Free Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir by Jimmie Walker, Sal Manna Page A

crowd. But I did the same material as I did at the Apollo, the same edgy racial humor labeled Black Only. Such as a routine about pitching pennies—about how the guys in the projects talked as they gambled, flinging pennies onto the cement, trying to land them as near as possible to a wall. The end came when someone threw a “leaner,” a rare feat in which the penny stands on its edge and leans against the wall, beating everything. I had my characters arguing and cursing like cousins at a Harlem barbershop.
    If a heckler kept interrupting my act, I would use an old Redd Foxx line: “If you keep on, I’m gonna have to come out there and cut somebody!” If it was a white guy, I would hit him with “Hey man, what’s wrong with y’all? This is great shit. Oh, you’re white! Now I know why you don’t get it.” If they were black: “Ever notice how in a whole crowd of black people, a nigger always stands out?”
    The problem was that even the black people in this audience wore leisure suits. These blacks had stuff, and people with stuff like having stuff and don’t want to lose their stuff. This was not the militant crowd of the East Wind who didn’t have stuff to lose. And the white people in the audience were liberals not particularly wanting to be attacked as though they were notorious Alabama police commissioner Bull Connor.
    The audience would turn on me. People came up afterward and said, “What’s with the anger, man?”
    One of those was Brenner. He was an Army veteran, a college graduate, and a television producer in his hometown of Philadelphia. He was smart, savvy, and had substance. He was also a very funny stand-up who you knew was going to succeed in a major way. He was white and Jewish, but he had grown up in the only Caucasian family in a black neighborhood, so he knew the black experience.
    After watching me, Brenner introduced himself.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Jimmie Walker.”
    “I’m horrible at remembering names, but I’ll remember yours,” he said, “because that was the name of a famous mayor of New York.”
    He sat me down. “Have you ever worked in front of a white crowd?” he asked.
    “No, not really.”
    “Well, you can be a star in the black community doing what you’re doing, but if you want to be a big star, you have to learn how to make white people laugh.”
    James Brown had said it was “a man’s man’s man’s world,” but most of all, it was a white world—and that was a world different from the projects and pitching pennies.
    “I think you have talent,” he said. “You’re young, you have the energy, the look. But none of that will get you anywhere if you can’t get on the floor in a white club.”
    He said I needed to tone down the racial rhetoric. “Hey, I understand there are problems,” Brenner explained. “The Italians have had problems, the Irish have had problems, the Jews have had problems, the Puerto Ricans, the Chinese, everybody has had problems. Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years. But you don’t hear me talking about that on stage. If you’re going to do stand-up, you need to worry about being funny. Bringing up that five thousand blacks died in Biafra today isn’t funny. You’ll have a better chance of getting a following—of being heard—if you go more middle of the road. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you will never be heard by anyone except blacks because no one else will hire you.”
    When Brenner spoke, you had the feeling you should listen. And if you didn’t, he told you that you should. Brenner befriended me, and he was right. This was truly a career-changing conversation, and I knew it immediately. I wasn’t that angry young man off stage even though I played one on stage. I was never nasty, but I did have a sharp edge. If I wanted to achieve universal appeal, I now realized, my material had to relate to white people as well as black people.
    That did not mean I had to become Bill Cosby. I had gone by