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 venues 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 f*cking 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.
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.
F*ck 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 f*ck 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 motherf*ckers 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 “f*ck 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.”
“Motherf*cker,” Richard says, shaking his head, baffled. It’s difficult for him to comprehend. “Are you a motherf*cking 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