The Curious Decline Of Paul Mooney

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Thread started 02/03/16 1:02pm

babynoz

The Curious Decline Of Paul Mooney

I would hate to see Paul go out as pitifully as Pryor did. Be sure to check out the photo of young Paul Moonie from the link.

Full article.......

http://www.vulture.com/20...ooney.html

comedy

February 2, 2016 1:57 p.m.
The Curious Decline of Paul Mooney
By David Peisner

In his youth, Paul Mooney was a dancer. And you can see it, too, in vintage clips from the ’80s, in the lithe, graceful way he carried himself onstage during his comedy sets. Even as he entered middle age and beyond, and even after he took to performing while seated, Mooney had a dignified, almost regal bearing — no matter that he was, as always, laying waste to any notions of political correctness or politesse. “Kill every white person on this planet,” he said bluntly in his 2012 special, The Godfather of Comedy. “To end racism, that’s the only way.”

Today, that dancer’s elegance is almost entirely gone, replaced by a slumped and diminished figure with a rambling, uncertain delivery. The 74-year-old is still touring, though whether he should be is an open question. It’s a troubling state in which to witness one of the most important and underappreciated comics of the past half-century. And that’s exactly what Paul Mooney is. He was Richard Pryor’s writing partner and best friend. He’s worked with Redd Foxx, Eddie Murphy, and Dave Chappelle. A comedian’s comedian, he was known to command the stage at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood for hours, riffing acidly on show business, politics, and, especially, the ugly state of America’s race relations. Slavery, lynchings, riots — these weren’t isolated sins, they were the country’s foundation, and somehow Mooney made it funny. Filmmaker Robert Townsend, who cast Mooney in his satirical 1987 film, Hollywood Shuffle, says, “Paul didn’t care to be loved. He wanted to speak his mind. He taught a generation of comedians to be fearless.”

Now, though, Mooney’s legacy is in danger of being sullied by an increasingly disheartening series of appearances. Last May, he delivered a rambling performance on Arsenio Hall’s since-canceled talk show. A week after it aired, news outlets reported that Mooney had cancer, citing his cousin and sometime manager Rudy Ealy as the source of the info. I asked Ealy, who I’d been told lives with Mooney in Oakland, if Mooney was ill; he said Mooney was “fine.” (Despite agreeing to let me interview Mooney and inviting me to Oakland to do so, Ealy stopped returning my calls once I arrived in the Bay Area.)
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Helene Shaw, who was Mooney’s manager for more than 30 years, has a different view. “Those people around him right now,” she says incredulously, “are going to put this man onstage?” She says Mooney was living in Los Angeles until about two years ago, when he fell ill during a trip to Oakland. “Rudy’s just been around because Paul happened to get sick up in Oakland. He just grabbed him. When he was in his right mind, Paul hated Rudy.”

All this uncertainty is especially jarring given the man it surrounds. Paul Mooney has built, and occasionally undermined, a career by boldly delivering his version of the truth. “They said, ‘Paul, why don’t you sugarcoat?’ ” he snapped at imaginary critics during one of his routines. “I ain’t sugarcoating shit … because white folks didn’t sugarcoat shit to me.”

Many of Mooney’s bits don’t read like jokes. His comedy is more like a challenge: Can you take me seriously? Can you not? Laugh, or you’ll cry. As Mooney’s daughter Spring puts it, “There is no lukewarm.” And that applies to his relationships, too. Comedy Store veteran and Roseanne executive producer Allan Stephan says, “Paul is a very gentle, sweet man. I have nothing bad to say about him.” Jennifer Pryor, Richard’s widow, who has known Mooney since 1977, sees him differently: “I don’t have anything nice to say about the asshole.”

Paul Mooney was born in 1941 in Louisiana to teenage parents and raised mostly by his grandmother. He moved to Oakland as a child. As a teen, he competed in and won dance contests, eventually appearing as a regular on a local American Bandstand–like TV show called Dance Party. (Mooney counted future Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton as a high-school friend.) After a stint in the Army, Mooney got into professional show business by working as a circus ringmaster. Then, in the early ’60s, he saw Lenny Bruce performing in a bar and his life changed — he started doing comedy and moved to Los Angeles. Almost from the beginning, race was central to Mooney’s act. In his 2009 memoir, Black Is the New White, he writes that when he was starting, black comics had to “have one self for the master and one self that’s ‘just between us’ … I’m the first comic to bring a ‘just between us’ black voice to the stage.”

In the late ’60s, he met Pryor, who’d already had a career as a suit-and-tie-clad Bill Cosby acolyte, which he pissed away in 1967 with a self-lacerating onstage meltdown. The two became tight, eventually relocating to the Bay Area together, where they grew increasingly politically conscious. Pryor was reading about Malcolm X and listening to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. Mooney joined an antiwar theater troupe called FTA, or “Fuck the Army,” where he performed alongside Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.

Mooney nurtured Pryor’s rebellious streak. Argus Hamilton, a comedian and former colleague of the duo’s, says, “It was Mooney that turned [Pryor] into Dark Twain.” When Pryor hosted Saturday Night Live in 1975, he insisted Mooney be hired as a writer for the episode. Mooney crafted a job-interview sketch for Pryor and Chevy Chase — tensions escalate until Chase says “nigger” — that remains one of the show’s most potent moments. As Chappelle has explained, “To see a black man on TV holding his own with a white man, that was television history.”

Mooney’s legend grew, but career opportunities didn’t follow. Hollywood, he wrote, was scared of “a proud black man like me.” Mooney’s friend Sandra Bernhard saw this up close. “If you’re an insecure white man, you might be a little threatened by Paul,” she says. “I’ll never forget I was ready to sign with this big management company in the ’70s, and they came to see me at the Comedy Store and said, ‘You have to lose the schvartze,’ pointing to Paul.”

By the mid-’80s, Mooney was back in L.A. and hanging with a group of comics later dubbed “the Black Pack” that included Eddie Murphy, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Hall, and Townsend. It was a creatively exciting time that resulted in a slew of projects, such as Murphy’s “Raw” tour (Mooney was the opening act) and accompanying concert movie, the HBO special Robert Townsend and His Partners in Crime (which Mooney appeared on), and Wayans’s groundbreaking show In Living Color (for which Mooney was a writer).

Despite the successes of many of these Black Pack–era projects, Mooney remained out of the spotlight. Townsend thinks his comedy cut too deep. “Some of the stuff he’d say would hit home so hard people in the audience would go, ‘This ain’t funny.’ ” But Mooney was also a master self–saboteur. Comedian Aries Spears had a bit about trying to bring Mooney aboard as a writer for Fox’s mid-’90s sketch series MADtv. “Soon as he walked in,” Spears recalled, “the producers were like … Are you familiar with our show?’ Paul went right into it: ‘I’ve seen your show. All of you niggas have stolen my material.’ ”

Prince, in you I found a kindred spirit...Rest In Paradise.

SPYZFAN1	I remember reading in "Right On!"magazine (1978 or 79....damn I'm old) that Paul was slated to play the role of Sam Cooke in a bio-pic on his life. It would have been interesting to see how he played him.
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