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An Iconoclast Remembered:
Richard Pryor
by Jason McGahan
Redd Foxx used
to say that Richard Pryor would have been banned from every nightclub
in the country had he performed
his act before the Black Revolution of the 1960s. Foxx, a friend and
admirer of Malcolm X since his youth, was speaking from long and bitter experience. Years before he
played Fred Sanford in the hit 1970s television program Sanford & Son,
Foxx was a “blue”
comedian known to Black audiences throughout the Midwestern Chitlin’ Circuit
of the ‘40s and ‘50s for
his sexually and politically explicit humor. He catered his act to the
sensibility of Black underclass audiences, which embarrassed many
integration-minded
Blacks and
missed white audiences almost entirely.
Foxx’s
black-or-white dilemma illustrates what historian Mel Watkins, borrowing
from W.E.B. DuBois, called
the “twoness” of African-American humor. Slavery created for Blacks the
necessity to manage both
how they were perceived by whites and how they perceived themselves. A laugh
from the master could mean
averting punishment, while satire, mimicry, and mockery of the master in the
company of slaves could help alleviate the pain and misery of bondage. To justify slavery to themselves,
the slavers rewarded foolish
joviality and naďveté, while no overt act of intelligence or irony went
unpunished. The richness of Black humor was secluded from the view of whites
for
centuries. The
gulf between authentic Black ethnic humor and crude racist
representations persisted unabated for more than a century.
Richard Pryor
wasn’t the first Black comedian to draw humor from the bitterness of
racism. He wasn’t the first
to substitute dazzling wit and intelligence in place of “acting the fool” for
white audiences. And his
mordant political satire informed by racial otherness had long since become
a staple of the Chitlin’
Circuit. What first and foremost made Richard Pryor a transcendent American
comedian was that he removed
the racial barrier separating working-class Black ethnic humor from the
predominantly white mainstream
of American culture.
Jim Crow
segregation after the Civil War had the effect of providing Blacks with
clubs and cabarets in which
to develop the humor denied them in the whites-only theater and mass
media. Richard Pryor, like
Redd Foxx before him, began his career performing before almost exclusively Black
audiences. And like Foxx,
the divergence between the types of humor suited to Black as opposed to white
audiences became a defining
source of conflict in Pryor’s development as a comedian. He was born into the
racially segregated Black
underclass of Peoria, Illinois. His father was a teenage boxing champ turned pimp
and bar manager. His mother
was a prostitute. He grew up in one of his grandmother’s brothels. His
earliest memories were peopled with the winos, addicts, con-men,
prostitutes, and
gangsters occupying the lowest rung of Black society in Peoria. Nowhere is
this fact more evident
than in his
best known stand-up comedy of the ‘70s and ‘80s. But earlier in his career,
Pryor suppressed his vivid
remembrances of the past, believing them a hindrance to his pursuit of the
financial rewards of white
mainstream approval.
Fans who
discovered Richard Pryor in the 1970s may be surprised to learn that he was a
famous comedian as early
as 1964. Pryor belonged to the coterie of Black comics that included Bill Cosby,
Nipsey Russell, and Dick
Gregory who had achieved a measure of fame by traversing the narrow, often
shaky ground between Black
ethnic humor and acting the fool. As tame as the humor of Cosby and the pre-1970
Pryor was by modern standards,
when they told jokes on Merv Griffin and Ed Sullivan in the mid-1960s they
were pioneering comedians.
In the mid to
late-1960s, Pryor was imitating Cosby “so much so that I should have
informed people,” he wrote
in his autobiography, Pryor Convictions. His performances during this period
were heavily rendered, derivative, anxious, and painstakingly suited to
the
tastes of
mainstream white audiences. “I had a wild neighborhood, I gotta tell you,”
began one such bit.
“Because my
mother’s Puerto Rican, my father’s Negro, and we lived in a big Jewish
tenement building in an
Italian neighborhood. So every time I went outside, they’d yell, ‘Get him! He’s all
of them!’”
But Pryor could
never become Cosby, whose college education and middle-class background were a
far-cry from
Pryor’s and imparted to Cosby a natural polish and subtlety that endeared him
to the mostly white audiences.
The pressure on Pryor to be someone he wasn’t gradually summoned his
personal demons to the fore, and his drug use and erratic behavior
increased.
One night at
the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas in 1969, Pryor gaped at the VIP crowd and
reportedly muttered, “What the fuck am I doing here?” before wandering
off
the stage.
Numerous
obituaries have made passing mention of Pryor’s sojourn in Berkeley in
1969-70 that coincided with his studying the speeches of Malcolm X and familiarizing himself with the
political philosophy of Black Nationalism. But this period is of
considerable interest
for the artistic metamorphosis it resulted in. Malcolm X’s posthumous
influence on Pryor, reaching
him as it did at the peak of the Black Power Movement and in its epicenter in
Berkeley, is
palpable.
“Strangely, I hadn’t been affected by Malcolm X’s death when it
occurred,” Pryor wrote in his autobiography. “However, after Redd
introduced me to
him as a person and what he stood for, I missed him terribly.” Malcolm X
distinguished himself from Black leaders of the Civil Rights movement by opposing racial integration on the
grounds that it reinforced the false notion of white supremacy in the minds
of
oppressor and
oppressed. Most Blacks in the U.S., not to mention in the smoldering
ruins of colonial Africa, were fighting for racial equality and self-determination, not mere
acceptance by whites. Black
people, he said, would have to liberate themselves.
The uncompromising
ethos of Black Power was born out of the flames of urban race rebellion and
urgently called
into question modes of practicality and patience that had marked Black
behavior for centuries through the Civil Rights Era. Disagreeable though terms like ”house negro” and
“field negro” may sound, to many Black youths of Pryor’s generation they
served
to distinguish
the old integrationist mindset from the new militancy. Black Power was
like a giant breach opened
in the historical enclosure of Black racial consciousness and pride. And
Pryor was absorbing it all, having befriended leading revolutionary
Black intellectuals
of the period like Ishmael Reed, Angela Davis and Cecil Brown — —
not to mention members of
the Black
Panther Party of Self-Defense. Imbued with the excitement of that historic
moment, he began to reevaluate
his art and his politics, and, most importantly to analyze the
conditions of his life in Peoria in light of everything he had learned.
The genius of
Richard Pryor, more evident with each successive white mainstream
publication that feels compelled to praise him in death, is that he
perfected the
comedy of the Black American underclass and injected it into the
predominantly white mainstream —
permanently
redefining the art of stand-up comedy. Pryor
was a man of enormous talent and subversive predilections who revealed to
the public to an extent never before seen the rich tradition of Black
ethnic comedy
in a manner that, if he didn’t exactly smash the racist idols of minstrelsy, at
least replaced them with
something less vulgar. Pryor repudiated punch
lines for comic
and often poignant impersonations of Black ghetto archetypes like the
Big Liar, the Wino, the
Junky, the Religious Fraud, the Prostitute, the Neighborhood Tough. His superb
gift for mimicry, poetic
use of street vernacular, and broad acting range had the unprecedented
effect of producing pathos in Black and white viewers alike. “I think
there’s a
thin line
between being a Tom on them people and seeing them as human beings,” he
told author James McPherson.
“When I do the people, I have to do it true. If I can’t do it, I’ll
stop right in the middle rather than pervert it and turn it into Tomism. There’s a thin line between to
laugh with and to laugh at.” Pryor exercised no such caution when the
subject turned
to the obliviousness of white America. The nasal voice that he used to
impersonate the overly
inhibited,
cowardly unassertive, and naively cruel “average white male” has become
part of the standard repertoire
of any number of contemporary Black comedians. For all the myriad
Black characters that Pryor
developed into marvels of idiosyncrasy, that white voice never underwent so
much as a change of inflection
whether it was meant to be a cop, a neighbor, or a tourist on
African safari. It is emblematic
of his profoundly funny satire, which pilloried the racist
double-standards, the cultural insensitivity, the victimization, the
degradation, and
the fear that
Blacks living in the U.S confront every day. Racism made up the very
fabric of his work.
But Pryor was,
after all, a comedian and he spent plenty of time joking about how
Blacks and whites behaved
differently at funerals, at the dinner table, and when reaching orgasm. At the
height of his powers, when
he was both Black rebel and Hollywood box office king, Pryor flaunted his
greatest vulnerabilities onstage to daring comic effect. He challenged
delicate
themes of Black
masculinity by regaling audiences with tales of his transvestite love
affair and confessions of his own sexual performance anxieties. He
described shooting
up his own car with his wife and her friends inside. He recounted his abyss
of freebase cocaine addiction,
his pipe personified into a bully with a voice like Jim Brown’s. He famously
narrated the story of
his self-immolation. It was beyond uncharted territory; it was an
undiscovered planet. No comedian since has ever sought to duplicate Pryor’s
ultimate
highwire act,
the fascinating way he turned the most intimate details of his personal
torment into breathless
laughter.
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