Too Much His: Richard Pryor, Paul Mooney, & the Question of Authorship
By M. Abduh
29 December 2025

Paul Mooney deserves credit for many things. He wrote for The Richard Pryor Show on NBC and served as showrunner. He wrote for Pryor’s 1975 appearance on Saturday Night Live, at Pryor’s insistence, contributing the famous job interview sketch with Chevy Chase. He co-wrote two episodes of Sanford and Son & collaborated on Pryor’s film Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. What he did not write was Richard Pryor’s stand-up.

Pryor was writing & performing his stand-up long before he met Mooney. Biographer Scott Saul mentioned that in 1965, Pryor was “writing new material constantly” for near-weekly appearances on Merv Griffin. By the time Pryor & Mooney worked together, his voice was already evolving. In his memoir Black Is the New White, Mooney recalled that Pryor shed his Cosby-like act alone in Berkeley, California while listening to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” on repeat & reading Malcolm X. He described watching Pryor’s new direction as an audience member, marveling as Pryor moved from simple set-ups & punchlines to storytelling, inhabiting characters drawn from his childhood in a brothel in Peoria, Illinois. 

A track on the album Is It Something I Said? titled “Just Us” is telling. Pryor credited Mooney as a co-writer, even though he only gave him one line: “You go down [to the courthouse] looking for justice. That’s what you find, just us.” Mooney himself said he did not write the routine. He threw out a line in conversation, & Pryor used it, honest enough to credit him for it. That is the only place Mooney’s name appears.

The “just us/justice” pun predates Mooney. It circulated in Black Arts–era writing & appears on the 1972 Last Poets record “E Pluribus Unum”: “They also represent the Just-Us / which you & I know is blind.” Poet Claudia Rankine would later use Pryor’s version as the epigraph to her 2021 collection Just Us. This is how language gets passed around & passed down.

Having an ear for a line isn’t unique to Pryor. In Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane,” the narrator asks an airport clerk if she believes in love at first sight. “Of course,” she says. “The other kinds are impossible.” It later emerged that García Márquez had heard that line years earlier from a woman named Silvana de Faria at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. After his death, she recalled the exchange:

“Then he asked why I was living in Paris. I said, ‘We Latin Americans can only live in France when we fall in love.’

‘In love with France?’

I said, ‘No, love at first sight. I believe that’s the only kind of love.’

This is what he writes in the story! He sucked my words. When I read that, I felt goose bumps. You are not original. You are like all bloody writers. You are a vampire.”

I suppose this makes her García Márquez’s writer.

Mooney described Pryor as a master of improvisation. Watching him work on stage, he said, was like seeing a high-wire act without a net:

When Richard gets up onstage at Maverick’s, he never knows what he’s going to say. The words just spill out. I’ve done enough improv to know how tough it is to do what Richard’s doing. Just a man and a microphone, saying whatever’s on his mind at that moment, developing it on the spot into a routine. It’s the purest kind of improvisation, and Richard proves himself brilliant at it. Every night is different.

That is not the description of someone performing material written by another person.

No artist works in a silo. Comedians like Pryor, Mooney, Murphy, Chappelle, and others collaborate with peers. They punch up jokes, offer ideas, throw out lines. For example, people often claim that Keenen Ivory Wayans co-wrote Eddie Murphy’s Raw. The credits tell a different story:

Written by Eddie Murphy
Opening sketch: Eddie Murphy & Keenen Ivory Wayans

As for Pryor & Mooney’s collaboration on sketches & scripts, Mooney said they hired a stenographer and met at Richard’s house. They tossed around situations, one-liners, trying to crack each other up. The stenographer couldn’t keep up. If she laughed, they knew they had something.

Those who were there, including Pryor’s bodyguard Rashon Khan, have rejected the claim that Mooney was Pryor’s writer. Khan stated,

The stand up performer writes his own material… Paul Mooney was not Richard’s writer. Paul Mooney like anybody that’s a friend would see what you was doing, & they would give you three or four or five other alternatives… It still was up to you. You created the base… They wasn’t writing for him. It wasn’t notes written down.

Pryor was a prolific writer for himself & others. He wrote for the Flip Wilson Show, Sanford and Son, The Lily Tomlin Show, &, perhaps most famously, he co-wrote the classic film Blazing Saddles with Mel Brooks. Mooney said, “Mel Brooks knows his comedy. He’s smart enough to know who is the funniest man on the planet. He hires Richard.”

Mooney himself said that “Richard is never worried about anyone raiding his material. It’s too much his.” 

No one else’s. 

Paul Mooney was Richard Pryor’s friend, collaborator, confidant. He was not his writer.