Mooney Censored for Anti-Bush Jokes

Time Warner Gives Bush-Bashing Comic the Hook

GET UP, STAND-UP Mooney

Is Time Warner getting into the censorship business? A host of Showtime at the Apollo claims he got the hook for angering top brass at the media megaconglomerate with jokes about President George W. Bush.

Comic Paul Mooney (most recently of Chappelle's Show) was midway through a taping of the famed Harlem theater's weekly variety show when the plug was abruptly pulled. Mooney claims the show's producer, Suzanne de Passe, told him material in his monologue had offended unnamed officials from Time Warner, whose chairman, Richard Parsons, heads the Apollo Theater Foundation's board of directors and is among the country's most prominent black Republicans. De Passe was traveling and unreachable for comment, but a Time Warner spokeswoman called the story "ridiculous." "It's absolutely untrue" that the company had anything to do with the incident, she says, noting that Parsons was out of the country at the time.

Mooney, however, seems certain who shut him down. "They wanted me out of there, the Republicans, the Time Warner people," he says. "They said I was Bush bashing, and it was hatred. I felt like I was in Iran or Cuba or somewhere."

After everything that's been said about Bush at this point, how did Mooney manage to provoke such a harsh response? "I talked about his little drunk daughters, Gin and Juice," he says, referring to Jenna and Barbara Bush. "I talked about his mother, who looks like the man on the oatmeal box." Mooney also did a bit on how the letters in Bush's name can be manipulated to produce the number 666, proving Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's recent claim that Bush is the devil.

"The audience went crazy for that," he says.

But whether the jokes were funny or in good taste is irrelevant, he adds. "My point is ever since 9/11, we lost all our rights. They're practicing on the minorities, but when they get good at it they're going to do it to the white folks."

Funnily enough, Mooney was filling in for Whoopi Goldberg, who had hosted the show's previous eight episodes. Goldberg faced her own Bush-bash-backlash in 2004, when she made a sexual double entendre on the president's name during a Kerry-Edwards fundraiser, prompting Slim-Fast to fire her as its spokeswoman. Mooney says he called Goldberg after the taping was scrubbed, "and she said, 'Welcome to the club.'"

By Jeff Bercovici   10/04/06 7:00 AM