This weekend marked the anniversary of the passing of Richard Pryor, who in my opinion is still the greatest stand up comic the human race has ever produced. While followers have only hinted at or aped his technique, at his peak he reigned like a regis over lesser men of ha-ha.
Phil Nugent at the High Hat has a pretty straightforward examination of the rather tumultuous career of Pryor. Most importantly, he doesn’t simply coddle the whole corpus, but explains where he fell, and where he stood above the fray. Critically, he observes that unlike many, his railings on topics related to race and culture were not simply angry jabs, but fundamental probes into those sensitive areas that sometimes only are best explored on a mass level through humor than direct interrogation. It also makes a case for how Pryor didn’t simply “work blue” but had a whole musicality to his use of invective that was more natural cadence than an affected act. Case in point:
Pryor’s comic observations about relations between the races and sexes grew out of a desire to understand. He would pick up on little things — like the differences he perceived in the white and black women he dated, and the inability of white people to get angry properly — and turn them inside out as if convinced that they contained the answers to all the riddles of the universe. There’s a contradictory element in Pryor’s approach…at the center of [his] acts, [he] had a childlike need to question things that people try to prove their cool by laughing off.
The write up is a decent read about a part of pop-culture that actually is worth a lasting legacy. Pop culture can anesthetize us or it can provide us a vehicle into self-examination or function as a form of societal humility hidden as entertainment. Rest in Peace Richard.