Pony Party: it’s RACY & an open thread

On Richard Pryor

by Armando

Sun Dec 11, 2005 at 12:40:26 AM PST

Digby has up a wonderful post on the greatest comic of my lifetime, Richard Pryor:

I saw Richard Pryor in concert in 1974 at the Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos, California. I just realized that he was only 34 years old at the time. (Of course, I was only 18, so everyone seemed pretty old to me then.) He was on the cusp of achieving huge mainstream fame that year from his album “That Nigger’s Crazy.”

I’d never seen anything like Pryor before. It was more than comedy, and it sure as hell was more than “R” rated. It was cultural observation so universal and so penetrating that I saw the world differently from that night on. He didn’t just talk about race, although he talked about it a lot and in the most bracing, uncompromising terms possible. He also talked about men and women, age, relationships, family, politics and culture so hilariously that my jaw literally ached the next day. He was rude, profane and sexist. But there was also this undercurrent of vulnerability and melancholy running beneath the comedy that exposed a canny understanding of human foible. His personal angst seemed to me to be almost uncomfortably plain.

I looked around me in that theatre that night, in which I and my little friend Kathy were among a fair minority of whites, and I realized that we were all laughing uproariously together at this shocking, dirty, racially charged stuff. As someone who grew up in a racist household (and had always had a visceral reaction against it) it was an enormous, overwhelming relief. I understood Richard Pryor, the African Americans in the audience understood Richard Pryor and Richard Pryor and the African Americans understood me. He was right up front, saying it all clearly and without restraint. He wasn’t being polite and pretending that race wasn’t an issue. And it didn’t matter. Nobody, not one person, in that audience was angry. In fact, not one person in that audience was anything but doubled over in paroxysms of hysterical laughter. He had our number, all of us, the whole flawed species.

I grew up in a small Southern town with a very large African-American population and went to the predominantly African-American public schools so I grew up exposed extensively and daily to African-American culture. In that sense, my Richard Pryor experience was different than Digby’s. I was less conscious of feeling as if I was peering into something I didn’t know about, because I did feel I knew something about it.

So Richard Pryor to me was, first and foremost, simply the funniest person I had ever heard. Later, as I grew older and thought about it and went to college and met white folks with virtually no experience with African-American culture, I realized how revolutionary Pryor was. I saw what Digby describes in her post – this ability to deal with racial topics in a way that folks of all races understood without pulling any punches.

In many ways, Richard Pryor provided the first unvarnished discussion of race relations that people of all races could understand. Not in the way Republicans want to have a “real” discussion, but in an honest way. Warts and all — everybody’s warts, but within the context of the realities of what the African-American experience has been.

Younger Kossacks may not appreciate how truly great Richard Pryor was as a comic (his films, even the concert films, do not do him justice.) Try listening to “That Nigger’s Crazy” or “Bicentennial Nigger.” If you don’t laugh your ass off to that, just mark him down as a historic comic great.

R.I.P. Richard Pryor.