European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - October 20, 1991, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Redd Foxx a Blue comedy was colourful by Lawrence Christon los Angeles times the line Between Baw Diness and filth is generally so Fine that no one can Tell when it has been crossed until its too late. Until Redd Foxx hit the big time on National to As Fred Sanford for years he had been known As a a a dirty comedian and even by today a standards to put on one of the scores of his old party albums is to experience Shock for a couple of minutes until you pick up on his Bluesy shout rhythms and hear out his great improvisations riffs. Foxx who was approaching his 69th birthday when he died oct. 11 of complications from a heart attack was a comedians comedian infinitely closer to the spirit of Rabelais and Henry Miller than the ostensibly liberated Gross out comics who Parade through the clubs today. A lot of his old stand up stuff is unquestionably dated an expression of hang ups different from our own. But what redeems it is his sense of sex As a tease an embarrassment something ineluctable and incomparable fun. Foxx is popularly remembered playing his take it or leave it patriarchal grumpiness on primetime to. But he was never More brilliantly Hini Selt than when he Shook the id into laughing wherever the performance. Most of Foxx a obituaries have made note of him As an actor and in fact his last big payday before he started lbs the Royal family this season came from the 19s9 movie Harlem nights. But Foxx was never really much of an actor in any serious application of the word a head never make any directors Short list for Othello. He was simply a great club comedian who was a wizard at catching the crosscurrents of instinct which in his Case swirled in the theater of sex. A lot of meaning was packed into Foxx a line when he once told an interviewer a school meant nothing to me. Knowing that George Washington crossed the Delaware a How was that going to help me in a Brick fight in St. L Ouis a head Itcan on his of n since the age of 13, when he ran away from Home in St. Louis to join a washboard Street band and four years later worked in an Amateur musical group called the Bon Bons up in Chicago. Later he went out on his own As a stand up comedian and in 1941 teamed with Slappy White to play the chit Lins circuit. Those were the years when the worlds of sports and entertainment ran on separate tracks alongside a a Ocolor line a despite the crossover successes of heavyweight Champion Joe Louis and the radio depictions of Amos n Andy As Well As a number of great Black musicians Louis Armstrong chief among them. Foxx did a lot of scuffling and his hard years formed him in his autobiography Malcolm x recalls Foxx when he still had his own name of John Sanford working As a Short order Cook in Harlem. Like Many self made men Foxx a curiosity about the world stopped a Little Short of his Rise in it because what he knew he knew Well and that was enough. He was a born club comedian and he loved the life so much that he was never completely Happy with his to successes he did t make his first network to appearance until he was 42, when he went on the today show. For a while the Money was a sore spot with him particularly with the first 1972-77 run of no cd a Sanford and son when he demanded lop Dollar a literally Carroll of Connor was reportedly making $25,000 a week for All in the family and Foxx asked for that sum plus $1. It May be that the voluminous ease with which Money poured through television production and into the pockets of so Many of its Young Arrivi stes was a rebuke to the Long hungry years Foxx spent working his Way along. That May account too for some of his temperamental demands such As a dressing room window when he moved Over to Abc in 1977, the network reportedly went out of its Way to give him All the window space he might want by putting his dressing room in a greenhouse. But its probably closer to the truth to say that for Foxx there was simply nothing like the clubs with their Smoky intrigue their easy liquored laughter their jazz their nocturnal heat and their atmosphere of sex. Up lbs comedian Redd Foxx starred in tvs Sanford and son in the 1970s and in the new series the Royal family this year before dying oct. 11 at the age of 68.october 20, 1991 sunday a