Mo' Mooney

Negrodamus returns, controversial as ever.

By Keith Gribbins on Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 4:00 am

Cleveland art

[
      {

        
        "name": "Ad - NativeInline - Injected",
        "component": "38482495",
        "insertPoint": "3",
        "requiredCountToDisplay": "5"
      },{


        "name": "Real 1 Player (r2) - Inline",
        "component": "38482494",
        "insertPoint": "2/3",
        "requiredCountToDisplay": "9"
      }
    ]

Onstage, Paul Mooney makes even the most brazen comedians look timid. In September, he pissed off Diana Ross' daughter at the BET Comedy Awards to the point that she got up and left the audience in the middle of his annual Nigga Wake-Up Award, which had turned into a full-on assault of Mama Ross' recent drunk-driving conviction. "I don't regret doing it," he says. "I'm a comedian. We're the last gladiators."

The comic veteran's résumé including everything from writing Sanford and Son to starring in Chappelle's Show (he played the future-telling Negrodamus). Mooney launched his career in the '70s, when he worked with Richard Pryor and wrote for Saturday Night Live when it was still good. In 1987's Hollywood Shuffle, a scathing look at black moviemakers, he played an NAACP president. These days, he claims to still fire off the N-word a hundred times a day. "It keeps my teeth white," he says.
March 24-25, 8 & 10:15 p.m.; Sun., March 26, 7 p.m.