman who bakes a chocolate cake. Her little eight-year-old son grabs some of the chocolate frosting, rubs it all over his face, and says, “Look, mama, I’m black.”
Mama slaps the shit out of him. “Damn, boy, don’t do anything like that ever again! In fact, go in to your father and tell him what you just did!”
The boy goes in to his father, and his father gives him an ass-whupping. The father tells him to go see his grandfather for some discipline. The grandfather wails into him, too.
He goes back to his mama, all hangdog, his ass hurting like a motherf*cker.
His mama asks, “Now, sonny, what have you learned?”
“I learned I’ve been a black person for only five minutes, and already I hate you white people.”