All in the Black Family

It sounds like a sure-fizzle formula.

No sex, no excitement, and precious little for a white, middle-class audience to identify with. Just two blacks, father and son, running a junk shop in Los Angeles and playing a continual, if affectionate game of oneupmanship. Yet NBC's Sanford and Son, which premiered in January, is already one of TV's top ten shows. With so much seemingly going against it, what does Sanford have going for it? Above all, it has Redd Foxx.

Foxx, at 49 the dean of black comedians, might have been preparing all his raffish life for the role of Junkman Fred Sanford. "He's an old black dude, and he don't take no stuff," explains Foxx. "He's a con artist. He thinks up elaborate, wily tricks, and I enjoy him." Most of his tricks are directed against his son Lament (Demond Wilson) to keep him from marrying and leaving home. One girl friend, Foxx assures the boy, would end up like her mother, "King Kong in bloomers." He is constantly complaining about his nonexistent heart ailment. "What if I have a heart attack and have to call the doctor?" he asks. "You know I can't dial the phone with my arthritis."

Teasing Laughs. The show was created by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, the team that produced All in the Family, and like Family, Sanford is adapted from a successful BBC series. Foxx's Sanford is at times a sort of black mirror image of Family's bigoted Archie Bunker. When he spots a white nurse waiting to give him his chest

X ray, he announces, "I ain't goin' in there with that ugly old white woman." A policeman asks him about a gang of thieves. "Were they colored?" the cop inquires. "Yeah," Sanford answers, adding--after the appropriate pause --"white."

Foxx's delivery of such gag lines is like a rasp drawn gently across the funnybone. With timing that would take an atomic clock to measure, he teases a laugh like a yo-yo on the end of a string. A figure of grizzled aplomb, he can get up from a spread of ham hocks and pinto beans, then strut through a junky living room as if he were Louis XIV in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

The son of an electrician in St. Louis, Foxx ran away to New York when he was 17, determined to break into show business. His first "club" was a street corner, where he played a washtub in a group named the Five Hip Cats.

Somewhere along the way he adopted his stage name, which was inspired by Baseball Great Jimmie Foxx and the red fox in children's stories. His real name was Sanford, which Yorkin and Lear borrowed for the show.

Dirty Jokes. Eventually, Foxx worked up to the Chitlin' Circuit, the trade name for the black clubs and music halls around the country.

Searching for something to set him apart from other comics, he discovered the dirty joke. He recorded his first "party" album in 1956.

It was so successful that he recorded 48 more and blue humor became his trademark. In one of his cleaner club routines, he is served a drink onstage by a pretty white waitress. "Oh, you're gorgeous, darlin'," he tells her, "but I don't want a white woman. No, I don't want a white woman. If I want a white woman, may the Lord strike me down with polio." Then his body goes out of joint, and he hobbles offstage. The records and a few "clean" appearances on TV eventually caught the eye of Las Vegas managers, and Foxx became a regular at the Hilton International.

Foxx's break into TV actually cost him about $70,000 in forfeited pay from his Hilton contract. Beyond that, he had to move his wife and seven dogs from Las Vegas, which he loves, to Hollywood. Still, he is well aware that he stands to recoup his losses, and then some. "I was doing two shows a night at the club--90 minutes' work for grand-theft money," he says. "But television is the now medium. Suddenly I've got a lot of future." But the years of waiting have left him rather bitter. "'Sanford made it in twelve weeks," he says. "Yet Redd Foxx has been around for 33 years. What took them so long?"

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