Comedians Owe Debt to Richard Pryor
by Audrey T. McCluskey
Bloomington Herald-Times
January 22, 2006
This guest column was written by Audrey T. McCluskey, director of the Black Film Center/Archive and a professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at IU. She is working on a book on Richard Pryor.
"Sometimes I laugh just to keep from crying."
- blues
lyric
Novelist Ralph Ellison once described the blues personality as one who "fingers the jagged edge" of life to transcend personal catastrophe through honesty and tenacity of spirit. Richard Pryor - whose recent death released him from more than a decade of the crippling effects of multiple sclerosis, an illness that rendered his body unable to respond to his tenacious, irreverent spirit - was the embodiment of the blues personality. His genius (an overused and misapplied word, to be sure) as well as much of his personal trouble and well-known foibles can be located in his unwillingness to tolerate any public pretense. He began his scorching social critique, the mainstay of his comedic performance, with a display of brutal honesty and vulnerability. Rather than surrender to the pain of life, Richard Pryor made art out it. The winner of five Grammies and a posthumous lifetime achievement award for his comedy albums, he emanated not from a desire to churn out one-liners and jokes, but to share lived and deeply felt experience that linked our common humanity. He left his audiences bowled over, laughing so hard that they would be crying, too. In the blues tradition, laughing to keep from crying can be a transcendent response to the fickleness of life.
Though his comedy was often bawdy and raw, he avoided stereotypical "cooning and clowning." He frequently used racial and sexual themes, and laid bare issues that made some black people squirm. Yet whites could not feel safe from the scorching truth-telling that exposed white racism and hypocrisy. In his best standup, a lesson, a protest, even a moral message was imparted. Pryor spared no one, especially himself. He was a man of bad habits, laced with good intentions who admired the qualities of those who would not give in to injustice.
A poignant example of this is shown in his story about football great Jim Brown. Brown, who as the league's all-time leading rusher, had to deal with the racism of early 1960s NFL opponents who would stomp on him after an overdue tackle and call him the N word. "Jim has so much integrity," said Pryor, "He would get up slowly, go back to the huddle and calmly tell the quarterback to 'give me the ball.'" Now, that is not necessarily funny, but with Pryor's insistent voice imitations and manner, his re-telling became not only funny, but a treatise on heroic action.
Pryor's solidarity with the underdog, and disregard for secrets - society's as well as his own - stemmed from his biography. Growing up in bordellos in Peoria, Ill., under the tutelage of a wise and unsentimental grandmother, and in the shadow of a larger-than-life father, he was exposed to all types of human frailty and need. Pryor invented sympathetic rendering of flawed, deeply human and affecting characters from winos and drug addicts to the inimitable "Mudbone," the southern transplant who fled racism on a "borrowed" tractor, and Miss Rudolph, the dispenser of magic potions and punishment.
Leaving Peoria and the Army, he worked his way east and reinvented himself as the next Bill Cosby. His G-rated routines showed the tremendous physical agility and comic delivery and landed him on network television. But it was not long before he exited that stage, giving up on what he felt was a lucrative fraud, to let his inner voice - the voices of the winos, drug addicts and everyday people struggling to hold onto their dignity - shine through.
Pryor was not the first to satirize race relations, but he was the first to draw a huge crossover audience who paid to hear him poke fun at them. When, for example, he contrasted the behavior of blacks and whites at funerals, showing whites acting reserved and composed and blacks crying and moaning, both groups laughed in recognition of essential truth in that exaggeration.
His success led to a productive movie career that extended beyond comedic roles. For a brief time, Pryor was the biggest black personality in Hollywood with a multiple movie deal and several notable performances in films such as "Blue Collar" (1978), "Lady Sings the Blues" (1972), "Bingo Long and the Traveling All-Stars" (1976), plus several hit comedies with Gene Wilder, including "Silver Streak" (1976) and "Stir Crazy" (1980). He had a good share of duds, too, "Toy" (1982) and "Brewster's Millions" (1985) among them.
Today's comedians of all races owe him a debt for shaking up the status quo and creating a new standard of performance. Because he was an original, Pryor will continue to be imitated, which just makes us miss him more. If he is in heaven, he, no doubt, has God bowled over in laughter. If he is in that other place, he is matching wits with the devil, and in that pairing, Richard Pryor has got to be the favorite.
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