White Girls (25 page)

Richard Pryor was the first black American spoken-word artist to avoid this. Although he reprised the history of black American comedy—picking what he wanted from the work of great storytellers like Bert Williams, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Nipsey Russell, LaWanda Page, and Flip Wilson—he also pushed everything one step further. Instead of adapting to the white perspective, he forced white audiences to follow him into his own experience. Pryor didn’t
manipulate his audiences’ white guilt or their black moral outrage. If he played the race card, it was only to show how funny he looked when he tried to shuffle the deck. And as he made blackness an acknowledged part of the American atmosphere he also brought the issue of interracial love into the country’s discourse. In a culture whose successful male Negro authors wrote about interracial sex with a combination of reverence and disgust, Pryor’s gleeful “fuck it” attitude had an effect on the general population that Wright’s
Native Son
or Baldwin’s
Another Country
had not had. His best work showed us that black men like him and the white women they loved were united in their disenfranchisement; in his life and onstage, he performed the great, largely unspoken story of America.

“I love Lily,” Pryor said in a
Rolling Stone
interview with David Felton, in 1974, after “Juke and Opal” had aired and he and Tomlin had moved on to other things. “I have a thing about her, a little crush...I get in awe of her. I’d seen her on
Laugh-In
and shit, and something about her is very sensual, isn’t it?”

Sensuality implies a certain physical abandonment, and an acknowledgment of the emotional mess that we try to keep from our public self. The work of the brilliant performer is to make a habit of disjunction. (One of Tomlin’s early audition techniques was to tap-dance with taps taped to the soles of her bare feet.) It is difficult to find that human untidiness—what Pryor called “the madness” of everyday life—in the formulaic work now being done by the performers who ostensibly work in the same vein as Pryor and Tomlin. Compare the rawness of the four episodes of a television show that Pryor cowrote and starred in for NBC in 1977 with Tracey Ullman’s last HBO show
(in which she needed blackface to play a black woman): the first Pryor special opens with a close-up of his face as he announces that he has not had to compromise himself to appear on a network-sponsored show. The camera then pulls back to reveal Pryor seemingly nude but with his genitalia missing.

Pryor’s art defies the very definition of the word
order
. He based his style on digressions and riffs—the monologue as jam session. He reinvented stand-up, which until he developed his signature style, in 1971, had consisted largely of borscht-belt-style male comedians telling tales in the Jewish vernacular, regardless of their own religion or background. Pryor managed to make blacks interesting to audiences that were used to responding to a liberal Jewish sensibility—and, unlike some of his colored colleagues, he did so without “becoming” Jewish himself. (Dick Gregory, for example, was a political comedian in the tradition of Mort Sahl; Bill Cosby was a droll Jack Benny.) At the height of his career, Pryor never spoke purely in the complaint mode. He was often baffled by life’s complexities, but he rarely told my-wife-made-me-sleep-on-the-sofa jokes or did “bits” whose sole purpose was to “kill” an audience with a boffo punch line. Instead, he talked about characters—black street people, mostly. Because the life rhythm of a black junkie, say, implies a certain drift, Pryor’s stories did not have badda-bing conclusions. Instead, they were encapsulated in a physical attitude: each character was represented in Pryor’s walk, in his gestures—which always contained a kind of vicarious wonder at the lives he was enacting. Take, for instance, his sketch of a wino in Peoria, Illinois—Pryor’s hometown and the land of his imagination—as he encounters Dracula. In the voice of a Southern black man, down on his luck:

Hey man, say, nigger—you with the cape...What’s your name, boy? Dracula? What kind of name is that for a nigger? Where you from, fool? Transylvania? I know where it is, nigger! You ain’t the smartest motherfucker in the world, you know, even though you is the ugliest. Oh yeah, you a ugly motherfucker. Why you don’t get your teeth fixed, nigger? That shit hanging all out your mouth. Why you don’t get you an orthodontist?...This is 1975, boy. Get your shit together. What’s wrong with your natural? Got that dirt all in the back of your neck. You’s a filthy little motherfucker, too. You got to be home ’fore the sun come up? You ain’t lyin’, motherfucker. See your ass during the day, you liable to get arrested. You want to suck what? Suck some blood? Nigger, you, you some kind of freak, boy?...You ain’t suckin’ nothing here, junior.

Pryor’s two best comedy albums, both of which were recorded during the mid- to late seventies—
Bicentennial Nigger
and
That Nigger’s Crazy
—are not available on CD, but his two concert films,
Richard Pryor Live in Concert
and
Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip
, which were released in 1979 and 1982, respectively, are out on video. The concert films are excellent examples of what the
Village Voice
critic Carrie Rickey once described as Pryor’s ability to “scare us into laughing at his demons—our demons—exorcising them through mass hyperventilation.” “Pryor doesn’t tell jokes,” she wrote, “he tells all, in the correct belief that without punch lines, humor has more punch. And pungency.” Taken together, the concert films show the full panorama of Pryor’s moods: brilliant, boring, insecure, demanding, misogynist, racist, playful, and utterly empathetic.

Before Richard Pryor, there were only three aspects of black maleness to be found on TV or in the movies: the suave, pimp-style blandness of Billy Dee Williams; the big-dicked, quiet machismo of the football hero Jim Brown; and the cable-knit homilies of Bill Cosby. Pryor was the first image we’d ever had of black male fear. Not the kind of Stepin Fetchit noggin-bumpin’-into-walls fear that turned Buckwheat white when he saw a ghost in the
Our Gang
comedies popular in the twenties, thirties, and forties—a character that Eddie Murphy resuscitated in a presumably ironic way in the eighties on
Saturday Night Live
. Pryor was filled with dread and panic—an existential fear, based on real things, like racism and lost love. (In a skit on
In Living Color
, the actor Damon Wayans played Pryor sitting in his kitchen and looking terrified, while a voiceover said, “Richard Pryor is scared for no reason.”)

“Hi. I’m Richard Pryor.” Pause. “Hope I’m funny.” That was how he introduced himself to audiences for years, but he never sounded entirely convinced that he cared about being funny. Instead, Pryor embodied the voice of injured humanity. A satirist of his own experience, he revealed what could be considered family secrets—secrets about his past, and about blacks in general, and about his relationship to the black and white worlds he did and did not belong to. In the black community, correctness, political or otherwise, remains part of the mortar that holds lives together. Pryor’s comedy was a high-wire act: how to stay funny to a black audience while satirizing the moral strictures that make black American life like no other.

The standard approach, in magazine articles about Pryor, has been to comment on his anger—in an imitation-colloquial language meant
to approximate Pryor’s voice. “Richard Pryor said it first: That Nigger’s Crazy,” begins a 1978 article in
People
magazine. And Pryor had fun with the uneasiness that the word
nigger
provoked in others. (Unlike Lenny Bruce, he didn’t believe that if you said a word over and over again it would lose its meaning.) Take his great “Supernigger” routine: “Look up in the sky, it’s a crow, it’s a bat. No, it’s Supernigger! Yes, friends, Supernigger, with X-ray vision that enables him to see through everything except Whitey.”

In 1980, in the second of three interviews that Barbara Walters conducted with Richard Pryor, this exchange took place:

       
Walters: When you’re onstage ... see, it’s hard for me to say. I was going to say, you talk about niggers. I can’t...you can say it. I can’t say it.

       
Pryor: You just said it.

       
Walters: Yeah, but I feel so ...

       
Pryor: You said it very good.

       
Walters: ... uncomfortable.

       
Pryor: Well, good. You said it pretty good.

       
Walters: Okay.

       
Pryor: That’s not the first time you said it. (
Laughter
.)

Pryor’s anger, though, is actually not as interesting as his self-loathing. Given how much he did to make black pride part of American popular culture, it is arresting to see how at times his blackness seemed to feel like an ill-fitting suit. One gets the sense that he called himself a
“nigger” as a kind of preëmptive strike, because he never knew when the term would be thrown at him by whites, by other blacks, or by the women he loved. Because he didn’t match any of the prevailing stereotypes of “cool” black maleness, he carved out an identity for himself that was not only “nigger” but “sub-nigger.” In
Live on the Sunset Strip
he wears a maraschino-red suit with silk lapels, a black shirt, and a bow tie. He says, “Billy Dee Williams could hang out in this suit and look cool.” He struts. “And me?” His posture changes from cocky to pitiful.

Pryor believed that there was something called unconditional love, which he alone had not experienced. But to whom could he, a “sub-nigger,” turn for that kind of love? The working-class blacks who made him feel guilty for leaving them behind? His relatives, who acted as if it was their right to hit him up for cash because he’d used their stories to make it? The white people who felt safe with him because he was neurotic—a quality they equated with intelligence? The women who married him for money or status? The children he rarely saw? He was alienated from nearly everyone and everything except his need. This drama was what made Pryor’s edge so sharp. He acted out against his fantasy about love by testing it with rude, brilliant commentary. A perfect role for Pryor might have been Dostoyevsky’s antihero, Alexei, in
The Gambler
, whose bemused nihilism affects every relationship he attempts. (Pryor once told Walters that he saw people “as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn’t come to be yet.”) That antiheroic anger prevents him from just telling a joke. He tells it through clenched teeth. He tells it to stave off bad times. He tells it to look for love.

HIS LIFE, AS A BIT

Black guy named Richard Pryor, famous, maybe a little high, appears on the eleventh Barbara Walters special, broadcast on May 29, 1979, and says this about his childhood, a sad house of cards he has glued together with wit:

       
Pryor: It was hell, because I had nobody to talk to. I was a child, right, and I grew up seeing my mother...and my aunties going to rooms with men, you understand...

       
Walters: Your grandmother ran a house of prostitution or a whorehouse.

       
Pryor: Three houses. Three.

       
Walters: Three houses of prostitution. She was the chief madam.

       
Pryor: ...There were no others.

       
Walters: Okay...Who believed in you? Who cared about you?

       
Pryor: Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor the Third.

The isolation that Richard Pryor feels is elaborated on from time to time, like a bit he can’t stop reworking. The sad bit, he could call it, if he did bits anymore, his skinny frame twisting around the words to a story that goes something like this: born in Peoria, on December 1, 1940. “They called Peoria the model city. That meant they had the niggers under control.” Grew up in one of the whorehouses on North Washington Street, which was the house of his paternal grandmother, Marie Carter Pryor Bryant. “She reminded me of a large sunflower—big, strong, bright, appealing,” Pryor wrote in his 1995 memoir,
Pryor
Convictions, and Other Life Sentences
. “But Mama, as I also called her, was also a mean, tough, controlling bitch.”

Pryor called his father’s mother Mama, despite the fact that he had a mother, Gertrude. When Richard’s father, Buck Carter, met Gertrude, she was already involved in Peoria’s nefarious underworld, and she soon began working in Marie’s whorehouse. Everything in Richard Pryor’s world, as he grew up, centered on Marie, and he never quite recovered from that influence. “I come from criminal people,” he told one radio interviewer. At the age of six, he was sexually abused by a young man in the neighborhood (who, after Richard Pryor became Richard Pryor, came to his trailer on a film set and asked for his autograph). And Pryor never got over the division he saw in his mother: the way she could separate her emotional self from her battered body and yet was emotionally damaged anyway.

“At least, Gertrude didn’t flush me down the toilet, as some did,” Pryor wrote in his memoir. “The only person scarier than God was my mother...One time Buck hit Gertrude, and she turned blue with anger and said ‘Okay, motherfucker, don’t hit me no more...Don’t stand in front of me with fucking undershorts on and hit me, motherfucker.’ Quick as lightning, she reached out with her finger claws and swiped at my father’s dick. Ripped his nutsack off. I was just a kid when I saw this.” Pryor records the drama as a born storyteller would—in the details. And the detail that filters through his memory most clearly is the rhythm of Gertrude’s speech, its combination of profanity and rhetoric. Not unlike a routine by Richard Pryor.