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

myself to see Cosby at Carnegie Hall a year or so earlier. I brought some jokes with me, naively thinking I could lay a few on him and he would take me under his wing. But then I saw his act—in front of an audience of a lot of white people, not many black people. He told stories—like his routine about Noah—not badda-bing jokes, and nothing racially charged. They gave him a standing ovation.
    I recognized that Cosby was the best comic rolling and that there has never been anyone better as a stand-up—or sit-down—comic. But what he did was not me, not my style, not my thing. I knew that my jokes were not for him, so I never approached him.
    I learned that blacks and whites are different audiences. White crowds give you a few minutes to win them over. Black crowds—you have to get their attention right away. For them, I would stand on the bar. I would stand on tables. I would take a drink in my hand and yell, “Don’t think I’m not going to nigger lip this!” That would turn their heads toward me.
    “You’re offending people when you say that word,” Brenner said disapprovingly of “nigger.” “People can’t laugh when they’re uptight.”
    “But black people say it to each other all the time.”
    “You know, white people get offended hearing that word too. People have to like you.”
    I continued to use “nigger” and “whitey” or “cracker” but only when I did black gigs (I was still with the Last Poets and the Panthers). At mixed shows they became “black folks” and “y’all.”
    I had a mixed act and a black act, and the mixed one was starting to succeed at the African Room. After about three months they gave me a regular spot. Then, one night as I was about to go onstage, Frankie pulled the plug on the gorilla. To this day that remains one of the highlights of my career. “I’m on my way,” I said to myself.
    I began to play increasingly white crowds at clubs downtown and in Greenwich Village—from Café Wha? (where I first met Richard Pryor) to the tiny Apartment, with its wall-to-wall carpeting; from hootenanny nights at the Bitter End to Gerde’s Folk City (opening for the likes of folk stars such as Eric Anderson, Dave Van Ronk, Karla Bonoff, Bonnie Raitt, and the McGarrigle Sisters); from the Gaslight to Upstairs at the Downstairs (where Joan Rivers ruled).
    At the Bitter End, if you won the Tuesday hootenanny night, determined by audience applause, your prize would be the opening-act gig for the star headliner the following week. The crowd was with me one of those Tuesday nights and I won, much to the chagrin of co-owner Paul Colby, who was not a Jimmie Walker fan. He couldn’t believe I had won, couldn’t believe anyone ever laughed at my jokes.
    Nevertheless, I opened at the Bitter End for Labelle, which went very smoothly because I had earlier worked with them in upstate New York when they were Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. We did three performances a night, at seven, nine, and eleven, from Monday through Sunday, and all twenty-one shows sold out.
    I must have done okay because a writer for Variety gave me a review I still have, from 1970: “Jimmy Walker, 23-year-old black comic, is drawing yocks. . . . Material is usually ghetto-based, quite pointed and always funny. . . . When response is lukewarm, he quickly shifts gears with resulting guffaws.”
    After the last of the twenty-one shows I hung around to get paid. Colby paid everyone, from the wait staff to the busboys. I think he even went outside and gave a couple bucks to the homeless guy in the alley before he finally got around to me.
    He was about to hand me $50 but then stopped.
    “Oh, you had two chocolate shakes,” Colby said. “That’s $1.25 a piece. Here’s $47.50.” Then he tagged it. “I’ll see you on hootenanny night!”
    I was happy I could put the Bitter End on my credits and happy that I had done well, but it was clear that this comic was the low man on that totem pole.
    Gabe Kaplan