Richard Pryor: An Appreciation
On December 10, 2005, nine days after his 65th birthday, Pryor died of a heart attack in Los Angeles. I was deeply affected by Pryor’ life, work, and death, and I promptly wrote this piece about him, which I shared with a handful of friends, including standup comic, actor, director, writer, Paul Provenza. Paul asked me if he could send the piece over to Shecky magazine for possible publication, and indeed they posted my piece the next day. For sake of having it on the record and readily available, I am posting the piece here on my own site, and hope that my readers find it of interest.
Richard Pryor – An Appreciation
From Jamy Ian Swiss, magician and comedy fan, comes this essay on the impact of Richard Pryor:
Richard Pryor is gone.
Some fool might say he’s been gone for years, due to his failing health and the progression of the multiple sclerosis he was diagnosed with in 1986. But most—and this fan, for one—would say he has always been present, and indeed will always be present, thanks to his pervasive and profound influence as an artist.
I believe Richard Pryor was the greatest comedian of my lifetime. I say this on due consideration—decades of consideration—and without hyperbole. I am a passionate fan of George Carlin—I saw him on the original Seven Dirty Words tour when I was 19 years old, I saw him at the live HBO broadcast a few weeks ago, and I’ve seen him on other occasions in between—I think he is now far and way our greatest living comic—but I can’t help but suspect that even Carlin himself would be quick to rate Pryor ahead of himself on the scale of impact, influence, and profound originality.
I say this not to take anything away from Carlin, but I cannot seem to discuss Pryor without thinking of Carlin as well. These were the great comic models I grew up with—along with a man who helped make them all famous, Johnny Carson, a king of a different breed, but comic royalty just the same. I learned about comedy by watching Carson’s show, learned from him about a generation of comics that had influenced him, learned from him by dissecting his monologues the morning after with fellow comedy students. And I learned from him by his open-hearted embrace of new comics—as when I saw Albert Brooks pour a glass of water down the mouth of a vent dummy and eventually kick the crap out of it—including the likes of George Carlin and Richard Pryor.
And again not in any way to diminish Carlin, but Carlin was and is in direct line of succession from Lenny Bruce. He doesn’t exist without Bruce. This observation does nothing to tarnish Carlin, a brilliant social satirist, a masterful wordsmith, and celebrator of silliness, all rolled into a skillful comic package that includes funny voices and funny faces—Carlin’s is a complete instrument. But to me, Pryor seemed untouched by influence. This is not of course literally true—in fact, he started out very much influenced by Bill Cosby, and you can see this throughout Pryor’s work, even after he twisted up and transformed that influence into something completely his own. Nevertheless, it’s clear that, like Cosby, Pryor was never a joke-teller, but rather a storyteller, a creator of character and narrative.
Interestingly, Carlin and Pryor followed similar career paths. They both hit the big-time first as straight, clean-cut comics. They even both performed on no less than The Ed Sullivan Show in these mild-mannered guises. Eventually they were both transformed by the counterculture of the 60s; Carlin grew his hair and became political; Pryor began speaking with the voice of the black ghetto whence he came.
Both men explored the poetry and drama of obscene language, and brought that aspect of their work to the level of high art. Those who complain about the use of such language for mere “shock” value miss the entire point of the beauty and force of these words in the mouths of maestros like Carlin and Pryor, whose work would truly not exist without those words. Surely comedy is filled with performers with more foul words than ideas in their work; filled with performers who have nothing to say except to perform as an expression of their desperate desire to land a sitcom and walk off into the sunset of syndication salvation. But on Carlin and Pryor, the language is, and remains, as an exquisite, excruciating kind of music.
When I saw Carlin perform in Las Vegas around 1997, I hadn’t seen him in quite some years, and I was thrilled to discover that he was as angry as ever. It’s easy to lose that edge with age—on stage or off—but Carlin was still furious, pounding his rage, and in turn enraging audience members before my eyes, like the young married couple who shared my booth at Bally’s, the man enjoying the show throughout, the woman sharing his pleasure for a time, but ending up infuriated.
And this facet of Carlin also serves for me as a subtle contrast to Pryor. For Carlin has always been fueled by his outrage, whereas Pryor always seemed, to me, to be driven not by fury, but by pain, and especially, vulnerability. Pryor, even in the throws of a foul-mouthed rant, always seemed to me a gentle soul—wounded by what he observed, rather than enraged.
And this is the one thing that Carlin does not reveal to us. The work of both of these men is filled with honesty and conviction, but Carlin conceals his wounds, covering them with anger, while Pryor show us his all. Not in the movies, generally—the films he made showed his silly side, and a part of him reveled in that, in the fact that the Pryor on film could fill a crowded movie theater with raucous laughs, as Pryor’s comic movie heroes, like Jerry Lewis, had once done for him. But while I admired those skills of his, and his wacky collaborations with Gene Wilder, it was never the films that mattered to me. If anything, I preferred his small body of more serious work, like his Oscar-nominated performance in “Lady Sings the Blues,” and even his more comic turn in the 60s oddity, “Wild in the Streets.”
But it was the pain and gentleness of his standup concerts that seized me, and have forever stayed with me. I do not think there has ever been a better piece of performance art than Pryor’s “Live on Sunset Strip.” His visit to Africa yields playful animal portrayals, along with his deeply moving commentary on the “N-word” and his own vow to cease using it, even among his fellow African-Americans. His complaint that a healthy fistfight could be suddenly ruined by a racial epithet. And, as best as I can recall his words now, his realization that “that word is an expression of our misery.”
And then, of course, the piece about his crack addiction, and the fire. The three-character conversation between himself, his stalwart friend Jim Brown, attempting to rescue him from his addiction, and that third voice, the beckoning voice of the pipe itself. There has before been art this wrenching, this revelatory, this horrifying, this personal—but has there ever been, before or since, art that was all that, and still hilariously, tear-dripping funny?
Not that I’m aware of. Not on my watch, not in my time. And who knows—maybe never again. I felt somehow personally devastated by the recent death of Johnny Carson, a hero in so many ways, a magician made good, a skeptic and artist and a model of class to the very end. Although I never met either man, by comparison I feel a more personal connection to Carson, perhaps partly because I know many who in turn had met and known him, perhaps partly because his voice and visage were in my home nightly for so many years. By contrast I admired Pryor from afar—not admired, but rather, stood in awe from afar, and loved him from afar. I am filled with that awe and love now, and I feel his absence now, and it seems that something terribly wonderful has been taken from me, from us. What is it about the human condition and its inescapable experience of struggle and loss, and the artists who capture and attenuate that experience, and mirror our pain back to ourselves? And in turn, we are somehow filled with gratitude.
Jamy Ian Swiss
December 10, 2005
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Originally published online by Shecky magazine, December 18, 2005: Richard Pryor: An Appreciation
