Becoming Richard Pryor (61 page)

In the show, Richard was drawn to explore the full spectrum of off-color humor: the silly, the risqué, the politically pungent, the macabre. In a spoof of spaghetti Westerns, a smart-alecky villain asks Richard’s gunslinger, “How’s your ass?” To which Richard replies, after a pregnant pause, “You mean my donkey? It wasn’t nice of you boys to shoot my donkey.” In “The 40th President of the United States,” Richard played the first black president at a press conference, trying to project an air of competence. The sketch begins as a satire
of political doubletalk (the neutron bomb is a “neo-pacifist weapon”), but evolves into an exercise in ever-more-improbable racial fantasies: under President Pryor, the jazz of Miles Davis will be piped into space; there will be more black NFL quarterbacks; Huey Newton will be head of the FBI. White reporters wriggle in their seats. A southern newsman uses his question to launch the ultimate insult—“Now, after your tenure, if your mother goes back to being a maid, right, will your momma do my house?”—and the presidential press conference degenerates into a miniature race riot, with black and white reporters at one another’s throats.

And then there was Bo Jaws, a faith healer preying on the poor, sick, and maimed in a bayou tent revival. “Let Bo Jaws handle it!” shrieked Richard, in a Rastafarian fright wig and with a crazed gleam in his eye, in the strangest sketch of the show’s premiere. “Handling it,” for Bo Jaws, means pitching a cripple out of a wheelchair and telling her to crawl; molesting a pair of Siamese twins (they complained they never had any fun); and putting a brown paper bag over the head of an ugly woman. Like the Reverend James L. White from Richard’s TV special, Bo Jaws is a fraud, but he has been so consumed by his own fraudulence that there’s no longer any daylight between him and his act. The sketch closes with Bo Jaws exorcising the devil within himself by slicing his body three times with a knife, wrapping the “devil’s serpent” around his neck, and kissing a live snake. (Urbisci swapped out the fake one used in rehearsal, unbeknownst to Richard.) Bo Jaws’s congregation moans and writhes in ecstatic worship as the sketch fades out; there’s no end in sight to their pain. “As a vitriolic lampoon of pseudo-religious fervor this is not particularly funny,” wrote the
Washington Post
appreciatively, “but it is unquestionably alarming.” The sketch made a singular impression: comedian Dave Chappelle, who had his own struggles with television as a medium, later told Urbisci that it was his favorite.

As Richard was pushing his show to the edge of what network TV might handle, he was also pushing his own body to the brink—drinking and snorting just as he had predicted. He had a habit of filling up a water glass with vodka (no ice) and draining it over the course of the meeting in the writers’ room. Cocaine, though it could be found everywhere on set, was especially plentiful in his dressing room. Sometimes he finished the day passed out on the floor. While filming “Star Wars Bar,” he delayed getting into his makeup, then was so blotto with the cameras rolling that he spoiled much of a first run-through of the scene. John Moffitt pleaded with Richard for one more take; Richard felt he couldn’t do it, then reluctantly agreed. A few days later, when Moffitt showed Richard a meticulously edited version of the sketch, Richard was shocked. “I don’t remember doing it,” he told Moffitt. He had ad-libbed, with fitful brilliance, then blacked out.

“Let Bo Jaws handle it!”: the twisted imagination of
The Richard Pryor Show
. (Courtesy of the author)

And yet it would be wrong to conclude that Richard was less than fully invested in his show. When informed that the first episode had run eighty-five thousand dollars over budget—in part because, with “Satin Doll,” he confected a glossy twenty-minute mini-movie complete
with song-and-dance numbers in period style—Richard turned to his manager and deadpanned: “write a check.” The check was written.

Though Dick Ebersol tried to protect the first episode of
The Richard Pryor Show
from network interference, there was a limit to Ebersol’s power, and Richard breached it with the visual joke set to open the program. As with his special, Richard wanted to launch his show by making fun of TV itself. At first he and his writers came up with the idea of NBC executives pressing Dr. Frankenstein to operate on Richard and a white man. The doctor would hook up their brains and, after a mysterious medical procedure, the white man would rise and talk jive; Richard would rise and say, in a voice closer to Andy Williams’s than his own, “I’m so glad to be on TV.” Richard ditched the Frankenstein idea in favor of a more pointed treatment of what exactly network TV threatened to do to him:

[
Camera pulls back to take in the top half of Richard’s body; he’s wearing no clothes
.]

[
Camera pulls back to take in Richard’s entire body; instead of having genitalia, he’s as smooth and sexless as a doll
.]

NBC’s West Coast office had originally approved the segment in a slightly less explicit form—without the lines about “standing here naked” and “not giving up anything”—but it refused to air the final version. The show’s producers appealed the decision by sending the video to the New York office of NBC chief censor Herminio Traviesas, who was categorical in his judgment: the sketch was unacceptable in any form; it had to be cut. A vice president of broadcast standards explained the logic of the decision: “We don’t do genital jokes. . . . [W]e just think television is not quite ready for that. It’s a matter of either compromising our principles or his production company realizing its responsibility to present programming that is suitable for television.”

Richard was in no mood for compromise, either. Four years earlier, he had seen Lily Tomlin locked in a similar skirmish, fighting for the integrity of her own show, but while Tomlin battled her network as if in a chess game, Richard’s preferred strategy was to threaten to go nuclear. On the Monday before his first show was set to air, he held a press conference at NBC studios in which he screened the censored segment and said he was prepared to walk away from the series unless NBC reconsidered its decision: “if we can’t find a reasonable means of dealing with it, then Tuesday night’s (taping of the second episode) probably will be the last. Everybody will say I’m crazy if I quit, that I’m the crazy nigger who ran off from NBC, but this is stifling my creativity and I can’t work under these conditions.” When a journalist asked whether NBC shouldn’t have some control over what it aired, Richard broke up the audience with his reply: “They do, and that’s why they’re Number 3.” Over the next two days, NBC didn’t budge, and neither did Richard: he refused to create an alternative opening segment.

Still, the offending segment did air—on the local CBS affiliate in LA, which covered the dustup in its early-evening and late-night newscasts. The press coverage favored Richard. “Maybe if NBC hired Farrah Fawcett-Majors they’d ask her to cut her hair,” wrote
Washington Post
critic Tom Shales. “Maybe they’d give Nureyev a desk job. Maybe if they reunited The Beatles it would be on condition that they
promise not to sing. It makes as much sense as giving Richard Pryor a prime-time hour of comedy and then expecting him to be safe, sane, and squeaky-clean.”

As always for Richard, censorship was felt as both a political and a personal affront. He told
Jet
, “I’d like to get the names of these people who say they’re protecting the public by trying to prevent my form of communication. That’s a political decision, not a moral one.” “It’s an insult to me,” he told Shales. “[W]e don’t intend to do any further work for NBC if we can’t get it on the air the way we do it. They’re treating us like children.” A more judicious soul might have looked at the first episode of
The Richard Pryor Show
and marveled at how much—references to “octopussy” and a threesome with Siamese twins!—had slipped past the censor’s blank gaze. But Richard had an all-or-nothing approach to his art; he would not back down, even though the battles took their toll. “All of us could use some bandages,” said a NBC executive. “If each program causes this much consternation, I don’t see how any of us can continue.”

T
he following week was, relatively speaking, a cooling-off period for Richard and NBC. The second episode of
The Richard Pryor Show
did not generate another battle between him and the network; it was outré but not risqué. It also gave the network a sense of how little it could use one episode of
The Richard Pryor Show
to predict the next. “Every piece that Richard did was different,” director John Moffitt observed. “You will find that in every variety show there’s a safe corner, we go to this little element week after week . . . and that never happened with Richard. And I don’t think it would have happened if we did the ten shows or more.” Averse to the usual variety show formulas, Richard had no interest in recruiting “special guest stars” or in generating the sort of easy chatter that other shows used as filler or segues. His show was structured instead like a collage, with the viewer left to make his or her own connections between the parts and the whole. NBC’s executives might have questioned the entertainment value of such a collage-like approach, but its censors put up no roadblocks.

The one sketch that did rile the network was also the most memorable segment of the second show: a satire of rock fandom so disturbing that it was cousin to the midnight movie emanations of Richard’s Berkeley period. In “Black Death,” Richard plays the leader of a glam-metal band, modeled after KISS, whose musicians make their stage entrance by popping out of coffins. His bandmates are ghoulish monks in cowls, robes, and white pancake makeup. Richard sports a thick reddish mane of hair, teased out with spikes, and his body is encased in a skintight purple and metallic costume that is at once ludicrous and heavily armored. After strutting his stuff onstage, Richard’s singer proceeds to exterminate his audience; the sketch is about overkill, in every sense of the word. “I’ve got some reds, they’re bad for you,” he sings in a voice that is halfway between Dylan and Hendrix, then throws bags of poison pills at his audience. Bodies fall limp to the ground. Richard’s singer sprays toxic gas at the audience, and more bodies fall. Then he machine-guns the crowd until there is no one left standing. All the while, Black Death kicks out the jams, and every audience member bops until he or she drops. Surveying the final pile of corpses, Richard’s singer mutters the stock countercultural response to the world’s strangeness: “Far out.” But there was nothing stock to the sketch. It took the logic of heavy metal’s fascination with the dark side and stretched it to the grimmest of conclusions.

In its original form, the sketch was harsher still. Richard and his writers had wanted to start it with a public hanging—with the promoter asking for a volunteer from the audience to be hanged, and with the audience watching as a young man was sacrificed for the show. The noose went up, the banner for Black Death came down, and the music began. NBC objected, understandably. “We crossed the line on that one,” Rocco Urbisci reflected. “You can’t hang somebody on TV.”

Richard did not threaten to quit over this edit. The sketch was still pungent and brutal—a dream of murdering your audience for loving you too much, too blindly, too voraciously. It was not strictly autobiographical (Richard was a fan of jazz and soul music, not heavy metal), but it spoke to the aggression that was never far from the surface of his stand-up after the late 1960s. Whenever his audience seemed to be enjoying itself too easily, Richard felt something must be wrong. Often, whether motivated by cruelty or anger or simply a desire for his version of a dynamic equilibrium, he searched for his audience’s weak spot and, finding it, lashed out.