by David Henry
A hotel security cop gave him the once-over but didn’t question his reason for being there. And while no one would ever mistake the twenty-two-year-old Richard Pryor for hired muscle, it might have made sense because Davis had faced continual threats of assassination, lynching, and theater bombings ever since his marriage to the Swedish actress May Britt in 1960, a barrage that only intensified when their daughter, Tracey, was born a year later.
Once or twice, Davis peeked out to see if the skinny guy in the chair was still there. After several hours, someone from Davis’s entourage brought Richard a plate of food. The next morning, as Davis was leaving, Richard rose from his chair. “What’s happening?” Davis said. The two would become great friends a decade hence, but for now Davis smoked and nodded as Richard stammered out a brief résumé and asked if maybe he would give him a job. Davis gave him a cigarette and some encouragement. “But he was so jive,” Richard wrote. “Didn’t mind being a star one bit. It was a beautiful thing to see.”
And then there was the hooker in Baltimore who invited Richard home with her after his show at the Playboy Club. “I want you to hear something,” she said, and pulled out a translucent red vinyl LP from its jacket, set the phonograph arm down on side one of Lenny Bruce, American, and for once, Richard forgot all about the pussy.
On the second track, Lenny set the scene wherein a nine-year-old kid inadvertently discovers the mind-altering properties of model airplane glue. Lenny next followed the kid into a toy store where he nonchalantly asks the clerk for a list of innocuous items: a nickel’s worth of pencils, Big Boy tablet, some Jujubes, Tailspin Tommy book, and—slipping this in almost as an afterthought—two thousand tubes of airplane glue.
“That destroyed me,” Richard said. “I went fucking crazy.”
The epiphany of Richard’s first brush with Lenny Bruce was akin to what Colombian journalist Gabriel García Márquez experienced when he first opened a copy of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. “Holy shit!” is what he said, reliving that moment for an interviewer some thirty years later. “The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that.”
Before Lenny Bruce, most comics purchased their jokes from gag writers. And, once those jokes had been performed, there was little recourse against other comics stealing them, so common a practice that Milton Berle, the most famous and highest-paid comic on TV at the time—affectionately known as Uncle Miltie, Mr. Television, Mr. Tuesday Night by viewers—was called the Thief of Bad Gags by his fellow comics. Lenny’s brand of comedy changed all that, effectively trouncing the division of labor between gag writer and comedian, rendering the arrangement hopelessly passé, just as Bob Dylan had done to songsters in tin pan alley. (“Bob Dylan killed popular music,” an old-time recording engineer at Columbia Records’ New York studio was heard to say during an afternoon mastering session in the late 1980s, shaking his head with equal parts admiration and rue. Every songwriter now felt he should sing, and every singer thought he had something to say.) Gag writers and tunesmiths soldiered on, of course, but mainly as remnants of a time that had passed. Comics, like singers—if they wanted to be taken seriously—were expected to do their own stuff.
What Lenny Bruce did was revive the long-neglected tradition of storytellers, balladeers, satirists, and poets who delivered their oratory in the public square. He showed that a comedian standing in front of an audience could roam the same expanse of territory, plumb the same depths of humanity as a novelist, poet, or playwright could sitting over a typewriter.
Richard, in his moment of enlightenment, understood not only the alchemy Lenny practiced, he recognized, too, that he’d already amassed and absorbed everything he needed to work that same spell himself. He knew it better than he knew anything. He’d been learning it all his life from Buck’s emasculating tirades, his grandfather’s tall tales, Uncle Dickie’s boasts, the pool-hall hustlers’ mother-rhymes, the prayers of the revival preacher who tried to cast the devil out of him, and the lies told by whichever wizened Peorian it was who planted the seeds of Mudbone as he sent streams of tobacco juice hissing into the barbecue pit.
Where Lenny was cool and detached, standing on the outside looking in, Richard would crawl inside his characters, actually become them, and follow them wherever they might go. Which is why the restrictions of TV performance proved so problematic. “I have to be that person,” he told James Alan McPherson in 1975. “I see that man in my mind and go with him. . . . When I do the people, I have to do it true. If I can’t do it, I’ll stop right in the middle rather than pervert it and turn it into Tomism. . . . If I didn’t do characters, it wouldn’t be funny.”
Richard’s problem, McPherson concluded, was his conviction that objectionable language was essential to the characters he created. To stay within the confines of acceptable practices, he insisted, Richard had to pull back, resist giving himself over to characters who would invariably go where he couldn’t follow—not and stay on the air, anyway.
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In Buffalo, fellow comedian Donnie Simpson sold Richard on a vision of bigger paychecks and beautiful women awaiting them in Canada. Finding themselves stranded in Ontario, out of money and with no work, Richard flipped through the June 17, 1963, issue of Newsweek to see a full-page article about a young black comic named Bill Cosby.
What set Cosby apart from all other “Negro comedians,” the article said, was that he didn’t tell Negro jokes. “I’m trying to reach all of the people,” he said. “I want to play to Joe Q. Public.”
Richard was panic-stricken. “Goddamn it,” he told Simpson and anyone else who would listen, “this nigger’s doing what I’m fixing to do. Ain’t no room for two niggers.”
If that’s what Richard had in mind, Simpson asked him, what was his ass doing in Toronto? “You got to go to New York. That’s where all them bit cats are.”
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When he first started out in Philadelphia saloons and New York coffeehouses, Bill Cosby saw himself as the next Dick Gregory, until manager Roy Silver convinced him otherwise. According to Newsweek, his act at that time consisted of “one joke about the first Negro President of the U.S. (‘Everything is OK. Just a lot of “For Sale” signs on the street’) and 30 minutes of gall.” Cosby soon conceded that there was only room for one Dick Gregory.
Yet, by the time Richard arrived on the scene, Dick Gregory had all but abandoned his post as the country’s designated black comedian, turning his energy and attention more and more toward civil rights and racial justice, working the college circuit and staging hunger strikes that gave him the gaunt face, sunken cheeks, and protruding eyes of a wizened sage. His press conferences, commentator Ralph J. Gleason noted, had become more entertaining than his stage shows.
Never an overtly political animal or even a student of politics himself, Richard nonetheless possessed an acutely intuitive political savvy. He didn’t need a weatherman to gauge the brisk winds that sent hats flying and people chasing after them as they rolled down the streets. (Soon enough, men simply stopped wearing them.)
Cosby uplifted the race without ever mentioning the subject. But the ardor of Dick Gregory’s activism awoke even Lenny Bruce to deeper currents running through the nation. When Gregory asked him to join a march, Lenny demurred, reasoning that his legal battles stemming from drug and obscenity charges would only bring down more heat on the march. Gregory assured him that would not be a problem. The only thing that mattered, he said, was to “trick whitey, fuck up Boss Charley.”
Trick whitey? Fuck up Boss Charley?
Lenny had never heard that kind of talk before. Then it dawned on him that he’d never heard a black man express any type of hostility, ever. If you’re in traffic, he said, and you hear some guy yelling, “ ‘Hey, asshole, move it over dere!’ That’s never a colored driver, Mack. Isn’t that a little strange?”
Still, some in the civil rights movement, such as Whitney Young of the National Urban League, l
amented Gregory’s activism, believing he could accomplish far more for the cause through performing his comedy on national television than he would in the marches and sit-ins. “We can find marchers and fasters and people who can run for political office,” Young argued, “but we don’t have many Dick Gregorys.”
By contrast, Cosby developed characters that had more in common with Red Skelton’s Mean Widdle Kid than with Dick Gregory’s cool scathing wit or, later, Richard Pryor’s Mudbone. Although Cosby’s material was clean and nonthreatening, he made the medium his message. The very notion of a cuddly color-blind black comic in the sixties was radical in and of itself, said critic Gerald Nachman. “He made folks feel good about America. The humor was just the icing on the cake; Cosby was the cake.”
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Richard arrived in New York City in the summer of 1963 with ten dollars in his pocket. He spent fifty cents on a shower at the Port Authority bus terminal, another dollar to have his suit pressed and shoes polished, bought a pack of cigarettes, splashed on some Canoe cologne, and headed uptown to The Apollo Theater in Harlem, the only place he knew to go. The man there took one look at him and suggested he try his luck down in the Village.
On the bus downtown, Richard struck up a hi-I-just-got-to-town conversation with a fellow passenger who offered him floor space in his rooming house on West Thirty-sixth Street until he got his bearings.
Soon Richard had a place of his own on Fourteenth Street and was sharing bills with the likes of Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, and Woody Allen at clubs like the Improv, the Gaslight, Cafe au Go Go, the Village Gate, and the Bitter End where performers would stop by in the afternoon to take a number, just like at a bakery or deli counter, to determine what order they would go onstage that night. Joan Rivers remembers waiting in that line with the skinny and “brilliantly shocking” young comedian whose jacket sleeves had been “lengthened so many times, he looked like an admiral.” Rivers would soon join the ranks of an unlikely assemblage of high-profile fans, including Hugh Masekela, Nina Simone, Budd Friedman, and Miles Davis, who took it upon themselves to promote Richard and champion his career.
While writing an article on Joan Rivers for Life, Tommy Thompson and the magazine’s entertainment editor Richard Meryman accompanied her to see Richard’s act at “some awful place in the Village where you walked down two steps—both literally and socially—when you walked into that club.” Even though there were only a few scattered people in the club that night, they all three were astounded by Richard’s improvisational flights of fancy. He was just incredible, Rivers says. “Funny, funny, funny. And sad. It was acting, it was comedy, it was social comment, it was everything.” Her awe only grew over time. Twenty years later (in the early eighties), she spoke of his stand-up characters as though they were actual people. “They’re brilliant and they’re ugly, but he makes them funny, and by the humor he takes you through the ugliness and into the humor and makes you aware of everything. Nobody can touch him.” Then, in a clear-eyed assessment almost unheard-of in a field so fraught with rivalry, she concluded, “In my own way, I may do some comparable things, but on a much more shallow scale. I do what’s painful for the middle-class woman. That’s a whole different thing. He does what’s painful for somebody who has really lived through pain.”
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During the last week of August and first week of September 1963, Richard shared a broom-closet-sized dressing room at the Cafe Wha? with pop singer Brian Hyland, who’d hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 three years earlier at the age of sixteen with “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” a novelty song that he followed with more enduring hits like “Let Me Belong to You” and “Sealed with a Kiss.”
“Richard projected such an endearing ease and vulnerability,” Hyland says, “he had the audience smiling with him from the moment he hit the stage. He was a master of voices and characters.” Hyland sat out front every night to watch Richard’s act and said he never did the same set twice. “His off-the-wall riffs always left the audiences roaring. He could do anything. I consider it one of the highlights of my career to have worked with the up and coming comic genius.”
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Nina Simone invited Richard to open for her at the storied Village Gate, a cavernous upscale club twice the size of the Cafe Wha?, where the stage consisted of a simple riser on the floor out among the tables.
On their opening night, Richard was so nervous he shook like he had malaria. Nina stood with him in the wings as he waited to go on. “I put my arms around him there in the dark and rocked him like a baby until he calmed down,” she wrote in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You. “The next night was the same, and the next, and I rocked him each time. He never stopped being nervous.” Or perhaps he just wanted to be rocked in the arms of Nina Simone.
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Miles Davis paid Richard out of his own pocket to open for his quintet’s weekend shows at the Gate. “He didn’t have a reputation yet, but I knew he was going to be a big star. I could just feel it in my bones,” Miles told Quincy Troupe. “I just wanted people to know how great this motherfucker was.”
Improv owner Budd Friedman ran a hard business—some called him a benign dictator—but he always had an indulgent spot for Richard Pryor. Richard once accused Friedman of taking advantage of him because he was black. “I was absolutely heartbroken,” he told Chuck Crisafulli of the Los Angeles Times. Friedman lay awake that night worrying that the kid might be right. Friedman’s wife, wanting to get some sleep herself, tried to reassure him: “You should have told him you take advantage of all performers, regardless of race, color, or creed.”
“I told Richard that line and he loved it. We had no trouble being friends again.” Friedman even played along with a costly gag the night Richard recruited J. J. Barry, and Martin Harvey Friedberg to join him for a bit of silent slapstick that knocked the crowd silly. Inspired as much by the Marx Brothers as the staged happenings and absurdist theater on display in the Village’s more high-minded venues, the three comedians set a table onstage and consumed a full meal in silence, grabbing food off each other’s plates, licking the dishes, and otherwise cutting up as the improvisational spirit moved them. The performance culminated in a smashing of plates that brought Friedman, on cue, into the act. He came out screaming, “Is this the way you treat my place!” whereupon he snatched away the tablecloth sending what dishes remained crashing to the floor.
Even though Richard drew attention and praise from all the right people, that Bill Cosby article in Newsweek still worried him like a bad tooth. His imagination filled with images of Cosby grabbing the headlines, the money, the precious few TV guest slots for black comics. Yet he’d never seen Cosby perform. One night between sets at The Cafe Wha?, Richard went around to the Bitter End to see Cosby’s act for himself. He was amazed to find that Cosby’s act was nothing like his own. His jokes were clean—no profanity, no politics, no racial axes to grind. As he walked back to the Wha? for his next set, Richard decided then and there that he would refashion himself in Cosby’s image. If Cosby did Noah and the ark, Pryor would do Adam and Eve. If Cosby spun stories of his childhood in the projects of Philadelphia, Richard would spin stories that sounded a lot like Cosby’s childhood in the projects of Philadelphia but set in Peoria.
On his debut Warner Bros. LP Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow . . . Right!, Cosby had a bit about the free entertainment provided by winos on the New York City subway. So Richard did one about subway drunks and pickpockets. Cosby parodied professional athletes doing television commercials for razor blades and hair tonic; Richard parodied commercials of real housewives captured on hidden cameras gushing about their laundry detergent.
Unfortunately, it worked: The accolades and bookings that came his way when he followed Bill Cosby’s lead put a half-decade-long stranglehold on his true genius.
When word got around the Village one night that a TV talent scout had dropped in at the Bitter End,
Richard rushed over and begged owner Fred Weintraub to let him get up on stage. That’s all it took. And so, on August 31, 1964, Richard made his national debut on a summer replacement TV variety show On Broadway Tonight, hosted by Rudy Vallee.
Vallee, an amiable megaphone crooner from the 1930s, famous for his recordings of “The Whiffenpoof Song” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” had been on the lookout for someone new to feature on his show. Despite mild grumblings from his producer, Irving Mansfield, Vallee saw Richard as just the sort of “out there” comic who would give his ratings a boost.
Despite his avowed determination to go full Cosby, Richard’s jokes were drifting toward pure Dadaism, such as this opening bit for the drawling hillbilly, a character that would take up permanent residence in his repertoire:
I heard a knock on the door. I said to my wife, “There’s a knock on the door. My wife said, “That’s peculiar. We ain’t got no door.”
Confronting the intruder (who’d presumably knocked before entering), Richard shifted into pitch-perfect mimicry of Cosby’s rapid-fire delivery, right down to the elongated vowels:
I grabbed the-eee crook. That was the-eee wrong move. He threw me down. I got up. He knocked me down. I got up. He kicked me down. I got up. He said get up. I said haaaaa! Then my wife threw him across the furniture. She slapped me. The police came. She beat them up. They took her away. Me and the crook livin’ happily ever after.
Always more comfortable when he could disappear into a character, Richard fidgeted between jokes and implored the studio audience to hurry their applause lest he run out of time before finishing his act. “Wait,” he said, “I’ve some more to tell you.”
The first words Richard spoke to Vallee’s nationwide television audience were, “I want to tell you a few things about myself because a lot of you probably don’t know me. I’m not a New Yorker; my home’s in Peoria, Illinois.” Here he paused for the customary applause that greets the mention of almost any American town, and then he let his face go slack when none was forthcoming.
