Becoming Richard Pryor (53 page)

Aptly, the episode began with a staged dispute over the whiteness of
Saturday Night
’s comic formula. Richard and his friend Paul Mooney had noticed that black actor Garrett Morris was often the odd man out, the trouper with no role to play, and they took their frustration public, getting the writers’ room to generate a sketch in which Morris stands his ground and Chevy Chase—already emerging as the show’s breakout star—plays up his sense of privilege.

“Richard Pryor’s here tonight,” Morris tells Chase in the sketch, “and I thought I would open the show. I mean, do the fall.”

Chase glares and returns, “I
always
open the show. Is it understood?”

In the spirit of comedy, the show settles the argument by splitting the difference. Chase offers to teach Morris how to execute the pratfall and so steals the scene from him, but then, because the fall has ostensibly knocked Chase unconscious, it’s Morris who announces the opening of the show. “Live from New York—it’s
Saturday Night
!” he says with relish, grinning over Chase’s lifeless body.

Most of Richard’s
Saturday Night
program toyed with that gap—or was it a chasm?—between how whites and blacks perceived the world and traveled through it. In his opening monologue, Richard put the white half of the studio audience on alert, delivering a version of “Acid” that played off the great distance between Richard’s drug-induced panic (“I can’t breathe!”) and the blithe indifference of his white friend (“Told you it was far out!”). In “Samurai Hotel,” John Belushi and Richard were samurai bellhops who duel over which one of them should carry
a traveler’s suitcase upstairs. After a bit of posturing with their swords, Belushi’s samurai yells, “Your mama-san!” at Richard’s. The insult is a miscalculation: Richard’s samurai is sent into such a rage that he slices the front desk in two—at which point Belushi’s samurai concedes the duel. “I can dig where you’re coming from,” he says, in the only bit of English his character ever spoke. Another running gag featured Richard in an ever-evolving police lineup. In the first bit, he’s placed, handcuffed in a bathrobe, alongside a Boy Scout, doctor, and businessman; in the second, alongside a refrigerator, a goose, and a nun; in the last, alongside three policemen, all of whom point an accusing finger in his direction. After every lineup, he appears more battered and bandaged.

The most provocative sketch opened onto a job interview at a desk in a drab office. Richard’s Mr. Wilson, in a dress shirt and tie, is apprehensive and obliging, while Chase’s interviewer leads him through the beginning of a word association test. “Tree,” “dog”; “fast,” “slow”; “rain,” “snow.” Then the interview takes a curious turn, as an ostensibly objective test is revealed to be anything but:

The tension ratchets up; both interviewer and applicant lose their composure, and the mental game of a “word-association test” degenerates into a slashing duel of insults:

In a tour de force of physical comedy, Richard then seems to be dismantled by his rage. His nose wrinkles and twitches with a nervous tic that reaches up to his eyebrows; his mouth hangs open, frozen. When Chase’s interviewer fumbles, in a conciliatory tone, “I think you’re qualified for the job—how about a starting salary of five thousand dollars?” Richard’s Mr. Wilson can’t arrest the momentum of his anger, even as he looks more aggrieved than incensed. “Yo’ mama! Yo’ grandmama!” he shouts, his voice catching and his eyes moistening. The sketch ends with a fantastic act of reparations: Chase’s interviewer rewarding Mr. Wilson for his trials with an offer to work, at an annual salary of fifteen thousand dollars, as “the highest-paid janitor in America.”

“Word Association Test” was the episode’s edgiest and most memorable sketch. It suggested that beneath the crust of much American life there was magma boiling; that for many white Americans—and not just pot-bellied sheriffs with thick southern drawls—words like
spade
and
nigger
tripped off their tongues with the same ease as
tree
and
rain
. But it also took this point and drove it home in a way that was witty and unpredictable. Richard’s character begins the interview at a disadvantage—the humble applicant trying hard to ingratiate himself and caught off guard by the series of epithets flung at him by his interviewer. He turns the tables not by coming up with more stinging epithets for white people but by refusing to play by the rules dictated to him. “Dead honky” defeats the “nigger” trump card as no single word could do; it transforms the word association test from a language game into a contest of wills, in which righteous courage is bound to prevail. Chase’s character crumbles; he is game master no longer.

T
he sketch—a
Saturday Night Live
classic—has something of a fraught backstory. Both Paul Mooney and Chevy Chase have claimed to have conceptualized the sketch; neither of them has given credit to the other, and the two have gleaned quite different lessons from it. According to Mooney, the sketch was his response to how Lorne Michaels cross-examined him—
How long have you been writing? How long have you been doing comedy?
—when Richard first insisted that Michaels hire Mooney. “Easiest sketch I ever write,” Mooney remembered. “All I do is bring out what is going on beneath the surface of that interview with Lorne and the NBC execs in the jai alai greenroom.” For Mooney, the sketch was an act of aggression against NBC, one that also allowed Richard to channel the ill will he felt toward his costar: “Chevy Chase was the doll-baby . . . the darling of the discotheque with straight teeth, and Richard wanted to knock them out.” Once it was performed, the sketch assumed for Mooney a power that was more than personal, too. It was, he judged, “like an H-bomb that Richard and I toss[ed] into America’s consciousness. . . . The N-word as a weapon, turned back against those who use it, ha[d] been born on national TV.”

For his part, Chase downplayed any enmity between him and Richard. In his memory, the sketch came about through a meeting of comic minds: “Richard’s attitude to it and my attitude toward it were one and the same.” And the final product spoke to a dimension in Richard and his art that Mooney didn’t mention: his essential generosity. While writing the sketch, Chase recalled “asking Richard for as many slang words for white people as he could come up with. [Richard] hesitated and then realized that there were many more for African Americans than he could think of for ‘whities.’ This is reflected in the sketch, and it was reflective of the lack of bigotry in the man.”

It’s a conundrum: Mooney saw Richard as an artist who weaponized comedy to an unprecedented degree, while Chase saw him as an artist who, by nature, did not reach for arms. Could they both have been right—if not about who wrote the sketch,
then about the Richard they loved and appreciated? The evidence of the job interview sketch suggests as much. As the slurs pile up, Richard’s Mr. Wilson throws off the awkward formality of the interview and comes to speak from a place of genuine, white-hot anger. He seems, as Mooney suggests, energized by his rage. But it’s too simple to see the righteously angry Richard as the one and only true Richard. At the opening of the sketch, his character can’t believe that the race card is being played, and even his most aggressive gestures are complicated by an internal debate that plays out in the quick ripple of his facial expressions. He’s undone by his anger as much as he finds himself through it. Richard’s performance might inspire a militant like Mooney, for whom Richard was an apostle of rage, and it might appeal to a writer-actor like Chase, for whom Richard was, at his core, a generous soul. The different fractions of Richard’s audience could come together at the crossroads where Richard stood, even if they couldn’t agree on where to travel afterward.

R
ob Cohen and John Badham caught a hint of the difficulties they faced courting their own crossover audience when they began screening
Bingo Long
at Universal. “What do you expect to do with this nigger epic?” asked Universal’s head of distribution, Hy Martin. According to Cohen, Universal president Ned Tanen was beside himself at a private screening. “What the fuck are they saying?” Tanen muttered at the characters on-screen, his ear unattuned to black dialect. “I don’t understand a goddamn word!” he said repeatedly, each time pounding the squawk box that was used to communicate to the projectionist—until the squawk box shattered into fragments of plastic and a dangling wire. Tanen stood up, the film still spooling. “Finish this!” he commanded Cohen and Badham, though it was unclear how they might ever satisfy him.

Despite the pushback from Universal execs, the team behind
Bingo Long
had reason to be proud. The final film struck a remarkable balance between sweetness and asperity: it had some
thing of the zip of a screwball comedy—Pauline Kael called it a modern black version of the 1930s football musical
Pigskin Parade
—but its levity was spiked with a hanging sense of raw injustice, of opportunities lost and never recovered. (Badham’s next film,
Saturday Night Fever
, was a similarly unstable compound: half Busby Berkeley musical, half Martin Scorsese’s
Mean Streets
.) Its tone was set by the 1939 newsreel that opened the film, in which quick reports of the Fascist storm gathering over Europe were juxtaposed with the gee-whiz story of a masochist who swallowed razor blades and stubbed out cigarettes on his tongue for pleasure. The world, it seemed, was breezily perverse.

Onto this historical stage arrived
Bingo Long
’s ballplayers, wayward heroes for a wayward age. Here Badham coaxed unexpected nuances from each of his three principals. Williams was zesty rather than stiffly debonair as team impresario Bingo Long; Jones cut his usual grandiloquence with a joyful sense of mischief; and Richard delivered a performance that was economical and suggestive. “Pryor calculates every line and gesture for small, explosive effect,” wrote
Time
. His Charlie Snow was both ingenious and hapless—“a fellow of wit and resource,” continued
Time
, whose life is “a slowly losing battle against absurdity.” He was also the character who imported a different strain of comedy into the film: it was never Charlie Snow who was shown putting on a high-stepping show for white folks. Instead, he put on a show for himself, “Carlos Nevada” being the alias of the witty lady killer he aspired to be. Whether he was talking about “getting my bat ready” before sliding into bed with a white woman, or cracking wise to a man holding a razor to his chest, he always seemed to be projecting a bravado in which he didn’t fully believe. He might pass himself off as Cuban, but he couldn’t shed the inner anxieties at his core.

Upon
Bingo Long
’s release in the summer of 1976, critics heaped praise upon it, and on Richard’s performance in particular. The
Washington Post
called the film “irresistible,” predicting that it
“should become one of the most popular movies of the year” and that “Pryor was heading for next year’s Academy Award for best supporting actor.”
New York
’s tough-minded John Simon commended Badham for the “dizzy old cinematic devices [he kept] up his tricky mitt” and noted the movie’s “engagingly bumptious vitality,” a “picaresque élan made more unusual by the supersession of the single
picaro
by two sardine-packed cars of pranksters.” Similar positive notices could be found from the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
to the
Chicago Tribune
and
Village Voice
. Universal rolled out a promo campaign that seeded articles on the Negro Leagues in newspapers across the country, and tried to capitalize on the runaway success of
The Bad News Bears
, the summer of 1976’s other baseball film, by staging an exhibition game between the casts of the two films and by publicizing a letter, from the actor who played
Bad News
catcher Engelberg, that hailed
Bingo Long
as “the best movie I’ve ever seen.”

All that
Bingo Long
needed, then, was an audience that could appreciate it half as much as Engelberg. In its second week of wide release, boosted by the wave of good press,
Bingo Long
became the third-most popular film in America. But then the audience disappeared: the film had no legs, petering out at a disappointing $2.8 million for Universal. The poor totals couldn’t simply be blamed on the failure of the film to cross over to whites, either. Even in its release at the Apollo Theater, the trend was the same: a big opening followed by a trailing off.

What had gone wrong?
Let’s Do It Again
, the sequel to
Uptown Saturday Night
, had been released in late 1975 and drawn $11.8 million in rentals, double that of its predecessor. Motown’s earlier two vehicles for Diana Ross,
Lady Sings the Blues
and
Mahogany
, had put up impressive box office totals, too: $9.1 million and $6.9 million, respectively. But
Bingo Long
, with its curious mix of the zany and the melancholy, was neither comedy nor melodrama. It was something more interesting, and perhaps harder to digest for audiences on either side of the color line. Or maybe it suffered from being everyone’s
second-favorite baseball movie of the season. In any case, later bids for the elusive crossover audience would not follow its lead. When Richard became the crossover star par excellence in the next few years, it would be through a fluke that, only in retrospect, would seem like the workings of grand design.