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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Jill Nelson on the rage, vulnerability and painful honesty of Richard Pryor's comedy.
Nov 25, 1998 | When Richard Pryor received the Mark Twain Prize for humor at the Kennedy Center on Oct. 20 he was too weak to perform or even to speak. That was left to Chris Rock, Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg, a few of the many comedians whose work he has inspired. I'm both exhilarated that Pryor's getting his due before he's dead and pissed as hell that a man who could give "motherfucka'" a thousand profoundly different shadings is, at 58, virtually speechless. You just know he'd have some hilarious and profound insights into Bill and Monica, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, and all the bizarre happenings in the last days of the 20th century.
Most every comedian under 50 has been influenced by Pryor, and not just the black ones. Watching and listening to them, it's as if Pryor's shadow always hovers nearby, revealing itself to varying degrees in inflection, pacing, body language, choice of material. Crippled by multiple sclerosis, unable to perform, still, Richard Pryor lives! Watching tapes of his stand-up comedy, his movies, his brilliant but short-lived (two months in 1977) television show, I laugh so hard I am forced to the bathroom as tears run down my face. I find comfort in the immortality of his work, that ability to damn near always be timelessly on point.
What is most wonderful and most missed about the humor of Richard Pryor is his simultaneous rage and vulnerability -- that sense of being mad as hell yet still yearning for and believing in acceptance and reconciliation, whether he was riffing about black folks, white folks, women, politics, black male macho or drug addiction. For Pryor, humor and talking much shit was a way to reveal not only his, but our collective psyche. In the process he used his voice, body and mind to turn himself into, not them, but us: the old man Mudbone, an angry black woman doing that head thing only we can do, his dick, assorted animals, a junkie getting off, an awkward white guy, his own heart in the middle of a mutinous attack on his much-abused body.
He has written an autobiography, "Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences," and several books have been written about him. Always 20/20, perhaps hindsight suggests the inevitability of his silencing. Born and raised in Peoria, Ill., by his grandmother, who owned a string of brothels, his mother was a prostitute who got pregnant and married the madam's son. He grew up in whorehouses frequented by entertainers and vaudeville performers who passed through town. It was a childhood spent in the contradiction between the world of sex and violence in the brothel and the world of middle-class, church-going values his family drummed into him. He dropped out of school in ninth grade, but not before an attentive drama teacher had recognized and begun to nurture his comedic talent. Still, by the time he arrived in New York in 1963 after a stint in the Army, Pryor had convinced himself that the road to success lay in non-political, raceless joke telling.
