Keywords

Introduction

In the grand scheme of intellectual inquiry, stand-up comedy does not often come to mind as a medium by which important theories or serious commentary are conveyed. The term “stand-up” is enough to conjure images of a nightclub performer hunched over a smoky bar microphone – a scene where tasteless, crude jokes fly as fast as the cheap whiskey. After all, some of the most popular standup comedians of the modern era crafted their personas around highly sexualized one-liners. The works of Andrew Dice Clay and Rodney Dangerfield illustrate that, even as adults, the average American has the capacity to appreciate the most immature, base, and crude aspects of human nature.

On the other hand, stand-up, in its most potent form, can be insightful and provocative and also explore complex ideas. Richard Pryor often used his comedic talents to openly address social issues. He did not shy away from topics that challenged his audiences and forced them to think about uncomfortable subjects. In some of his most iconic stand-up performances, he used the comedic stage to illustrate the racial divide between black and white Americans. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Pryor produced a series of three concert films: Live in Concert (Margolis 1979) Live on the Sunset Strip (Layton 1982), and Here and Now (Pryor 1983). These films not only moved stand-up comedy forward as an art form; they showcased Pryor’s ability to create funny characters and tell stories that brought attention to systematic oppression, drug addiction, and racism. In these concert films, Pryor directly addressed police brutality, racial profiling, and white privilege. As one of the most successful crossover stars of the 1970s, Pryor used his talent and celebrity status to expose white audiences to aspects of the black experience. Pryor’s comedy, through virtue of his immense popularity among white audiences, served as a conduit by which these white audiences became aware of issues facing the African American community.

But does Pryor’s ability to translate elements of the black experience to white audiences have a name? What is it called when a member from an oppressed group finds a way to influence the thoughts and actions of the dominant group? The answers to these questions are found when Pryor’s comedy is analyzed in reference to philosophical concepts. For instance, philosopher Antonio Gramsci predicted scenarios in which individuals called “Organic Intellectuals” would cultivate specialized knowledge that, in turn, could be used to challenge the views of a ruling class. Pryor, through his career, did just that. Pryor cultivated his knowledge of the black experience and used art to translate it to a dominant class. Examining the works of Pryor through the lens of Gramsci yields a deeper understanding of the connection between Pryor and philosophy. Further, it reveals Pryor himself to be an organic intellectual, and thus, a philosopher.

Getting to Know Gramsci

Before delving into the comedy routines from Pryor’s three concert films, it is first important to discuss the philosophical construct taking center stage. In other words, what is an organic intellectual? To understand this concept, one must understand its author, Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Born in Sardinia Italy in 1891, Gramsci discovered his talent for writing and politics as a student at the University of Turin. After abandoning his studies, he became heavily involved in Italian politics. By today’s standards, Gramsci could be described as a political activist. He staged walk-outs, started newspapers, and founded political parties. Eventually, he would lead the Italian Communist Party from 1924 to 1926. He was a champion of workers’ rights and strong labor unions. When Benito Mussolini took power in Italy, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned. During his trial, Gramsci’s prosecutor (acting on behalf of the fascists) famously said, “For twenty years, we must stop this brain from functioning” (Crehan 2002, p. 17). Gramsci would go on to die in jail in 1937 at the age of 46.

During his years of confinement, Gramsci wrote The Prison Notebooks, which is a series of essays and political thoughts. They were first published in the late 1940s, long after Gramsci’s death, and have since become some of the most influential writings in the field of cultural studies, politics, and philosophy. Building on the foundation left by Marx, Gramsci continued to discuss social class, working conditions, and elements of the “superstructure.” Like Marx, Gramsci saw society as dominated by a capitalist hegemony, in which one group holds the influence, power, and control. In the United States, for example, white people’s experiences and culture dominate and are supported by the ruling class. However, Gramsci is known for his break with the traditional Marxist philosophy as it applies to agency. Where Marx saw an unyielding class system, Gramsci saw pockets of agency and argued that hegemony can change over time. Gramsci believed individual “intellectuals” could make the difference. Consider this passage from the Prison Notebooks:

What are the “maximum” limits of acceptance of the term “intellectual”? Can one find a unitary criterion to characterise equally all the diverse and disparate activities of intellectuals and to distinguish these at the same time and in an essential way from the activities of other social groupings? The most widespread error of method seems to me that of having looked for this criterion of distinction in the intrinsic nature of intellectual activities, rather than in the ensemble of the system of relations in which these activities (and therefore the intellectual groups who personify them) have their place within the general complex of social relations. Indeed, the worker or proletarian, for example, is not specifically characterised by his manual or instrumental work, but by performing this work in specific conditions and in specific social relations […]: is a metaphor to indicate a limit in a certain direction: in any physical work, even the most degraded and mechanical, there exists a minimum of technical qualification, that is, a minimum of creative intellectual activity. (1971, p. 8)

In this passage, Gramsci puts forth the idea that there is a certain amount of creativity associated with even the most degrading of jobs. And labor does not have to be confined to acts that simply perpetuate a structure that is only to the benefit of the wealthy. Gramsci goes on to say:

Each man, finally, outside his professional activities, carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a “philosopher”, an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it…. (1971, p. 9)

Gramsci expands on Marxism by allowing the possibility for an “intellectual” to exist outside the confines of his or her job. In Gramsci’s view, people can have meaningful ideas, artistic inclinations, and morality despite the fact that a capitalist ideology seeks to separate the worker from his or her humanity. Moreover, an individual can “modify” a conception of the world by virtue of his own experience.

What Is Gramsci’s Organic Intellectual?

The “intellectual” plays such a large part in Gramsci’s ideas on power and position that he places them in categories and describes, in detail, how each of them functions in society. He called the first category “traditional intellectuals.” Doctors, lawyers, and clergy fall into this category. Traditional intellectuals acquire their knowledge through formal avenues like schools, the church, and universities. Furthermore, they feel connected to the dominant (capitalist) system that educated them. The second category is “organic intellectuals.” This latter group acquires knowledge through informal means and uses it to represent segments of society that have been overlooked or marginalized by a capitalist hegemony. In other words, Gramsci’s organic intellectual gains knowledge through lived experience.

Pryor’s concert films demonstrate how he used his artistic acumen to relay aspects of his own life and, in doing so, positioned the comedy stage itself as a mechanism by which he challenged hegemonic structures and advocated for new ways of thinking, which is a major function of Gramsci’s organic intellectual:

Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system etc. (1971, p. 5)

Gramsci argued that an organic intellectual had a significant role to play in political revolutions and the reorganization of oppressive systems.

It is important to note that Gramsci did not write about race or racism in a way that would make his work relevant to the world in which Richard Pryor lived. In actuality, it is difficult to divorce Gramsci’s ideas from 1920s Italy and the European political landscape that led to WWII. In short, Gramsci wrote about a specific sliver of history. He was inspired by the October Revolution in 1917. In 1920, he witnessed unrest as “strikes and factory occupations broke out across Italy. In Turin alone 185 metal-working factories were occupied, including the main vehicle producing plants” (Schecter 1994, p. 94). He also saw the rise of Mussolini. Gramsci’s writings are tethered to specific historical times and events.

However, Gramsci’s work also touches on larger ideas. For example, as the Prison Notebooks progresses, Gramsci speculates on the mechanisms by which revolutions can occur. He is concerned with strategy, political alliances, and how a ruling class can be subverted. In other words, Gramsci wants to know how those metal factory workers in Turin can take more control of their own lives and move to a position of power, however difficult or unlikely doing so may be. He writes extensively about the processes in which intellectuals use knowledge to challenge hegemony. If it is accepted that Pryor used the stage to confront an oppressive structure (racism or otherwise), then the application of Gramsci’s theories is appropriate if not ideal.

The Great Crossover Star

For many black entertainers in the twentieth century, fame and fortune meant crossover success. Richard Pryor was no different. By the mid-1970s, he had established himself as a major box office headliner. In 1976, he starred alongside Gene Wilder in Silver Streak (Hiller 1976), a financially and critically successful action comedy that propelled Pryor into the spotlight. After the success of Silver Streak, Pryor went on to play lead roles in a string of hits like Stir Crazy (Poitier 1980), Bustin’ Loose (Scott 1981), Some Kind of Hero (Pressman 1982), Superan III (Lester 1983), and See No Evil, Hear No Evil (Dark 1989). His film career pushed the sale of his comedy records, which sold millions and won him several Grammy Awards. Pryor also starred in two television series, The Richard Pryor Show in 1977 and Pryor’s Place in 1984. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Pryor was a cultural fixture in mainstream American entertainment. And mainstream meant he had the adoration and attention of white audiences.

It was during this time, at the height of Pryor’s mainstream popularity, that he recorded three concert films. The first one was called Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, which was shot at Terrace Theater in Long Beach California in 1978. The second was Live on the Sunset Strip, which was recorded over two nights at the Hollywood Palladium in 1981. The third concert film was Here and Now filmed at the Saenger Theater in New Orleans in 1983. These three films are significant for several reasons. One is the way Pryor chooses to relay aspects of the black experience to an audience comprised of multiple races. Pryor takes great care and effort to explain, as Gramsci might say, a “specialized knowledge” of the world. But what is this “specialized knowledge” and why did Pryor choose the comedy stage as his platform?

Pryor does possess a specific kind of knowledge; an American experience filtered through a life of pain, brutal encounters with racism, and drug addiction – examples of which can be found in Pryor’s 1995 autobiography Pryor Convictions. Racial slurs and sexually explicit descriptions of Pryor’s sexual encounters are found throughout the book. However, the explicit nature of the language is positioned as an extension of Pryor’s rough childhood. For instance, Pryor goes into great detail regarding the unjust treatment of African Americans that he witnessed as a young man. He describes the rampant discrimination and the racially charged violence he saw in his hometown of Peoria, Illinois:

Even the best days in Peoria were tainted by gloom, a murky darkness that hung over people the same way smog lays flat over a city as pretty as L.A. It just fucks up the picture. I saw shit that would cause an adult nightmares. Heard tales about hangings and murders that happened just because a man happened to be black. (2005, p. 17)

In an effort to detail his world and circumstances, Pryor chose to use harsh language, just as he experienced it.

Pryor was born in Peoria in 1940, a time when the city was known for vice and rampant corruption. Pryor’s mother was a prostitute. His father was a bouncer in the brothel where his mother worked. They married but eventually divorced after only a few years. After the separation, Pryor’s paternal grandmother, Marie Carter, took responsibility for raising him. By all accounts, Pryor loved his grandmother, who he called “Mama.” Pryor’s father, LeRoy “Buck” Carter, continued to play a role in his life. However, Marie Carter was Pryor’s primary caregiver, disciplinarian, and the only real parent he would ever have. It should also be noted that Carter was the owner of the brothel in which Pryor’s parents met. He grew up in this brothel watching all kinds of depravity, later recalling memories of such things from his childhood in various interviews and books. He explained how he remembered seeing his mother perform sex acts on a stranger through a keyhole in his grandmother’s brothel. According to a 1977 interview with the New York Times, Pryor says that “I saw my mother turn tricks for some drunk white man when I was a kid. I saw my father take the money, and I saw what it did to them” (Saul 2014). Pryor also witnessed drug abuse, domestic violence, and street violence.

In Pryor’s case, as in the case of all black people in America, the mere act of existing in racist society provides intimate knowledge of a dangerous political imbalance. If this rare knowledge could be weaponized in some way, it would be the key to siphoning power and influence from the dominant class. Pryor is the personification of Gramsci’s “organic intellectual” because Pryor was able to authentically and profoundly understand the issues of inequality, racism, and prejudice that were plaguing his community. In turn, Pryor was able to convey his understanding through his mastery of the stand-up form and, in doing so, politicize his knowledge and advocate for (what Gramsci would call) a subaltern class.

Example 1: Cops Don’t Kill Cars

To begin, let us examine a segment from Richard Pryor: Live in Concert that places a spotlight on racial inequality in America. Live in Concert is the first of Pryor’s three aforementioned concert films. It was recorded in December of 1978 in California and went on to be the “first successful film of its kind” (Kantor and Maslon 2008.) The film begins with images of Pryor arriving at the theater, exiting his car, and walking through a series of backstage passages. As Pryor gets closer to the stage, the sounds of the buzzing crowd get louder and louder. Finally, Pryor takes the stage and the crowd erupts into applause.

Pryor grabs the microphone and thanks everyone for coming out to see him. At this point in the show, many attendees are scrambling to get back in their seats. Patti LaBelle, Pryor’s opening act, had just finished her set and many attendees took a brief intermission. Pryor makes a joke about the situation. He says, “Wait for the people to get from the bathroom. People in there pissin’. ‘Wait. The shit done started, Damn.” Then, Pryor calls attention to the mixed nature of the audience:

Jesus Christ. Look at this. White people rushing back. [laughter]. White people don’t care Jack. [They] just come out anyways. […]. You niggas taking a chance being in Long Beach though Jack. I saw the police had some brother jacked up when we was coming in here. Nigga’s hands way up here.

Pryor sticks his hands up. He acts out being frisked by the police. The crowd laughs as Pryor remarks that he “bets” the black man was taken away to jail. Then Pryor makes a couple jokes about how black audience members should be careful not to get arrested in Long Beach because it is, presumably, a white part of town. Pryor tops off these opening remarks by saying, “White people, this is [the] fun part for me, when the white people come back after intermission and find out niggas done stole their seats.” So, within the first 3 min of the show, Pryor has already addressed the fact that his audience is a mixture of black and white people.

His next few bits also surround the differences between black and white people at large events and concerts. He says, “White people be funny. And you ever notice like, you be the only nigga someplace, and you go where white people [are], and they be funky. Right?” Pryor then launches into his “white voice,” one his comedic signatures. The voice is an accent free, flat, semi-nasal sound that is remnant of a generic, male midwestern newscaster. In the white voice, Pryor says, “You want to move out of the way fella? Excuse me. Thank you, every much. Takin’ up all the fucking area, Jesus Christ.” As Pryor delivers these lines, he acts out a white man walking through a crowd of black people. Pryor’s “white walk” is similar to his “white voice.” It is rigid, flat-footed, and uptight. And although the crowd appears to be predominately white, as seen in cutaway shots from Pryor’s point of view, the bits lampooning white people are met with uproarious laughter. Thus, white people are laughing at Pryor even when he is making fun of white people.

Pryor capitalizes on his rapport with his white audience when he eases into a bit about police brutality. He starts by recounting a story in which cops showed up to his house to investigate a domestic disturbance. He says, “I don’t want to never see no more police in my life, at my house, takin’ my ass to jail, for killin’ my car.” Pryor explains that his wife wanted to leave him, so he used a magnum pistol to shoot the tires out of her car and the police eventually showed up. Although this bit, like most of Pryor’s bits, involves complicated and disturbing subjects, the audience laughs. Pryor’s presentation is full of lively expressions, deliberate cadence, and comedic sound effects that bring levity to the scene. For example, when he acts out drunkenly shooting his wife’s car, he makes a high-pitched sound that imitates the sound of air escaping the tires. He also anthropomorphizes the bottle of vodka he was drinking during the incident. He also makes fun of himself. He is not afraid to make himself look foolish or diminutive. The bit ends when Pryor, aware of his own blackness and lack of advantage, tells the audience that when the cops arrived, “I went in the house. Cause [the cops] got magnums too. And they don’t kill cars. They kill nig-gars.” In his delivery, he rhymes the word car with “gar,” which results in a huge laugh from the audience.

As unnerving as it is to think about police shootings, Pryor manages to guide his white audience through it. He uses humor, his comedic abilities, and his celebrity status to go even further. Pryor’s next comments confront police brutality with more direct language. He says:

Police got a choke hold they use out here though, man. They choke niggas to death. I mean you be dead when they though. Did you know that? Niggas goin, “yeah, we knew.” White folks, “No! I had no idea!”

In this example, Pryor calls attention to the fact that the black members of the audience knew what he was talking about without any further explanation. However, the white audiences had no idea that such injustice and violence was happening. Although the white audience is laughing, the bit manages to make them aware that there are aspects of the African American experience of which they have the privilege of ignorance.

He continues by describing the hold.

Two grab your legs, one grab your head, and [mimics the hold] snap. [In his white man voice.] ‘Oh, shit, he broke. Can you break a nigger? Is it ok? Let’s check the manual. Yep, page eight. “You can break a nigger.” Right there. See. Let’s drag him downtown. Ok.

Long before the deaths of Rodney King, George Floyd, Dante Wright, Tyre Nichols, and countless others, Pryor was warning his white audience that the police can beat, “break,” and even kill black men with impunity.

Then Pryor goes even further. As the bit continues, he tells the audience about more instances of police brutality. For example, he acts out a story in which he saw black men being chased by police dogs. Pryor mentions he has seen chases with both German Shepherds and Doberman Pinscher. He says:

I saw [the cops] letting [a Doberman] loose on a young brother, about sixteen, in an alley. The police jumped out the car and sicced the Doberman loose on him. And the brother was low running. I mean he was down in here.

Now, Pryor acts out the way the young man was running. He crouches down towards the stage and makes a flapping motion with his hands. This flapping motion, in an almost cartoonish way, indicates the wind passing by quickly as the young man ran to avoid being hurt by the vicious animal. Pryor adds to the scene by creating sound effects with his voice. He imitates the terrifying growling sound the dog made as it edged closer and closer to the man.

Finally, Pryor ends the bit by telling the audience that the young man got away. Pryor indicates that the man was simply too fast for the dog. Pryor, in a moment that gets one of the bit’s biggest laughs, tells the audience that the young man outran the dog, essentially by turning his hat around backwards as if it was a switch that made him run faster. “[H]e shifted into overdrive on the dog. Yeah. The brother had a cap on, he just went…” and Pryor uses his hand to indicate that the boy turned the hat around backwards. The entire bit is met with uproarious laughter from the audience, which seems odd given the grotesque subject matter. After all, Pryor is recounting a completely horrifying instance in which a young black man is chased by a large, aggressive, police dog.

Pryor’s ability to elicit laughter while discussing the most depressing topics is an obvious indication that he has reached a level of success usually reserved for rock stars. The fans in the audience cheer, snap pictures, and wave profusely and are ready to laugh at almost anything that comes out of Pryor’s mouth. Although it is argued that he ultimately uses his comedic prowess to, in philosophical terms used by Gramsci, function as an organic intellectual, his presentation is still in keeping with that of a superstar stand-up comedian. In other words, even though Pryor is about to discuss police brutality and the oppression of black men with a predominately white audience, he does not come across as a politician or as a man engaged in a lecture. Instead, Pryor’s points are disguised as comedy bits. He is an entertainer. The jokes invite audience members (especially those who are white) to let down their guard and listen to the point of view of a member outside their hegemonic class.

In terms of specialized knowledge and the connection to Gramsci’s organic intellectual, it should be noted that in 1940, the year of Pryor’s birth, “a full two-thirds of black Pretorians reported […] the persistence of police brutality” (Saul 2014, p. 24). When Pryor acts out scenes in which a young black man has to run from a police dog, he is sharing his own lived experience. As a result, white audience members are being exposed to ideas, concepts, and realities to which they would not otherwise be exposed.

Example 2: When You Hear “Yee Haw”

Pryor continues to share his specialized knowledge in Live on the Sunset Strip, his 1982 follow-up to Live in Concert. In Live on the Sunset Strip, Pryor takes the stage dressed in his iconic red tuxedo. Throughout the special he tackles personal topics. For example, Live on the Sunset Strip was taped after Pryor’s widely publicized brush with death. In 1980, police were called to Pryor’s home after reports that the comedian was on fire. At the time, the incident was attributed to Pryor’s drug abuse and his preference for freebasing cocaine (People Staff 1980). However, in the years that followed, Pryor explained that the fire was in fact a suicide attempt. In Live on the Sunset Strip, Pryor goes into the gory details of his hospital stay and recovery. As a performer, Pryor was always willing to bring his pain on stage.

This willingness extends to more offerings about the African American experience as well. As a matter of fact, early on in Live on the Sunset Strip, Pryor takes a moment to directly address racism. At the show’s 30-min mark, almost immediately after his opening bit, Pryor goes into a routine about his new home in Hawaii. He says:

There’s 500 people live where I live. And they are brown. And I like that because you can sleep at night. You know, cause you live around white people in the country and anything can happen. [Laughter]. Not that I don’t trust white people. It’s just that, in the night, you know what I mean? [Laughter]. I don’t know, something happens to white when you start drinking and when you hear one of them mother fuckers go “Yee Haw!” […] It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Live on the Sunset Strip, like all of Pryor’s concert films, is filmed in front of a mixed crowd. B-Roll shots of the audience reveal, what appears to be, an equal number of black and white people. Thus, Pryor is constantly having to walk a fine line. He must take care not to alienate the white half of the crowd. Case in point, he couches the setup to this particular bit by saying that “not that I don’t trust white people.” Pryor’s word choices indicate that he understands he is addressing a group of people that are part of the hegemonic class. And, in order to convey his point, he has to maintain his likability. He must keep them laughing even as he brings the bit into a darker territory. And darker territory is coming. Pryor eventually says, “Cause I know what’s next. After ‘Yee Haw,’ [white people] get a rope and a black mother fucker.”

Once again, Pryor’s subject matter is not something typically found in a comedy show. In this example, he is talking about lynching black people: something devasting, macabre, and completely devoid of humor. Nonetheless, Pryor finds a place for it. He finds a way to discuss it and place it in the minds of white audiences. As improbable as it sounds, it is important to remember that when Live on the Sunset Strip was taped, Pryor was a huge crossover star. He was absolutely adored by white and black audiences. He is in a unique position to bridge a gap between both communities. Instead of backing away from the opportunity to share the black experience, Pryor embraces it.

After this bit about lynching, Pryor makes a rare declaration. He comes out and tells the audience directly that “racism is a bitch.” He then tells white people what he wants them to know. Pryor says:

White people, you gotta know. It [racism] fucks you up. But what it does to black people is a bitch. … It’s hard enough being a human being. It’s really fucking hard enough just to be that –like, just to go through everyday life without murdering a motherfucker; it’s hard enough to walk through life, decent, as a person. [But there is] another element added to it when you are black …

In this example, Pryor is directly explaining his perspective to the audience. He is using his status as a celebrity and world class performer to share his lived experience with a white audience. As this bit continues, Pryor details the humiliation and pain associated with being called a “nigger.” He explains that the word “nigger” makes a person feel less than human. Pryor says that once he is called that word, he is not “a man anymore.” He is, in effect, something subhuman.

Example 3: Mudbone

Live on the Sunset Strip also features an appearance by Mudbone, one of Pryor’s most famous stage characters. In short, Mudbone is an old African American man who Pryor knew from his youth in Peoria, Illinois. Mudbone spits tobacco into a coffee can and tells stories to anyone who will listen. He appears on several of Pryor’s comedy records and television shows. His backstory was revealed in detail during a stand-up segment of The Richard Pryor Show in 1977. Before beginning his monologue as Mudbone, Pryor explains:

Mudbone is a person born in Mississippi. And I knowed him well, you know? And he dipped snuff, you know?. And he [would] sit around in front the pool hall or barbeque pit and he’d spit in a can. […]. He had an old Maxwell House Coffee can with the top cut off it, and he’d spit in it, see? (Pryor 1977)

Pryor goes on to tell the audience that although Mudbone was originally from Tupelo Mississippi, he traveled to Peoria to find work. However, when Pryor met Mudbone in Peoria, he was retired and spent his time “hanging” in front of local establishments telling stories to the locals.

When Pryor performs as Mudbone, he completely transforms his body and voice. He sits on a stool and makes a subtle but noticeable change to his posture by raising his shoulders. The move gives Pryor an older, more sunken look. Pryor also changes his voice and accent. Mudbone’s voice is slightly higher pitched and comes out like a quick whisper. Mudbone also has a decisively more southern accent. Pryor maintains these aesthetic elements throughout his performance as Mudbone. He even takes time from his monologues to mime spitting into a coffee can. Mudbone’s many appearances on Pryor’s records and concert films typically involve telling dirty jokes or recounting stories from Mudbone’s life.

Mudbone makes an appearance in Live on the Sunset Strip when a fan yells out. “Do Mudbone Richie!” After a few moments and encouragement from the audience, Pryor finally agrees to transform into Mudbone and perform a monologue. As Mudbone, Pryor says, “I know that boy. See, he fucked up. See, that fire got on his ass, and it fucked him up, upstairs. Fried up what little brains he had.” At this point, the audience is completely onboard with the bit. They are laughing hysterically as it becomes clear Mudbone is making fun of Pryor’s hospitalization after burning himself.

As Mudbone continues his monologue, he uses phrases and exaggerations that are typical of his storytelling style. In this excerpt, Mudbone makes light of all the “hard times” he has seen in his life. Mudbone says:

See, I lived through hard times before. Like, people talkin’ about, “these is hard times.” Hard times was way back. And they didn’t even have a year for it, just called it hard times. [Laughter]. It was dark all the time. I think the sun came out on Wednesday. [Laughter]. And if you didn’t have your ass up early, you missed it. [Laughter]

Mudbone’s world was tempered by his experiences in the deep south. His background provides a sense of gravitas and perspective that he can readily adapt to the situation.

Although Mudbone is a fictional character, the details of his life align with the plight of many ex-slaves born in the Deep South. More specifically, Mudbone’s story echoes what historians have called the Great Migration. As Ronald Takaki summarizes in the 2008 edition of his book A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America:

An exodus was under way. “The Afro-American population of the large cities of the North and West,” the New York Age reported in 1907, “is being constantly fed by a steady stream of new people from Southern States.” Between 1910 and 1920, the black population jumped from 5,700 to 48,000 in Detroit, 8,400 to 34,400 in Cleveland, 44,000 to 109,400 in Chicago. (2008, p. 312)

When examined in relation to the historical perspective, Mudbone appears to be an ex-slave or a child of ex-slaves who heard about opportunities in the North and traveled there. Takaki goes on to cite a letter written by a black man working, like Mudbone, at a packing plant in Chicago. The letter says, “I work in Swifts packing Co., in the sausage department… . We get $1.50 a day… . Tell your husband work is plentiful here and he won’t have to loaf if he want work” (2008, p. 314). When Pryor brings Mudbone to the stage, he brings a piece of African American history to white audiences.

Example 4: Motif

Finally, we come to Motif, one of Pryor’s many characters. Simply put, Motif is a drug addict from Pryor’s past in Peoria. Motif appears in the last half hour of 1983s Here and Now. At this point in the show, Pryor has done a number of bits about his sobriety. In the late 1970s, Pryor had a very public battle with cocaine addiction. At the height of his substance abuse, he was spending $30,000 a day on drugs. The culmination of his addiction occurred when Pryor lit himself on fire.

By the time Here and Now was filmed Pryor had stopped using drugs. Before introducing Motif, he recaps his own battle. Pryor says, “I haven’t done any drugs, now. It’s been seven months.” The audience responds with applause. Pryor continues, “And that’s a lot for me, you know, ‘cause I done—I think I done drugs since I was fourteen.” He goes on to tell the audience that when he was 19, he became a heavy drug user and now is the first time in his life that he is completely sober. He uses the announcement as a segue to explain how sobriety has changed his life. For example, Pryor goes into a bit about how funny it is to have people come up to you and tell you things you did when you were drunk – things that you didn’t even remember doing. After a couple more bits, Pryor comes back to the more serious issue. He hints that he ultimately regrets how much time he spent addicted to drugs that that he “should have learned from people that I knew that would get fucked up when I was little.”

At this point, Pryor is ready to show Motif to the audience. They are still laughing from the previous bits and Pryor seizes the opportunity to explore a topic that is a little more serious. Pryor explains that he failed to notice the horrors of drug addictions because, when he was a child, as he puts it, “I didn’t think [drug addicts] were on dope or nothin’. I thought they were cool. ‘Cause I had friends like—I had a friend, Motif. The motherfucker, he just sounded so cool. Anything—he took his time to answer.” Pryor uses the prompt “Hi Motif,” to bring Motif to the stage. For his transformation, Pryor stands still. He hangs his head by pushing his chin into his neck. Finally, after several beats Motif answers “What’s happening.” Motif’s line gets a huge laugh. The scene plays out just as Pryor has described. Motif takes a long time to answer questions. Pryor points out, to a child, this delay is seen as “cool.” Pryor says, “I was young, I thought that was cool.”

Pryor goes on to tell the audience that he and his childhood friends thought Motif’s reactions were not only cool, but hilarious. They would urge each other to “say something” to Motif so that he could provide another delayed response that young Pryor and his young friends found so amusing. Pryor acts out how one of the neighbor kids would yell out “Hey Motif!” Once again, Pryor changes his posture and expression. His eyelids get heavy. He slowly bobs his head up and down. At a glacial pace, Motif turns his head towards the boys and finally says, “hey.” Once again, Pryor tells the audience he thought Motif’s delayed reaction and short answers were cool. Then, Pryor hits the audience with the truth. “I didn’t know [Motif] had shot his brains out.” At this point, Pryor has kept the atmosphere light enough that the audience laughs at the revelation that Motif is a drug addict.

Now, Pryor moves the bit into decisively darker territory. He tells the audience more about Motif. Pryor begins “But [Motif] liked to talk to me sometimes, you know?” At this point, Pryor goes into a full-fledged embodiment of Motif, similar to the way he embodies Mudbone. The result is a monologue that, at times, feels like it may be better suited for a Broadway production. For almost 12 min, Pryor (as Motif) talks to a young Pryor. Motif asks him to take a bag of watches “down the street.” Motif says he “can’t carry ‘em ‘cause the police are looking for me.” Young Pryor expresses hesitation because he suspects they are stolen. Motif responds by saying:

No, [the police are] not looking for me. You know who they looking for, man? They’re looking for my brother Bobby. No, “cause the bitch up the street talking about, I broke in her house. She said I broke in there and stole some of her shit. But I didn’t do it” cause I told her, you know. I said, “Look, I want your shit, I just come in here and take it.” You know, I ain’t got to break in. I’m bold. You know, I walk in the door.

As Motif continues, it becomes clear that his explanations do not make any sense. (Notice he says that the police are both looking and not looking for him.) The monologue goes back and forth between trying to convince young Pryor that he didn’t break into anyone’s house and recounting an incident in which his brother Bobby robbed a liquor store with a pistol. Motif then starts to talk about how he doesn’t want to go back to prison.

Eventually, Motif’s ramblings are halted when he is approached by a friend named Les that he hasn’t seen in a long time. Motif catches up with Les. They have a short exchange about the liquor store robbery. At this juncture in the bit, the audience is still laughing at Motif’s antics and speech pattern. After all, Pryor portrays him vividly and, at this point, the entire scene could still be interpreted as a rendition of the funny things people say and do when they are high on drugs. However, Motif’s monologue takes another dark turn. It is revealed that Les has heroin. Motif immediately pulls out a tourniquet and wraps it around his upper arm. He looks for a vein by aggressively tapping on his elbow crease. He finds it and proclaims, “there it is.” Then, Motif’s friend injects the drugs into Motif’s newly found vein. As the drugs take effect, Motif wobbles. His eye droop and wander. He mumbles profanities. Motif, as he goes deeper and deeper into the drug, lets his body be pulled over. He eventually hunches over completely and is unable to do anything other than silently look at the ground. After a few moments pass, Motif lifts himself up again, stands straight up, and lets his head fall back.

Now, it becomes completely apparent that Motif is a junkie. For the next couple minutes, Motif twitches, shakes, speaks incoherently, and makes a series of sounds remnant of echolalia. As the monologue concludes, Motif (still heavily under the influence) relays his experience of trying to get a job.

Check the logic. Check the logic. I went downtown, right? Now, this is me, right? I’m gonna try to get the job. A motherfucker tell me I can’t have the job, but I can take an application. Are you ready for that? I say “Well, what’s the logic? What is the logical conclusion of the logic of it?” I just wanted to know. I figured it was something wrong with the logic. Yeah, motherfucker tell me I ain’t dependable. Shit. Say, baby, I got a $200 a day habit. I ain’t missed a payment. Shit. Is that dependable?

Motif finally explains that he would like to have “The job as the town junkie.” He proposes that he could stand on the street corner and get high for the tourists. This line gets a big laugh from the audience. Motif continues with some final comments about his own mortality. “I’m not going to heaven or hell. I’m just going.” After these words, Motif takes out his tourniquet again and ties off another vein. Before shooting up, Motif appears to directly implicate the audience when he says, “You weren’t sensitive, you motherfuckers. You weren’t sensitive. You just– Well, you just didn’t like a motherfucker sensitive, man. You run over people. You put ‘em – you put ‘em in a position that they can’t do nothing in it. Then when they can’t, you all say, ‘See?’ That, that wasn’t right.” Motif then shoots up, drops to the floor, and rolls over onto his back. The stage lights go out and the entire audience is left in darkness, a moment that signals Motif’s death by heroin overdose.

Pryor does not close Here and Now with Motif’s death, however. When the lights come back on, Pryor goes directly into a lighthearted, crowd pleasing bit. His show ultimately ends on a more traditional, high note. However, Pryor had already used the comedy stage to relay his specialized knowledge. In other words, Motif is not a fictitious character. He is, as Pryor suggests with his own words, someone he knew when he was young. After all, the Peoria of Pryor’s youth was a city of vice. According to Scott Saul’s 2014 book Becoming Richard Pryor:

Peoria of the 1930’s was “wide open as the gateway to hell,” wrote the Peoria Journal twenty years later – “a city where every sordid passion had its willing handmaidens.” This was not just vivid hyperbole. (p. 22)

And Pryor was born in the heart of the red-light district on North Washington Street, where his family’s brothel was located.

Once again, Pryor is using the comedy stage to illustrate the plights of the drug addicts and wayward souls he saw as a child. He is acting out his “specialized knowledge” for audiences that likely never saw a black man overdose on heroin or listen to his thoughts about racial injustice as his life fades away. In this instance, Pryor has done something remarkable. He has managed to transport a white audience to the streets of 1940s Peoria to watch the drug-induced death of a black man.

Conclusions

When Antonio Gramsci wrote about organic intellectuals in the Prison Notebooks, it is safe to say that he was not thinking about stand-up comedians. His writings were largely inspired by the political situation in Italy during his imprisonment. Nonetheless, Gramsci’s ideas are adaptable. It is clear that he felt the working classes (those outside the dominant class) could produce their own leaders – intellectuals who communicate the lived experience of their particular class. Because Pryor took such great care to share the African American experience with the white world through his comedy, he is an example of what Gramsci’s organic intellectual can be. Pryor was, in effect, a teacher and a philosopher.

After years in prison left him weak and suffering from a variety of painful ailments, Gramsci died at age 46. He spent the last years of his life being moved in and out of hospitals. He sadly would not live to see the publication of his prison notebooks or their effect on the world. In many ways, he reexamined Marx in a way that allowed subsequent philosophers to ask a poignant question, “who manufactures idea and consent?” For Marx, the question was secondary to the superstructure. There was the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, and the petit bourgeoisie. Furthermore, for Marx, the changes to the capitalist system would come by way of technological advances that are applied to the means of production. In other words, the capitalist system could not produce any kind of organically created equilibrium between the working class and the ruling class. Instead, the arc of history and technology served as the great equalizer. Gramsci took this argument to a new place by suggesting that there are instances in which the lesser class can have an influence on the ruling class by means of simply communicating a story or a lived experience. Pryor was a living example of a member of a disadvantaged class influencing the dominant white class through his recounting of his lived experiences, in a format that they were receptive to.

In the end, Pryor’s comedy does not feel like a lesson. When he discusses issues relating to the black community, the routines do not morph into lectures or rants. The opposite is true. Pryor keeps the audience laughing even when the subject matter turns dark and unsettling for white audiences to hear. In effect, Pryor’s humor functions as a Trojan Horse. The jokes invite audiences (especially white audiences) to let down their guards, listen, and learn. The process is as perplexing as it is fascinating. And although Gramsci did not specifically address comedy in his philosophical writings, his work did focus on how an individual can use his or her lived experience to disrupt or defy hegemony. Richard Pryor, in many ways, is philosophy in action, an illustration of political progress.