1979 comedy
Rating: Ehh. I don't feel like rating this one.
Plot: Richard Pryor tells jokes and makes an audience laugh.
My knowledge of Richard Pryor is limited. I pretty much only know him as the black guy in those Gene Wilder movies. This is from 1979, a year I'm currently researching, and I was in the mood for a laugh and decided to give it a go. It's easy to see why Pryor is considered a comedy legend in this, apparently the first feature film consisting only of a stand-up comedy show. Pryor sets the bar pretty fucking high for anybody who follows. Sorry for the f-bomb, but it seems appropriate when writing about this kind of performer and this kind of act.
Those are gold shoes that Pryor is wearing, right? You wear gold shoes and bomb and you deserve the special place in hell you'll likely end up in. Pryor earns the right to those gold shoes. He unleashes a horde of voices or characters in this--police, white people, various black people, more white people, children, old people, dogs. He also brings this tremendous energy, the kind that will have a guy sweating through his shirt by the halfway mark. He bounces around from topic to topic--lots of race stuff, the police, his pet monkey having sex with his ear, his dogs, heart attacks, death and John Wayne, his father and other members of his family, cocaine, snakes, the great outdoors, boxing Ali--and it all seems random or stream-of-conscious until you step back and realize how well it all blends together. It never ever feels like a routine, a bunch of jokes he wrote and rehearsed and delivered the same way at different spots around the country while on tour. I mean, that's probably exactly what happened because that's what professional comedians do, but he's got a presence on stage that makes it seem like this stuff is just pouring out of him.
2 comments:
I have a couple Pryor stand up specials on DVD. I used to just put them on and leave them running while I did other things around the various houses and apartments I've lived at. I like Pryor's ability to make his stand-up a conversation. It doesn't feel like a routine. It feels like a guy just talking. I know he has some "bits" in there, but really you just take it holistically, and it's gold. He was a master.
I was well into adulthood (like 30s) when I first heard stand-up greats like Pryor, Carlin, Hicks, Bruce, etc. I knew Woody Allen's stuff because I had read his books in high school and liked them. And I knew current guys like Steven Wright. Didn't dive into the old stuff until much later.
I think you're right about how he made his stand-up more like a conversation. There's a rapport he has with the audience in this even though it's a HUGE audience. I can't even build rapport with a single student when I'm talking to him/her one-on-one. Maybe I need to say "motherfucker" a lot more.
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