Pryor offenses

Revisiting a comic genius

by Josh Kun

A few weeks ago, I was at the Laugh Factory on the Sunset Strip watching three young black comedians pay tribute to Richard Pryor as part of the release party for Rhino's nine-disc Pryor anthology, . . . And It's Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968-1992). In a back corner, Pryor sat motionless in his wheelchair -- his body debilitated by MS, his vision erased by blindness -- while on stage his progeny waited for laughs.

Chris Spencer did a great bit about the differences in court psychology between pick-up basketball games in Inglewood and those in Pasadena. Damon Wayans cracked on his son for being a hip-hop thug in a gated community. Chris Tucker killed the hardest: he gets caught taking a swim in the pool of one of his new Beverly Hills neighbors. "I thought it was the community pool!"

But what they told were jokes and nothing more -- a series of set-ups and punch lines. What you realize listening to . . . And It's Deep Too! is that Pryor didn't tell jokes. In one of the box's essays, Walter Mosley writes of Pryor as an anthropologist, a philosopher, and a psychologist, but never simply a comedian. Pryor did comedic solo performances that turned his life as the black Peoria son of a boxer and a prostitute -- a life that included as many marriages as heart attacks, chronic drug addiction, and jail time for disorderly conduct and tax evasion -- into one-man dramatic sit-coms that defused black rage and disillusionment with searing confession and dazzling roleplaying.

Pryor morphed into junkies, blacksmiths, slaves, Mudbone, his kids, and all kinds of white people who all sounded the same. He gave voice to everything. When a wino talked trash to Dracula ("What's wrong with your natural?"), he was both wino and Dracula. When he explained the psychology of coke addiction, he was the pipe who talked. And whereas Snoop and DMX compare themselves to dogs, Pryor became dogs, giving them human voices and human feelings. In Pryor's universe, even the trees could talk.

As Bill Cosby remarks in the notes, because TV and film were more off-limits to black comedians in the '60s and '70s, Pryor had to create his shows where he could: on stage in front of mixed black and white audiences who relied on him for an escape into an honesty not permitted outside the space of the nightclub -- an honesty so unbearable, so real, so relevant, that you had to laugh in order to go on living. The occasionally Pryor-funny but never Pryor-smart Laugh Factory performances -- which took place on the same Sunset Strip where Pryor went public with his infamous tale of freebase self-immolation and where he vowed to stop using the word "nigger" after a trip to Africa -- were a less-than-promising commentary on post-Pryor black comedy. Although Pryor most certainly opened the racially segregated doors that all of these comedians have walked through on their way to movin'-on-up tax brackets, TV series, and big-screen roles playing the president, none of them -- save for Chris Rock and early Eddie Murphy -- has done much with the social and stylistic ground he broke, except find new ways to tell the same old gags about farting, pussy, and big black dicks.

When Wayans addressed politics, all he could come up with was, "Doesn't Al Gore seem gay?" When Pryor gets political on the discs collected in the box set, he puts the entire nation on public trial. On 1974's That Nigger's Crazy, he reasons that black people aren't afraid of flying saucers because of slavery and racial oppression ("Nothing can scare a nigger after 400 years of this shit"). On Bicentennial Nigger, he subtitles the American Bicentennial as "200 years of white folks kickin' ass." At the Comedy Store in 1973 (on the That African-American Is Still Crazy rarities disc), he laments the end of Black Power ("Shit's over? You mean it's back to singing groups?"). He even finds a way to turn Leon Spinks into a freedom fighter: "He may not articulate the language," Pryor deadpans to an imaginary white critic on 1978's Wanted: Richard Pryor Live in Concert, "but it ain't his language anyway. Like to see how you do in Zaire muthafucka."

The most difficult part of the Laugh Factory event was seeing Pryor get wheeled out on stage for publicity photos. He appeared unconscious, his limbs limp, his mouth drooling, the world's greatest stand-up comic forced to sit down forever in silence. This was the same body that had been so resilient in the past, the same body that Pryor polluted with pills and powder and then burned up with a bottle of rum, the same body that almost drowned in the deep end of a pool, the same body repeatedly sent into paralysis by a heart that couldn't keep beating, the same body that no matter what Pryor did to it always talked back to him.

The Pryor on stage was the phantom Pryor. The Pryor chronicled on . . . And It's Deep Too! gives us back embodied Pryor, the Pryor whose genius still has plenty of truths to tell.