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Paul Mooney is a comedy legend who isn't a household name because he mostly did his work behind the scenes. He made his mark creating material for Richard Pryor. He also wrote for "Good Times" and "Sanford and Son" in the 1970s. In the early 1990s, he developed signagture characters for "In Living Color" including Homey the Clown.

In front of the camera, he has been in films such as "Hollywood Shuffle," Spike Lee's "Bamboozled" and "The Buddy Holly Story." Gary Abdo, who runs the Uptown Comedy Corner, has Mooney coming on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week (details below.) He hooked me up with Mooney on the phone Friday.

The interview got off to a rocky start. (Abdo was listening in and can attest to that.). I asked Mooney first why he was coming to Uptown.

Mooney sounded irritated and flabbergasted. “This is a booking,” he said. “I work. The devil made me do it. I’m a professional.”

I asked him about actor/producer Robert Townsend, who I had just met. "A professional, very bright young man," he said, still sounding annoyed. (Yes, Paul is 68 years old and Townsend is only 52 so I guess Townsend is a young man relatively speaking.)

I was off my game at this point and asked him a relatively lame question about whether he feels underappreciated despite all he’s done. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I just am who I am. I love what I do. I wear different hats. I write. I act. Standup is my first love. That’s why I’ve been doing it such a long time. I see myself as a professor. People study me. They get on TV and act like they don’t even know me.”

How does he feel about that? “It doesn’t matter how I feel about it,” he said, sounding mucho annoyed. “It’s the reality of it. It has nothing to do with my feelings.”

At this point, I noted half jokingly that this is possibly the worst interview I’ve ever done. Abdo laughed, saying that Mooney gets on people’s cases because he can. He later told me one radio station morning team just cut off an interview because they were getting ragged on like that.

I switched topics to Dave Chappelle and the conversation normalized a bit. Mooney wrote for Chappelle's show and played several characters, including Negrodamus. His take on Chappelle walking away from $50 million-plus to keep doing his show on Comedy Central: "It put him on the A list. He wasn't on the A list before that. People love him now. They can't get enough of him. I'm asked about him every single day."

The fact is, Mooney noted, “you don’t turn down white folks’ money. He also went back to Africa. They’ll never get over it!”

Chappelle now focuses on standup. “He’s a lot like Richard Pryor. He’s unpredictable. That makes him interesting.” Mooney misses the show. He’s trying to convince Chappelle to do a movie but after six months of working the comic, “I’m running out of leads.” He has no clue if Chappelle will ever do a sketch show again.

This led to him mentioning that he once spent five and a half hours on a stage opening for Marvin Gaye in the early 1980s. "They couldn't find him. I had to stretch it out," he said. But he said, "it felt like five minutes. When I'm doing an hour, I'm just getting started."

He participated in Chris Rock's new film "Good Hair," which just came out last weekend. "It's very funny. Chris has been acting like a diplomat. But he's not telling the real reasons why we process and burn our hair… we try to simulate we're under the illusion of inclusion trying to be a black Anglo-Saxon." A black Anglo-Saxon? "That's a black person that thinks white."

His candid take on BET: “BET is owned by white people. They rewrite history. They are big liars. They had my show ‘Judge Mooney.’ They got scared. They don’t like the messages I send. They’re intimidated and get frightened. I’m the Jew who says they’re going to gas us. Nobody wants to believe our neighbors are going to put us in a gas chamber.”

Mooney has a book coming out November 3 called "Black is the New White." "It's all about prejudiced Hollywood, my relationship with Richard Pryor. It's everything."

Has there been progress in racial relations? Yes, he said. "We're able to discuss stuff like this openly without being beaten or lynched or tortured." So will Barack Obama ever be assassinated? "No," Mooney said. "That doesn't worry me. There's no reason to kill him. White folks know not do do that."

He will be doing two shows each night Tuesday and Wednesday at Uptown. By now, he’s in much better spirits. “Tell your black readers to bring a white friend. Let’s all have fun!” Mooney said.

Mooney wrote this masterpiece of a “Saturday Night Live” skit with Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor in which a word association game goes awry:

– watch more

Here’s a segment of his DVD “Jesus is Black.” Note: it’s for adult ears onlyi.

TO GO

Paul Mooney

Uptown Comedy Corner

800 Marietta St NW

Atlanta, GA 30318-5783

(404) 881-0200

Tuesday, October 20, 8 p.m. and 10 p.m.