Bright Black : ON THE REAL SIDE: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying--The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, From Slavery to Richard Pryor, <i> By Mel Watkins (Simon & Schuster: $27.50; cloth; 656 pp.)</i>

‘A comedian is . . . a historian. He reflects the times and the mood of the country and the world.”

--Godfrey Cambridge

I had a dream last night That almost turned me white--

From “Under the Chicken Tree”

Last night I dreamed I was a comedian. That wasn’t so bad, until I realized who my audience was: Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby and Redd Foxx.

That was not all. There were traditional African comics--griots--in chains. These were the brothers who, once enslaved in the New World, used their humor to mislead white slave-holders into thinking that they were naive, contented children.

At another table sat two comics from the 1890s--Bert Williams and his partner George Walker. They humanized the denigrating blackface caricature by creating dramatic characters with dignity. At another table, I recognized the great comedy team from the 1920s, Miller and Lyles. There were Moms Mabley, and Pigmeat Markham from the ‘40s.

At another table were Jimmie Rogers, Slappy White, George Kirby. Representing the ‘50s, where they performed the first interracial jokes, these guys had taken a big step in the history of black comedy when they stripped off their chauffeur and bus-boy uniforms, hand-me-downs from the minstrel tradition.

At the next table were Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby and Godfrey Gambridge--the ‘60s comics who went even further by telling jokes to an interracial audience. At the ‘70s table were Flip Wilson and Redd Foxx, who paved the way for today’s African-American comedians by using black street language.

At a table by himself sits Richard Pryor--representing the ‘80s. Behind him at another table sits Eddie Murphy and Whoopi Goldberg.

My dream turned into a nightmare, when I realized that I was to entertain them!

While I was thinking this, the doorman rushed in.

“There’s a white guy out there saying he should be in here. His name is Lenny Bruce!”

Somebody at the first table--the early slave joke tellers--said, “Massa Bruce? Doan know hem.” Finally, Pryor said, “Let him in. Tell him he can come over and sit with me.”

After Lenny was seated, I took a deep breath and went for it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not a comedian and what I say next may not be funny, but I want to tell you about a history of comedy--a book by journalist Mel Watkins called ‘On the Real Side’--and you’re all in it.”

They nodded their approval and wanted to know how much space was devoted to them.

“I was the most important comic figure in all of the films in the ‘20, ‘30s, and ‘40s,” Stepin Fetchit said. “What did he say about me?”

One of the most thoroughly researched and brilliant essays in this book is on Stepin Fetchit, who promoted his career by playing the role of “dumb nigger” off the black circuit comedy stage. When Darryl Zanuck asked Stepin Fetchit--whose real name was Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry--for a decision, he would say, “It sounds good to me, Mr. Zanuck, but I’ll have to talk it over with my manager, Mr. Goldberg, and get back to you.”

One day Zanuck, fed up with delays, demanded the phone number of Mr. Goldberg. “I guess you had to find out one day,” Fetchit confessed, “I’m Mr. Goldberg. “ Stepin Fetchit took “playing the fool” to its ultimate expression.

“ ‘Playing the fool’ is a tradition we inherited in Africa,” the griots said. “We had to use that in slavery to preserve a connection to our past and to shake off the hatred of the white man.”

“But don’t forget the work we did,” Pigmeat Markham shouted. “We worked the chitlins circuit, where we could only perform to a black audience; without us paving the way, there couldn’t be no Flip Wilson or Red Foxx.”

“Now wait a minute,” Cosby said. “I am against this idea that a comic has to refer to his race in order to be funny. Humor is universal, hello? Hello?”

“Yeah, that’s because you begin working in the Village to a white audience,” Moms Mabley snapped.

“That’s all well and good, Mr. Cosby,” Eddie Murphy put in, “but you are not the world’s most popular black comedian now are you?”

“Richie,” Cosby said to Pryor, “help me out.”

“Bill, you helped me out many times, and now I’ll return the favor. You don’t have to be a black to be funny. But it helps.”

I was glad I had them all here so that I could ask them questions about their appearance in this great book.

The book is really four books into one: an encyclopedia of everybody and every term related to black humor, a biography of leading comedians, a history of the social and cultural movement, and finally an analysis of what black humor is.

“This book begins with a history of black laughter,” I told them. “At first, whites found the laughter of African slaves to be abhorrent.” As late as 1944, Gunnar Myrdal, in his massive study of American black life, “The American Dilemma” (1944), would write confidently that the “Negro’s cackling laugh,” which amused the white man and often staved off punishment or brought rewards, “was a indication of blacks’ ignorance and their ‘accommodation to class.’ ”

Needless to say, these white observers never studied exactly what blacks found so humorous or why they were laughing. In fact, black humor is often distorted by the outsider: Watkins’ aim here is to “trace and examine the social functions of two disparate strains of humor: the often distorted outside presentation in mainstream media (initially by non-blacks) and the authentic inside development of humor in black communities . . . as well as in folklore and black literature, films, and race records.”

As my audience smiled appreciatively, I went on.

“However, the crux of this book is the transformation of Richard Pryor from diffident comic to comic genius. According to Watkins, Berkeley was the epic center of what the world would later come to known as the Richard Pryor Quake. I was there in the years 1966-70 when Pryor was “undergoing a major crisis involving his comic identity,” according to Watkins. “The novelist Cecil Brown met Pryor at Mandrake’s,” Watkins writes, “after a friend told him ‘There’s a comedian down there who’s crazier than you.’ ”

I did go to see Pryor at the Mandrake Club--now it is an Animal Shelter and Hospital, and I immediately liked him. He liked me too. At first I didn’t see Pryor as a professional comedian. He was just somebody I had known all my life. He was also how I saw myself.

In those days, the Mandrake was about as laid-back as you could get. Pryor’s audience was college students. But that night it was packed with a different crowd, a blacker crowd. He did a parody on superman called Super Nigger. It was raw, exciting--hilariously funny. These routines were never taped, but they were the raw materials for his next album, “Craps (After Dark).”

I had brought a camera that night. On stage, every time the flash went off, Pryor playfully struck a pose. Right after his show, we went out into the parking lot. “What did you think of my show?” he asked me. I told him I thought it was great--it was. I introduced Pryor to Ishmael Reed, David Henderson, Claude Brown and other black artists in Berkeley in 1969.

“Pryor’s Berkeley retreat ultimately proved to be a source of genuine inspiration” and by 1971, Watkins writes, when “Richard felt confident at least of the direction in which he wanted to take his humor, he returned to Los Angeles.”

We would go to movies. Pryor’s favorite was the surreal “El Topos.” We went to see a film in which giant insects took over the world. Pryor drew his comedic material from the life he lived, even when that life was made of matinees.

After Pryor’s show, we would retire to his hotel room--then to his apartment on California Street. With five or six other black men, we had many laughing sessions where we would stay up all night talking and watching late night TV, deconstructing white films. Late one night we lucked up on the Zulu uprising against the British. Why did the British win? I asked. Because Zulus don’t make films, Pryor laughed. Like a pack of hungry dogs on shred of meat, we plundered white films--the whiter, the cornier, the better--for unintended laughs.

It was an insular kind of humor, the kind that comes out when black men come together in the privacy of their shared humiliation and experience in white racist America.

Pryor would stay up all night. When we left, it would be 8 in the morning and he would sleep into the early afternoon. Then he would eat some dinner and stage his show, recreating some of the same scenes we had howled at the night before.

Pryor generated a sexual energy in his audience. “Don’t worry about the money you spend on the ticket and the drinks,” he told a young black man in the audience, “because I’m going to get her hot for you!” Women enjoyed the sexual undercurrents in Pryor’s comedy and were attracted to them. Watkins describes Pryor’s Mudbone, the rise of the major themes and characters of his albums, concerts and movies.

Watkins believes that it was this transformation that created Pryor’s greatest art. “He had taken the humor of the streets, black American’s presumed ‘low’ comedy--with much of its vulgarity, profanity, explicit sexuality, and unvarnished satirical perception--and, without losing any of its intensity, turned it into high art.”

Watkins ranks Pryor with Bert Williams. “If Bert Williams was, as some claim, the finest American comedian of his time, then Pryor may have inherited that mantle. Without out, he changed American attitude about black folk humor, lifting it from obscurity and establishing it a preeminent form of humorous expression.”

In my dream, the comedians were applauding suddenly.

“You did a great job entertaining us,” Pryor said.

“Thank you, Richard,” I said. “But tell us? How much of the truth did Watkins guess out? Did you jump on that table and yell ‘Black Jack?’ Did Cosby save you?”

“I’m writing my own book,” Pryor said.

Yeah, I’ve heard that before. Watkins does a good job of reporting all the rumors and making plausible sense out of them. We will have to wait for Pryor’s own autobiography for the facts.

And then I woke up. I wasn’t white after all.