Laughter Sold Separately: The Toy

Interior: A conference room in Burbank, CA, 1981; conference table strewn with overflowing ashtrays and coffee cups. Executives seated around the table

EXEC 1: So Pryor plays Jack and the kid basically buys him and—

EXEC 2: Wait, can we do that?

EXEC 1: Yeah! I think, I mean, yeah, yes. Okay and then they put a big red bow on Pryor--

EXEC: 3 Yeah, I gotta say, this does feel a little, you know, with the black thing and everything, you know.

EXEC: 2: I’m kinda with Dan on this one. I mean, the kid gives him money, like pays for him? Because, that seems—

EXEC: 1: No! I mean, no, the kid doesn’t give him any money. One of the assistants does. The kid is like, eight or something. That would be weird, right? But c’mon, it’s funny! He’s a MAN, but also a TOY! See?

EXEC 2: Yeah, sure. Okay. So, it’s not, like a race thing, then?

EXEC 3: Yeah, because Pryor is black, you know, like black black.

EXEC 1: Guys, you’re missing the point! It’s FUNNY! THE MAN IS A TOY! WHO WOULDN’T THINK THAT’S FUNNY?! C’mon, let’s do a few more lines of coke. You’ll get it.

SCENE

This is how I imagined the executives at Raystar Pictures decided to greenlight the 1982 film The Toy, starring Richard Pryor and Jackie Gleason. The movie is about an unemployed man named Jack Brown who ends up getting “bought” to be a living “toy” for a tycoon’s spoiled son. Sidenote: Richard Pryor is a black man in this film as he was in real life, BUT THIS IS NOT RACISM, IT’S COMEDY!

I was seven when The Toy was released. I didn’t see it at the movies, but I remember watching it almost every time it was on HBO, which was a lot. This was HBO before prestige television; movies and premium sports ruled the roster. If you happened to miss an airing of something like The Toy at 11 a.m. all you had to do was wait until 3 or 4 in the afternoon when it aired again. For a couch spud kid like myself, this was earthly paradise. The 1980s was truly a golden era of film comedy: Caddyshack, The Goonies, Trading Places, Airplane, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (literally every John Hughes’ movie), and Better Off Dead to barely scratch the surface. At the time, The Toy was unremarkable. It was just another serving of my media diet. There was a lot of silliness and pranks; the slow parts where they talked about feelings were boring; Eric Bates’ (the millionaire’s son) room looked like a page from the F.A.O. Schwartz catalogue; Richard Pryor was funny; where can I get a me-sized race car?

The movie came up in conversation from time to time as I got older. Usually this was between me and my older brother as we tried to stump each other with obscure movie quotes. In these instances I would think back, trying to remember how they, shall we say, dealt with the central tenet of the film’s premise. You know, the thing about buying a black man. Was that really just “okay” even in the 1980s? Then again, this was the same decade that gave us The Dukes of Hazzard, a very cool show that was not sexist and didn’t cater to stereotypes of Southerners at all. Maybe The Toy made it work!”

It did not, at least, not in a way that wouldn’t trouble any modern viewer who is also not the governor of Florida. We use the shorthand “does not hold up” for a movie like The Toy. And that’s fine. Not everything is built to be Casablanca. However, books, movies, TV shows, songs (“Oooh baby, honey doll! You’re a sweet sugar doughnut, yeah yeah yeah oooh oooh”) that makes us cringe with discomfort on one or many, many levels are still speaking to us. They have something to tell us about the tastes and trends as well as about the political, social, and artistic sensibilities of a particular period. It was with this in mind that I recently rewatched the 14^th highest-grossing film of 1982.

The Toy is actually a remake of a 1976 French film titled Le Jouet by Francis Veber (many of Veber’s films have been remade for American audiences including Buddy, Buddy, The Man with One Red Shoe, and The Birdcage). A 60-second summary: Richard Pryor plays Jack Brown, an unemployed journalist facing foreclosure on the house he shares with his girlfriend, Angela.  Jackie Gleason plays U.S. Bates, a Louisiana millionaire whose name is on everything from newspapers to office buildings. Desperate for work, Jack takes a janitorial job at a department store owned by Bates. There he encounters Eric Bates (Scott Schwartz), U.S.’ spoiled, entitled son home on spring break from military school. Eric has come to the store escorted by a pod of Bates’ suited lackies to pick out anything he wants. He watches Jack goofing around unawares. “I know what I want,” says Eric. “The black man.” And if reading that sentence made your blood pressure spike, you are not alone. One of the men named Mr. Morehouse (Ned Beatty) approaches Jack with this “offer.” Jack laughs, dismissing him, “No. No way, man. You know this got settled in the Civil War?” After Morehouse butters Jack’s palm with a stack of thick bills he caves and agrees to spend the week with Eric.

Racism, yes, but also sweet ride!

Plot wise, the rest of the film is uneven at best. It wants to be about a father and son ultimately repairing some of their estrangement and emotional damage. But it also wants to capitalize on the box office draw of its funniest star: ¹Richard Pryor. In comedy circles of the 70s and 80s, Pryor was revered. His work was always full-throated, unflinching, smart, caustic, incisive, and unapologetically raw. Before signing onto The Toy, Pryor had a run of critical and commercial successes in films like Greased Lightening (1977), Stir Crazy (1980), Bustin Loose (1981), and with his stand-up feature Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip (released in April of 1982, eight months before The Toy hit theatres). 1982 came just two years after Pryor survived a horrific near death experience where he set himself on fire after freebasing cocaine for five straight days. File under: would not wish on my worst mortal enemy. The era launched by The Toy marked a professional and personal turning point for Pryor. That film, the ones that followed such as Brewster’s Millions (1985) and See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), as well as much of his stand-up wrought a different comic style and sensibility for Pryor. He was still wickedly observational and devastatingly candid, but also more nuanced, thoughtful; he was no longer going for the jugular. Pryor recognized this in an interview with the New York Times in 1983:

People call me up and say, 'You're not like you used to be.' I say to them, 'That's right, but do you know what I was really like then? Do you know what kind of insanity I was into, with the drugs and the liquor?' I'm not going to start doing that again. I'm going to be nice to myself. I don't have the same desire to succeed any more. I don't have that push, push, push I used to have. I think I had it until I burned up. After that, it didn't seem to make much sense.

What this looks like in The Toy is a bit of a disjointed mess where scenes meant to advance the reconciliation plot between Eric and U.S. sit awkwardly with a lot of farcical, schticky, and just badly played humor: Jack dressed in too-small Spiderman pajamas stumbling into a fancy dinner party at the Bates mansion or getting doused with a bucket of oatmeal rigged to fall on his head when he enters Eric’s lavish playroom; a dopey scene where Eric and Jack go fishing and Eric tells Jack the lake is stocked with piranha. Thinking it’s another one of Eric’s practical jokes, Jack fearlessly wades in. Seconds later the water churns. The film speeds like a Benny Hill sequence and Jack practically runs on top of the water. He collapses on the ground, his shirt riddled with neat cartoon ovals. These physical gags and the one-note misogynist and racist jokes that litter the rest of the movie crowd out Pryor’s gifted sensibilities, which, unfortunately, we only get to see in one scene.  

When Eric first notices Jack at the department store, he is messing around with a giant inflatable toy called The Wonder Wheel:

I don’t know if this scene was improvised, but given Pryor’s skills, I would guess that some, if not all, of it was unscripted. Pryor shines in his guilelessness here, which is what endears him to Eric (and viewers). As the camera cuts between Jack’s clowning and Eric and Bates’ managers, a close-up of Eric shows him smiling. While the adults around him stare clinically, Eric recognizes the fun he’s missed out on as a child of wealth and power who is merely tolerated by his father. Jack’s monologue over the “dying” Wonder Wheel—“Oh Wonder Wheel! You didn’t even go to the zoo!” is pitch-perfect silliness and illustrates Pryor’s wonderful agility to inhabit ²playfulness.

As a whole, the film squanders Pryor’s talents. Instead it relies on him to smooth over the more racially problematic aspects of the movie. Jack is the hapless, non-threatening black man making the best out of a bonkers situation at the hands of racist one-percenters. Laughing at Jack’s comic indignities and humiliations encourages audiences to affirm the film’s underlying theme of “this is how it is” without too much self-reflection. I think this more than any of the other elements—misogyny, sexism, classism—hiding in plain sight makes The Toy hard to watch today. A lot has changed, but a lot has not.

At one point early on Jack becomes so fed up with the lunacy of what he’s agreed to that he quits and goes home. He is quickly persuaded back to the Bates’ mansion. Slightly wiser, Jack resigns himself to sticking it out and making the best of it for the gains, to work the system from the inside, much like Pryor did in his life and career because sometimes that’s also “how it is.”  

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Lens Zen!

Friends, I’m not going to lie: this essay took a lot out of me. I had planned to continue our little Super Spy Theatre with Boris and Natasha, but that will have to resume another time. Stay tuned! Instead here is a capture of The Little Boathouse at the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts. The Old Manse is a beautiful historic property once owned by the Emerson family. It was also where Nathaniel Hawthorne stayed and wrote as well as a regular hangout for the likes of Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott. This adorable boathouse sits on the edge of the property and looks out toward The North Bridge where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. History, Mr. White! I thought I might just drag a writing desk out here, drill a few holes to run some fatty WiFi through the place, and make it my own private writer’s retreat space. No one would notice, right?

“I will get alll the writing done here!” and other lies writers tell themselves. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

1. I didn’t get exposed to more of Pryor’s earlier film and stand-up until I was much older. I highly recommend the excellent bio, Becoming Richard Pryor, by Scott Saul as an incredible and thorough exploration of his life and work.

2. Another great example of this comes from Pryor’s appearance on Sesame Street in 1976. You will never think of the alphabet the same way again.