All Jokes Aside
In a New Memoir, Paul Mooney Opens Up
2009-11-04
By Eric Easter

BLACK IS THE NEW WHITE
Simon & Schuster
256pp.

Paul Mooney doesn’t know his own strength. Of the dozens of books that come in each week for review, none stuck out more as an immediate read than writer/actor/comedian/ living legend Mooney’s memoir, Black is the New White. Few stories could be more compelling and anticipated. Yet one gets the sense that neither Mooney nor his publishers know the extent that Mooney is revered as an icon and trendsetter. As a result, the book is a relatively scant 256 pages, but could easily go on for several hundred more to record an amazing life.

Like any memoir, Black is the New White, is Mooney’s attempt to claim and define his own legacy, just in case the world fails to give him his due. In his case, the world absolutely has not. That’s the burden of being a pioneer. After a career of being ahead of his time, Mooney has never been quite as famous as the people whose words he supplied, never quite as successful as the young comics who studied his stand-up routine. The book reads almost as a therapy session where Mooney is both client and patient, repeated asking and answering the question of why his name is not the household word that his best friend Richard Pryor’s was.

Inevitably the answer can be summed up in one protest phrase, ”Too Black, Too Strong”. The best comedy contains a kernel of truth. Mooney’s routines, however, are almost too true. They are at once statements of fact and absurdity, the kind of jokes you tell while a hangman is tying a rope around your neck, you either make the hangman laugh or the rope gets tighter. Mooney almost always goes the tighter rope route. It’s a unique brand of humor that has cemented Mooney’s reputation as an influential genius  and won him a loyal following but apparently not the kind that gets you a cute little sitcom on Thursday nights.

Still, Paul Mooney’s influence looms large. Richard Pryor’s head writer, author of one of themost-remembered SNL sketches, writer for Sanford & Son and Good Times, writer for In Living Colour and creator of the “Homey D. Clown” character, and to a whole new generation, Negrodamus.

As much as the book is a record of Mooney’s life, it’s also a chronicle of the times and an insider’s look at the circumstances and relationships that helped develop the course of Black comedy from the Cosbyera to now.  It begins with a startling revelation (I won’t spoil it here) about how he met Richard Pryor. It’s an eye-opening story that immediately shows the heavy influence of drugs and alcohol on Pryor’s psyche and the demons that haunted him through his career.

For those who like memoirs to be tell-alls, Mooney more than satisfies on that account, giving blow-by-blow details on negotiations and bed arrangements. Richard Pryor slept with Shelly Winters for a movie role. Pryor hated Chevy Chase and the Saturday Night Live cast member had to beg to get the role in the famous “Dead Honky” sketch that became Mooney’s signature writing credit. There’s much more where that came from.

More interesting is Mooney’s take on his personal struggle to get his own career started and move beyond the shadow of his friendship with the most famous comic in the world, an attempt that tested the relationship as Mooney began to make a name and an income for himself with Pryor’s help.

The book dances between hubris and humility. Mooney seems to want to take the credit he’s due for the role he has played in Black comic culture, but then backs off at the last minute to focus on others. Still he’s not above the occasional unsubstantiated boast, for example laying claim to popularizing the phrase, “Nigger, please.” But then who would challenge him on that? If not Paul Mooney, then who, and who but Paul Mooney would even take that credit?

Ultimately, Black is the New White proves that Mooney has no excuses to make, to others or to himself. His legacy is solid and any lack of love or recognition is entirely our fault not his.

Eric Easter is VP of Digital & Entertainment for Johnson Publishing, Co., Inc.