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.They hate the criticism, but they use the “nudity” excuse to kill the bit.Richard is furious, but the censorship backfires on NBC.The controversy shows up on all the network news broadcasts.Many more people see the sketch on the news than ever watch the show.I have a good laugh about it, but Richard doesn’t see it as funny.He’s too angry at NBC to see that the controversy just makes people love him more.“See how that shit works? NBC gets all the free publicity.Those motherfuckers always win,” he says.That’s how Richard sees it.The way I see it is that we’re starting to kick down the walls of Fortress Hollywood brick by brick, gag by gag—“just trying to stay three steps ahead because you know they’re going to push you back two.”On the set, Richard swings from highs to lows like some sort of bipolar crazy person.The werewolf comes out repeatedly.The ensemble cast I put together never knows who they’re going to get when they approach him.He places himself under enormous pressure.I feel as though it’s too much for him, as though he’s going to explode and wind up, like he warns me again and again, “with a bullet in my head.”I don’t “nigger, please” him when he says shit like that.It scares me.But despite all the tension on the set, we produce some of the best television ever broadcast.The Maya Angelou bit comes off beautifully, unbelievably good.Nothing like it has ever been shown before or since.I get to act in a Chaplin-style pantomime bit with Richard—no dialogue, just music on the soundtrack.He plays Mr.Fix-It, and I am his customer, with a broken-down car.In a series of sight gags, Richard totally demolishes the car.At the end, miracle of miracles, he manages to start the wreck’s engine.Overjoyed, he leaps out to shake my hand.My arm falls off.It’s the purest form of comedy, a sketch that would play in Thailand just as well as in Oakland.You don’t need words.I treasure it as one of the highest achievements of my life, to share a stage with my best friend Richard, just me and him, making people laugh.Other sketches are less stripped-down.A parody of the bar scene in Star Wars has Richard as a bartender keeping a rowdy crowd of aliens in check.It reminds me of him trying to keep the ensemble of actors and writers on track, trying to keep it real.Richard loves Star Wars.He’s obsessed with it.He tells me because the characters are from a galaxy “far, far away,” then they can’t be prejudiced.Richard does a samurai skit that shows off his obsession with all things Asian.He and Robin Williams slip a cocaine-snorting reference into an Egyptian tomb-of-the-pharaohs sketch.Racial politics keep creeping into the content of the show.There’s a lot of Afrocentric material, because Richard is getting more and more interested in Africa.African dances, glorification of the black female, a voodoo skit where Richard attempts to heal Robin’s crippled arm.In another bit, more than three decades before Obama, Richard acts as the “Fortieth President of the United States” at a press conference.He starts the sketch solemn enough, but becomes increasingly raucous, calling only on black reporters while telling the white journalist from Mississippi to sit down.He appoints our old Oakland friend Huey P.Newton as the head of the FBI.I do the audience warm-up for the show, because Richard doesn’t trust anyone else.Not only do I perform multiple functions on the show, I go home with Richard and buck him up during his dangerous moods.I have the professional and the personal at the same time.By the fourth show, Richard has had it.He’s ready to bail.It’s clear from the ratings that NBC won’t be interested in going forward.We’re scheduled up against the two top-rated shows on TV back then, Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley.We barely dent their numbers.No one has succeeded in mounting a new TV variety show for years, and we don’t break that trend.In public, Richard talks about his inability to work under the rules of network censorship.It’s a good story, and everyone in the media buys into it.But from the inside, I know the truth.Richard can’t stand the demands of a weekly TV show.It’s the pressure, the drugs, the obligations.He can’t handle it.So he uses the “censorship” excuse to slide out of it.The explanation has just enough truth to it that it’s widely accepted, even today.Richard and I charged Fortress Hollywood and got shut down.The show crashed.We got flattened.I have a big hand in the failed show, from casting to writing.So why am I happy? I swear that my life could end right there, laughing with my best friend on national TV, and I would be cool with it.I don’t let any of the stresses of the show weigh on me the way Richard does.He goes into a deep funk.He’s the biggest star in Hollywood, but in his own mind, he’s a failure.CHAPTER 24As Richard retreats to Northridge to lick his wounds (and lick the coke crumbs off the mirror), I get my own taste of the big screen.Growing up, people tell me all the time that I look like Sam Cooke.I don’t think I look like anybody but me, but I take it as a compliment to be compared to the greatest soul singer of all time.That resemblance, coupled with my increased visibility on The Richard Pryor Show, leads to my first costarring role in a movie, playing Sam Cooke, with Gary Busey as the lead, in The Buddy Holly Story.At the start of his rock-and-roll career, Buddy Holly tours with Cooke.He and the Crickets are always being confused for a black act when people hear their records without seeing the band onstage.Buddy Holly sounds pretty white-bread today, but it’s a measure of how much white musicians lift from black music that everyone thinks he is black back then.Holly and the Crickets are booked at the Apollo, and the crowd gasps when the curtains rise to reveal a white band.“We didn’t expect you, either,” Holly says, before proceeding to win over the all-black audience with his music.In one of my scenes with Busey, I manage to slip in a time-honored insult joke straight out of the dozens:Me (as Sam Cooke): Hey, young blood, I hear Solly booked you for the whole tour.Gary Busey (as Buddy Holly): Yeah, I couldn’t stand seeing you and my poker money leaving town.Cooke: Come on back here, we’ll play another hand—for that suit you’re wearing.I want to give it to my brother.He’s an undertaker
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