Comedy legend Paul Mooney will forever be linked with longtime friends Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle, but he's racked up an impressive career outside those fruitful collaborations, both as a writer for shows like In Living Color and as an influential stand-up comedian. Mooney's early show-biz career included stints as a ringmaster for the Charles Gody Circus and a performer with the incendiary anti-Vietnam War "FTA" (Fuck The Army) troupe alongside Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, and Peter Boyle. A chance meeting with Pryor irrevocably shaped Mooney's career; he began writing for Pryor, in a fruitful partnership that led to classic comedy albums, performance films, and the Pryor-directed autobiographical drama JoJo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. As a writer on The Richard Pryor Show and In Living Color, Mooney gave big breaks to acts like Robin Williams, John Witherspoon, Sandra Bernhard, and Jim Carrey. Mooney recently experienced a surge in popularity via his prominent appearances on Chappelle's Show in the popular segments "Ask A Black Dude" and "Negrodamus." The A.V. Club recently spoke with Mooney—whose new comedy DVD is titled Know Your History: Jesus Was Black… So Was Cleopatra—for a rambling, digressive conversation about misbehaving primates, Richard Pryor, the N-word, and being asked to host on the DVD Chappelle's Show: The Lost Episodes.
The A.V Club: You have an archetypal story, in that you ran away from home as a teenager to join the circus.
Paul Mooney: Oh yeah. I go down in black history, I was the first black ringmaster. This is way before the Black Circus and all this stuff, back in the day. It was called the Charles Gody Circus. We had all the animals from television: Gentle Ben, the cross-eyed lion, all that stuff. You're probably too young. Daktari was a hit then. The black man that starred in that, I forget his name, 'cause I'm getting old. I don't have Alzheimer's, I have "sometimer's": Sometimes I remember, sometimes I don't. They used to think I was hep, and they called me "Hollywood."
AVC: Did you run away and join the circus because you were unhappy at home?
PM: I quit my job. I was working at Joseph Magnin's in Century City. I was working with Candy, Aaron Spelling's wife Candy. Aaron used to come in all the time to see her. She had this big engagement ring, and I said to her, "Who's that ugly white man that keeps coming here to see you?" She said, "I'm going to marry that ugly white man."
AVC: Was it a big circus? Did they have a freak show?
PM: It wasn't like Barnum & Bailey, or anything like that. It was just a circus, a miniature little circus. We'd go to different places and perform.
AVC: Did you enjoy the circus life?
PM: I found out how they tortured the animals. No wonder circus animals do what they do: They tortured them. And you know the only ones they can't control? It's the chimpanzees. You can't control them. That's why you never see a gorilla in a movie, because the gorilla may decide there'll be no filming. Yeah, but the elephants and all this other stuff, they train everything else. They torture them. That's why they do the same thing, over and over night. That part, I didn't like.
AVC: What did you like about the circus?
PM: I liked the kids coming and all that. It just made the kids so happy.
AVC: Were there circus groupies?
PM: Oh, of course! They used to follow the circus around. Yeah, of course.
AVC: How did you make the transition from being a ringmaster to doing comedy?
PM: I was a ringmaster, and I was funny. I was doing comedy before. I just did that to make some money. I was a shoe salesman, I worked at Joseph Magnin's, an expensive store in Century City, and it was good money. Let me tell you something about Hollywood you may not know. Back in the day, we did everything we could to pay the rent. We didn't give a damn. There was a lot of us that did The Dating Game, we were married or we were with somebody, we still did it because it was scale, and we had to pay our phone bill and our rent. I also worked for Playboy for five years. I did Playboy After Dark.
AVC: Really? How was that?
PM: It was great. I know all the dirt. Barbi Benton, Hugh Hefner's girlfriend, she had just met me. Her daddy was a doctor. Janice Pennington, from The Price Is Right, and Lindsay Wagner, The Bionic Woman, we all come out of Playboy. Oh, it was great. We got to know everybody, we got to meet every star. Every star that there ever was came to the mansion. It was the place, it was the thing. The big thing was the Playboy Mansion and the Playboy Club, and Laugh-In, that was during that time. That was the big deal. Sinatra, everybody, came to the private clubs and to the Mansion.
AVC: Did you do stand-up comedy at Playboy After Dark?
PM: No, I wasn't doing comedy. I was one of the pretty people.
AVC: You were there just to stand around and look good?
PM: Yeah. We were there just for the party, to dance and all that stuff. We were like atmosphere. Hang out with Hef and go on the private jet with all the bunnies. That was back in the day. But I was still doing stand-up when I wasn't on the show. And I was writing for Richard.
AVC: What was your early stand-up like?
PM: I found myself at the clubs. What's the little Jewish lady's name? What's her name? I just saw her again, she's so funny, she was so funny back in the day. I'll think of her name in a minute, I'm getting old. It was at Ye Little Club, where we all used to go and perform. That's how I met Sandra Bernhard when she was 18 years old. And I told her she was a cigarette come to life. And that's before full lips were in. They used to call her "nigger lips." She had those big lips, and they were just jealous of her. That's why they used to put lipstick on those little tiny lips of theirs. I told her, before it's all said and done, big lips would be in. And my prediction came true. Joan Rivers! It was Joan Rivers. She used to come in all the time at the Ye Little Club. That's where she got her start. We all used to go in there and work out.
AVC: Richard Pryor's early stand-up was a lot more conventional, a lot more in the Bill Cosby mode. And then he moved into a different direction. Were you, basically, the same kind of comedian back then that you are today?
PM: No. I learned all my tricks at Ye Little Club. I found myself working there because I wouldn't have my friends come in. I'd just do what I found myself. I worked it out there. It was always there. It was always a nuclear bomb, I just wasn't in control of it. And from working in that club, and working by myself, and taking all the yes and nos, all the "We like you, we don't like you," I found out who I was.
AVC: You learned how to harness your gift?
PM: Yeah. Then I held onto who I was. When you know who you are, you know who you are. That's the real dangerous thing in Hollywood, because they all want to create you and mold you. They have Frankenstein syndrome here. But as in the Frankenstein story, the monster always hates the doctor.
Did you ever see the black-and-white original Frankenstein? Okay, the doctor has all the dialogue, you know: "You think I'm crazy? I'll show you crazy. I created it with my own hands!" He talks throughout the whole movie, am I right or wrong? Frankenstein said one thing—less is more. "Aaaah!" And all you remember is the monster.
AVC: In the early '70s, you toured with FTA, which stood for Fuck The Army.
PM: With Jane Fonda, Peter Boyle, and Donald Sutherland. That was my second time around, because I came out of Second City with Peter Boyle. We toured all over the United States. Avery Schreiber was our director. And before that, I was with the improvisational group in San Francisco, the first black improvisational group. It was called the Yankee Doodle Bedbugs.
AVC: What was it like touring the country with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland?
PM: It was the best. She was very smart, and very pretty. I loved being with Jane.
AVC: Was she as divisive of a figure back then as she would become? Were people angry about her message and her politics?
PM: She was right. She was right. Since then, she's been saying she was used, but she wasn't. She was used by God. Because her daddy being a movie star, and all this other stuff, they wanted to kill her. They wanted to murder Jane Fonda. I was right there with her. They did not like it, they didn't like that white woman that had everything, talking up against that war, which she should've. That war, we shouldn't have been there, just like we shouldn't be in the one we're in now. People don't want to hear the truth, they never do. They wanna live in some kind of fantasy. And then when they get caught up in it, they start being in denial because they don't want to be wrong. She was right in doing what she did. She was right in bringing all the attention and all the controversy to it, because we needed that. America does not like losers. Look how we treated those soldiers who came back from Vietnam. Because they lost. America likes winners.
AVC: Because you were a part of something radical and overtly anti-war, were you subject to a lot of harassment?
PM: Not really. I only did that because I believed in it. So, majority doesn't rule. One person can change the history of the world. It wasn't Harriet Tubman and her cousins, it was Harriet Tubman. And people just have to have the chutzpah to make that stand. If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for everything. Everyone doesn't have that in them. It's pretty sad, but that's the way it is. People do many things for many reasons. Sometimes, what you do you have no control over, because it's predestined. It's gonna happen in spite of you. There's nothing you can do about it.
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