CRITICAL MASS

Richard Pryor: Rebel, troubled critic of society

The Internet does a good job on some things. It eliminates the need to know certain facts. It takes just a few keystrokes to call up Matty Alou’s lifetime batting average (.307), or the name of William Howard Taft’s cow (Pauline Wayne). With the merest enterprise, you can arrange to hear Lenny Bruce or the Sun Ra Arkestra. They tell me some people watch movies that haven’t even been released yet on the Internet.

But sometimes the Internet fails.

I have been trying to find a clip of what may have been the funniest thing I ever saw on television - an incident that occurred on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in the ’70s. Richard Pryor was the first guest, and he was seated on the couch while Bobby Goldsboro - the helmet-hairedcrooner of such treacly pop hits as “Honey” and “Watching Scotty Grow” - was being interviewed. Goldsboro was waxing on about the bucolic pleasures of his new farm, when Carson asked him what one did for fun in the country.

“Oh, we go coon hunting …” Goldsboro started.

And at that moment Pryor slid down the couch away from Goldsboro and toward Ed McMahon. (If McMahon was there that night. Maybe it was Doc Severinsen.) And Goldsboro, already a candidate for America’s Whitest Man, turned even whiter. Whiter than a Klansman’s robe. And he started trying to apologize. Which only made it worse.

Richard, that’s not what I meant ….

Oh, I know what you meant.

At this point I should point out that the lying Internet insists that Carson was not there that night, but that Bill Cosby was guest hosting. And that, while it will give me a date for the show - Dec. 6, 1978 - it won’t provide me with a video clip. But I was able to find a couple of references to the moment I remember. On an obscure news group dedicated to obituaries I found this comment: “Cosby asked Goldsboro about his new house.

Goldsboro said he was having trouble because the pond was way down and coons were stealing his fish. The audience started laughing loudly and then so did Goldsboro as Pryor and Cosby gave him incredulous looks. It was a funny Tonight Show moment.”

Someone else on the Internet remembered that Goldsboro was preparing to sing a song about “his old coon dog.”

And so are comedians’ careers remembered, imperfectly, a string of discreet moments - indelible, unreproducible and sometimes impossible. Comedy has as much to do with the individual responding to the bit as with the comedian. If Icould go back and watch the clip, I might receive it as less a spontaneous reaction than as a prepared bit. Because it is impossible to see it again for the first time, because I am 35 years older and I know the punchline. And because Pryor is dead.

We have been without Pryor for some time now. He died of a heart attack in 2005, but he really disappeared around 1986, after his lifeless turn in the 1986 movie Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling - a lightly disguised film autobiography that should have been the performance of his career. Pauline Kael wrote that, had she never seen Pryor before, she “couldn’t have guessed - based on what Jo Jo does here - that he has an excitable greatness in him.”

That same year he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.Though he made a few more movies, for money, they were generally of poor quality. He retired from stand-up in 1992. Excepting the Internet, and the now out-of-print nine-CD box … And It’s Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968-1992) that Rhino Records released 13 years ago, our culture has been pretty much free of Pryor for 20 years. As impossible as it seems, there are probably people who have come of age without having heard “Big Ben the Blacksmith” or “Mud Bone” or “Wino Dealing With Dracula.”

And so, Shout! Factory’s release of No Pryor Restraint: Life in Concert (list price $99.99), a seven-CD, two-DVD boxed set that includes Pryor’s three concert films - Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979), Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip (1982) and Richard Pryor … Here and Now (1983) - as well as material from his comedyalbums from 1968 through 1983, and nearly two hours of previously unreleased material, including Pryor’s final stand-up appearance - delivered from an armchair at Los Angeles’ Comedy Club. There’s a whole CD of previously unreleased material. And there’s a book with photos and essays and celebrity tributes, a discography, a filmography and a personal note penned by his widow, Jennifer Lee Pryor.

While completists will be drawn by the newly available stuff, it’s hardly the best stuff. Pryor’s heyday was actually relatively brief. He spent the early ’60s as a family-friendly Bill Cosby manque, a conservative joke teller who played big rooms in Las Vegas. But then Groucho Marx (imagine Marx mentoring Pryor!) urged him to take more chances in his work. After a legendary onstage breakdown, Pryor moved to Berkeley, Calif., where he hung out with Huey Newton and started doing more drugs. When he emerged, he was a different sort of cat, willing to engagecore American issues.

And from around 1969 until he famously burnt himself up, Pryor was something more than a mere comedian, something like a social force. There’s no doubt he anticipated the influence of hiphop heroes on the children of the white middle class - was there a suburban kid in the 1970s who wasn’t familiar with Pryor’s albums That Nigger’s Crazy and … Is It Something I Said? - that he invaded the homes of the bourgeois, instructing their children in a different cultural style.

Pryor was like Jackie Robinson or Elvis Presley; he mainstreamed what had been an outsider style.

He used racial language that had been taboo in “polite society” (but all too common elsewhere) in his routine, paving the way for rap artists to come. Pryor’s frequent and seemingly casual use of the N-word is almost as startling now as it was 40 years ago.

Pryor didn’t tell jokes so much as riff on racism and the pretty lies society tells itself. While he snacks on topical humor, his real meat is well-intentioned hypocrisy and the self-aggrandizing myths people of all colors made up about themselves. Unlike Lenny Bruce, who - despite what people will say about the great black bawdy comedy tradition of Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx - is Pryor’s most obvious and most important antecedent, Pryor never fell intothe trap of seeing comedy as largely a political tactic. He was concerned with something deeper than politics, something more profound than whatever fashionable struggle was au courant.

He crafted characters ofnovelistic depth with a few tweaks of his voice. He caught a bit of the jazzman’s need to invent for invention’s sake, and he was utterly fearless in regard to the dark closets in which his art compelled him to rummage.

All those bad, hateful, crazy remnants of the American psyche: Pryor understood the basic shame of America, the Puritan instinct balanced by a deeply human longing for carnal sensation. He understood that the competition between the id and the superego was where the real action was, that the differences between black and white weren’t nearly as important as the commonalities between us all.

That doesn’t mean that Pryor didn’t explore racial and cultural assumptions. He worked that rich vein as hard as anyone - he said things that could get a man shot - but at the bottom there was always the realization that Pryor was speaking for himself, not for a bloc, and that his observations were more universal for being so personal.

Raised in his grandmother’s brothel in Peoria, Ill., he was the quintessential “brilliant but troubled” performer. Pryor’s demons manifested themselves in drug and alcohol abuse, multiple marriages and a deep paranoia.

It is convenient to say Pryor was never quite the same after June 6, 1980, when - after freebasing cocaine - he doused himself with rum and set himself afire. Still, he staged what at the time seemed like a spectacular comeback, transforming his near-death experience into a resurrection act. In his first concert appearance after his suicide attempt, he held a burning match and jiggled it lightly in the air. That was “Richard Pryor runningdown the street” he told us. We should have expected it - Pryor was always a comic alchemist, spinning his troubles into onstage gold.

But if you listen critically to Pryor’s post-fire work, it’s not the same. There are still wonderful, perceptive riffs on traveling to Africa and accounts of the men he met while visiting a prison, he still had an edge and could be unflinching in the face of the worst stuff that human beings could do to each other and themselves; but he couldn’t reproduce the fresh anger of his early work. Maybe he was too happy. Maybe it is pretty to think that.

That impossible memory I have of Pryor on the Tonight Show? Maybe it’s buried on one of those massive 36-disc DVD collections. If it is, someone let me know. Maybe I want to see it again.

On second thought, probably not. Because it is impossible to see it again for the first time, because I am 35 years older. And I know the punchline.

E-mail: [email protected]

Style, Pages 45 on 06/23/2013

Upcoming Events