The Enduring Genius of Richard Pryor

When I was teenager (ahem, some years ago) I had the good fortune to see Robin Williams perform. He was the lead entertainment for that year’s Gator Growl, the annual pep rally thrown by the University of Florida. At the time, Williams was mainly known as the odd but extremely funny star of TV’s Mork & Mindy. Few were aware that he was first and foremost a stand-up comedian, and even fewer knew just how brilliant—not to mention obscene—his style of comedy could be. So, you can imagine the surprise (and shock) that ensued when he walked out on stage and did his first joke, miming the cocking action of a shotgun as well as the sound: KA-CHICK. “Down here in the South,” he said, “if you hear that sound, you’d better be one fast motherfucker!”

The ensuing performance became a local legend. I remember it as being as incredibly manic and astoundingly creative. William’s comedy was like nothing else around at that time. It wasn’t long before he emerged as the premier comedian of his generation. And, since his suicide in 2014, he has become firmly embedded in our national consciousness as the Greatest Comedian of All Time.

This is a justifiable opinion. For my money, though, there was one comic who surpassed even Williams in his intellect, inventiveness, and sheer genius. This was Richard Pryor.

Not long ago, I was re-watching one of Pryor’s earliest concert videos, Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, which is currently streaming on Netflix.  (If you haven’t seen it, close this web page right now and go watch it; you’ll thank me later.) I first saw it as a kid, when my parents were rabid Pryor fans.  I even got the chance to listen to some of Pryor’s comedy LPs, which were legendary even back then.

Now that I am forty years older, this particular concert—recorded in Long Beach, California in the late 1970s—strikes me as amazingly powerful. Time, it seems, has not diminished Pryor’s cultural relevance. Rather, it has only increased it. In the space of ninety minutes, Pryor embodies a seemingly endless gallery of characters, including his mother, his father, several dogs, a monkey, his own heart attack, a car’s engine block, John Wayne, a black teenager, and many, many versions of nerdy white men and women (including the then-President and First-Lady).

As a mimic and impressionist, Pryor had no equal. (Except, perhaps, for Eddie Murphy, who came along a bit later.) And even those who came close—Murphy, George Carlin, Steve Martin—never achieved anything like Pryor’s emotional depth. His work felt more like performance art than mere stand-up, and this particular video is among his best. Instead of jumping from gag-to-gag, as Williams did with such unbelievable agility, Pryor provides a series of anecdotes—miniature stories that circle back on each other, magnifying the same themes over and over like the chapters in a fine novel. The absurdity of life, the sadness of death, and—most of all—the secret child hiding inside every one of us.

When Pryor recounts the New Year’s Eve when he “killed” his car with a .357 Magnum in a futile attempt to prevent his (long-suffering) wife from leaving him, he is like some perverse and wildly amusing friend, encouraging us to see ourselves in him. His folly is our own.

And when he inhabits the character of a viscous dog who takes pity on him (Pryor) after his pet monkeys have died, he reveals both the pathos and absurdity of the human condition (yes, even in a dog).  “Ain’t life a bitch,” the sympathetic dog laments after learning of the monkey’s demise. “And I was gonna eat them, too.”

Of course, it’s impossible to watch one of Pryor’s performances without becoming aware of his other great theme—the cruelty of racism. In this regard, alas, Pryor’s act is still terribly current. In one impression, he gives us two cops who have “accidentally” broken a black kid.  (“Can you break a n***er?” one asks.  “Yep,” the other answers, “it says right here in the manual.”)

Some would argue that racism is, in fact, Pryor’s essential theme. And not without cause.  In his excellent biography, Becoming Richard Pryor, writer Scott Saul relates the man’s brutal childhood, growing up in a whorehouse run by his grandmother. And the suffering he endured as a child—including a sexual assault inflicted by a neighborhood boy—seeps out of every pour of Pryor’s on-stage.

Still, I think it’s a mistake to assign racism as his overarching subject. His work was too deep for that, too sublime. At his best, Pryor seemed to transcend not only the black experience in American, but the human experience, in general—with all of its tragic-comic selfishness, greed, and anger.

And what is the cure to all these sins? Compassion. Again and again, Pryor returns to the redemptive power of compassion—for the other race, the other sex, the other class. The other…underdog. That was Pryor’s great gift.

Man, I miss that. And him.

(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)