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, Jazz 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 “motherf*cker” both. Shit! Motherf*cker!
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, p-ssy.
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 motherf*cker. Richard loves him some “motherf*ckers” 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?