+in memoriam.
richard pryor
comedic genius. griot.

The one time Richard Pryor went away was during the years when he masqueraded as a Bill Cosby clone. I remember watching an old tape of Richard appearing on the Tonight Show (Or was it the Ed Sullivan Show?) in a tight sweater with a small collar shyly protruding from the crew neck. He looked nervous and constricted like the tight sweater and little collar worked in tandem to compress his range of movement into awkward hand waggles and open-handed appeals to the audience. I don’t remember his jokes but he was funny. Not Richard Pryor funny. Just Funny. Richard Pryor funny didn’t come until one night in 1969 at the Alladin Hotel in Las Vegas. The Cosby Clone went to the stage and moved into his innocuous and non-offensive routine. Halfway through he stopped, stared out at the audience and asked...

“What the fuck am I doing here?”

Then walked off the stage.

He lost the tight sweaters and the little collars. He moved to Berkeley, California and bounced around the Bay Area. He hung out with Ishmael Reed and Huey P. Newton. He read up on Malcolm. He ran with the pusher and pimp archetypes he knew well from his youth. The elasticity in his body came back and brought the rhythm back with it. He put the performance back in the art and vice versa. And he was funny again. I mean Richard Pryor funny. You know, the type of funny that he had honed in whorehouses and tested on some of the most demanding audiences the chitlin' circuit could offer. The type of funny that will never go away again.

The Seventies, the years after Richard Pryor came back, were his salad days. He began by radically redefining what stand up comedy should sound, look and feel like. He got into moving pictures. He started off as the scene-chewing supporting actor (Lady Sings The Blues, The Mack, Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings), screenplay and television writer (Blazing Saddles, Sanford and Son, Flip Wilson Show) and scene-chewing cameo assassin (Car Wash, Uptown Saturday Night, The Wiz ) and moved into leading man and the funnier half of buddy movie partnerships (Silver Streak, Which Way Is Up?,Stir Crazy). He also brought his stage show to film, shooting Richard Pryor Live In Concert, and Live and Smokin.

The transformation from Cosby clone was complete when Richard took the stage on the set of the Richard Pryor Show (Network Television pre cable) in something resembling 70’s pimp attire, performed a little rock and roll and then machined gunned the audience. This time he wasn’t asking questions, he was taking audience members out one by one. The Cosby Clone seemed like a million years ago.

I got hip on Richard in the mid to late seventies, I was a little kid and understood little of what I heard but the thrill and anticipation that energized a room when “That Nigger is Crazy” or “Was it Something I Said” was put on a turntable was palpable. Then there was the voice. The white man voice, the female voice, the corner hustler voice, the old man-on back porch-overlooking a marsh voice. The voice, in all its forms, was tied to good times, red lights- this type of thing. Even when the voice wasn’t saying something happy and frilly- which I later learned was usually the case- it was tied to good times because Richard turned pain and pathos into comedy. He did this for men. He did this for women. He did this for children. I didn’t always understand what Richard Pryor was saying but I understood Richard Pryor. And the reason a little boy could get Richard Pryor was because anyone who had an ounce of respect for the truth could get Richard Pryor.

But Richard was never the same after setting himself on fire. His thoughts turned inward and his comedy more reflective. By the time the 80’s rolled around he had begun sleep walking through big budget films and personalized star vehicles with a bewildered and frightened mask on his grill. Then multiple sclerosis did what self-immolation, censors, seven second delays, flaming cognac baths and domestic battles couldn’t- silence Richard Pryor. Like Ali, Richard’s voice left him and as an extension (like Ali) Richard’s voice left us. Yet, Richard Pryor didn’t leave us again. He hovered above every comedian that stretched a joke into a story and dared to put character into their content. Every person telling a joke on a stage, into a microphone, before a camera, in a bar, from a back seat or across a table has to access that Richard Pryor Funny strain that has been absorbed into our collective DNA. If he/she can’t find it then he/she isn’t going to be funny. Its just that simple.

Richard Pryor lived hard and could treat people around him as hard as he treated himself. Five marriages splintered and died and he often lamented his problems with being a father. Even Jim Brown spoke of Richard with a croak in his throat (on television no less), going on about how Richard had done him wrong. But no matter how hard he was on the people around him, he saved his best abuse for himself. He was the cat that ate the canary but that was cool because he left everything behind- a laugh, a thought, a sliver of truth, a pound of blood, an indelible memory. Richard Pryor has passed. But he ain’t dead muthafucka. He’ll never leave us again.

Phillip Harvey is the editor of Nat Creole. He is excited about 2006. Please hit him up at ph@natcreole.com with any thoughts, suggestions, beliefs and other forms of commentary. Hold the beef please.