R.I.P. R.P.

by digby

If you would like to have a surreal experience akin to the effects of downing ten shots of cheap tequila, tune in to FoxNews as they eulogize Richard Pryor. Apparently he invented dirty words. (It’s going to come as a helluva surprise to Lenny Bruce — not to mention Redd Foxx.) He rejected the comedy of the good comedian, Bill Cosby, and went down the “wrong path” that led us to where we are today with all this R rated badness. One of the commentators said that when he went on TV in the mid 70’s he “wasn’t ready for prime time.” (Actually, prime time wasn’t ready for him.) Another said that “every black comic owes him something.”

(Is it possible that right wingers are all actually zombies who died sometime before the 60’s and have been walking among us as the undead ever since then? I just don’t know what else can explain their terminal cultural obtuseness.)

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 Ni**er’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.

He’s been sick a long time and so it’s no surprise that he died a a sadly early death. I’ve been missing him for quite a while. If you haven’t ever had a chance to see him in concert when he was in his prime, check it out on DVD. Maybe it won’t be funny or salient to people today, I don’t know. At the time, it was a revelation.

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