Losing Richard Pryor

Only twice can I remember an entertainer agitating audience members to the point that they stormed out of a performance or sat stone silent. Richard Pryor was that entertainer. The first time he did it was at a concert I attended on New Year's Eve at a small club in Hollywood. Pryor cut loose with a bitter, expletive-laced diatribe on black and white relations. He aimed his sharpest barbs at the whites. He needled, hectored, and browbeat them for their racial sins.

Midway through his rant, the predictable happened. A trickle of whites made a beeline for the door. Pryor, nonplussed by the sound of their marching feet, didn't relent from his verbal tongue lash. The trickle quickly turned into a stampede. Even then, Pryor didn't miss a beat: he continued to hurl barbs at their backs.

But Pryor was a take-no-prisoners, equal-opportunity baiter. Shortly after he returned from his racial epiphany trip to Africa in 1980, I and other blacks in the theater audience at another Pryor concert sat in stunned silence when he stopped the funny stuff, looked dead at the audience, and flagellated himself from the stage, targeting himself and other blacks that routinely spit out the N-word with every sentence.

Pryor could talk. He had practically elevated the word to a high art form. He called the word demeaning, offensive and insulting, and solemnly pledged that he would expunge it forever from his rap. The audience squirmed in puzzled silence. They didn't know whether to cheer or hiss.

This was not the Pryor that many of us had come to know and love, the madcap king of irreverent shock humor. The fall-out from his announcement was swift. Pryor said that his fellow comedians, friends and even some fans lambasted him for going soft and for selling out. Still others accused him of being a black militant. He claims that he got death threats, and garbage thrown on his lawn. He took the heat from fans and friends not because he used the N-word, but because he had renounced it.

A reflective Pryor was dumbstruck that a drug addicted, paranoid, frightened, lonely, sad and frustrated comedian (that's his self-description) could draw public bile for his simple but very personal step toward asserting racial pride. Pryor's tormenting swipes at whites, and blacks, and his willingness to take criticism for it, was vintage Pryor. He was the artist that didn't just live on the edge, but sharpened the racial edge in his art.

Pryor was hardly the first black funnyman or woman to chide, cajole, and poke fun at America's racial sensibilities from the stage. Redd Foxx, Dick Gregory, Moms Mabley, Nipsey Russell, Godfrey Cambridge, and Slappy White, tossed out occasional one-liners on race issues, but they were always careful that they kept their audience, especially whites, laughing with them and at them, and not steamed at them.

Pryor also was not the first comedian to sprinkle ribald, dark humor social commentary through his punch lines. Lenny Bruce beat him to that, and in some ways, did it better. However, Pryor's neurotic, hyper, frenetic, rapid-fire rap on race and social issues perpetually made audiences laugh and think. He did it without stepping over the line by sounding like a preachy crusader, at least most times. He was the consummate artist: even at his wildest, drug-induced, insulting and irreverent worst he never forgot his calling. If he had forgotten that, his message would have been a turn-off, and his audiences would have turned off to him.

But even when they fled to the door in disgust at his barbs, or looked at each other in puzzled silence, they still came back. That was tribute enough to his genius. A Pryor concert drained you, but it was a good draining, the kind that made you want to come back for more.