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I discovered both Richard Pryor and George Carlin when they were co-hosting a summer variety show on one of the big networks during television's golden B&W period. Both comedians impressed me as fresh, extremely talented and funny. And if you view the G rated requirements of prime-time network TV not as a prohibition but as a "challenging format" requiring performers of inventive comic brilliance, both Pryor and Carlin proved they did not need "forbidden" words or "blue" humor to be funny.
Pryor works with color and race as his medium of expression much as Carlin does the same with language--more specifically, the distorted versions of reality we unwittingly create with our thoughtless uses of words. Carlin, in some respects, has to be admired as the master of his craft precisely because he avoids autobiographical material and the construction of a comic persona based on his own life. He's a comic everyman, reporting the day's trivial and sordid business, from flying on airplanes to being witness to another senseless war predictably launched by the all-supreme DOD. He candidly discusses his hatred of "lies," which is the only thing we can expect to hear from our government. And then he proceeds to dramatize the world of lies to which each of us is subjected during our brief, uninformed lifetimes.
If you can overlook the "F word" (hasn't it exhausted its meaning and effect by now?) and recognize, even in some of his most outrageously funny sketches (with catalogs of euphonic words, each individually clear yet coming together in a forceful current that streams from his mouth in a heady rush that I have yet to hear matched by any rapper-hip-hopper--if you can recognize in that stream not only the dazzling performance of a master craftsman but the picture of life as it is lived (or, more often, wasted), then you're in a position to recognize Carlin for the supreme satirist that he is. Like the 18th century's Jonathan Swift, he's capable of touching a nerve provoking anger along with laughter (some of it anger over our own obtuseness and stupidity).
Both Carlin and Pryor are proficient at using multi-voices. There's always the "adult voice" of arrogance, pride, and presumed maturity alternating with the more direct and vernacular voice of outrage and truth.
Pryor's builiding blocks are his personal experiences as a young black man having daily business with hookers, druggies, and brothels. Unlike Carlin, he gives himself an advantage through his creation of a sympathetic figure due to the prejudice and hardships of his youth (most of the laughter heard on "Live and Smokin'" sounds like it's coming from the white women in a small audience). Like Carlin, he works with loosely drawn-up "set pieces," each of which has been carefully rehearsed before stringing them together for the occasion. The transitions and segues aren't as smooth as Carlin's (there are a number of fades to black), and Pryor occasionally makes self-conscious references to the challenge of working in front of a camera. The audience gives him that--at least, more readily than if it were Carlin making similar excuses. Much of the humor on "Live & Smokin'" is scatological--and here his targets are not black and white but man and woman, and the different ways in which each deals with his or her bodily functions. It may strike the viewer as odd that the audience seems most repulsed when Pryor sticks his finger in his nose, then his mouth, then says: "Come on, admit it . Doesn't everyone enjoy a good booger?" Maybe so, but that's the stuff that children between the ages of 5 and 8 especially enjoy (the "Jelly-Belly Factory" in Kenosha, Wi, even puts out a "booger-flavored" jelly bean).
Besides the "shock value" (getting the crowd's attention), the bits about body functions universalizes the primarily black life that is Pryor's main focus. Soon he's not merely talking about but assuming the character of the real down-n-outers that, we quickly sense, he knows far better than we. We may laugh but not without feeling equal amounts of pity and fear--one moment Pryor is swinging wildly with his fists, striking the mic or anyone within range, the next he's threatening to drop his trousers, the next he's a hopeless addict whose mother has called him a dog and whose father has disowned him for hocking the family TV set. He uses his hand as an object of menace, helplessness and obscenity--holding it in the region of his groin and making it appear physically deformed. Soon it becomes a symbol of his stolen manhood, signifying his limited opportunities and his resentment at a world that has kicked him into the gutter, then ignored him--no good Samaritans within sight of his tortured body, as he wishes for only two things: 1. a friend who will walk alongside of him, offering support and empathy until 2. two o'clock the next day, when he thinks he has a chance to score with drug-dealer who will make his troubles go away--for a limited time.
Pryor isn't saying , merely, that "Black lives matter" even though he's representing black experience with greater candor than many people (including successful and wealthy black people) have ever had a chance to get so close to. It's only when his spectators sees through the "blackness" (Pryor's tool, his means to a weightier end) to the "human" and the universal that his humor reaches the destination that counts. Black lives matter because, like white lives, they can easily be misled, misguided, mishandled and fall off the high and dry curb into a dark stagnating abyss--white lives and black lives alike. Whether it's an impoverished, unbathed, stinking white person or a black person, what matters is laughter signifying that we recognize in the afflicted humanity created by Pryor someone like ourselves. Our pride and privilege can't insulate us from the fallen or excuse us from our failure to assist such a human being, even if it's to get him through another night of hell prior to the next fix.
It's not that black lives matter "as much as" white lives (the misunderstanding of white politicians). Rather it's the recognition that if black lives don't matter, neither do white lives because we're all essentially alike. If we allow blackness to distance ourselves from another human being--whether it's to abuse that person or to ignore him--we act as though black lives DON'T matter. What you have yet to learn is that "blackness is humanness."
(Part of Pryor's closing impersonation of a down-and-out black man is theological, as he invokes the preacher and the Good Samaritan. And these reference allow us to appreciate the power of humor to "free us from our sins," lifted from us by the power of laughter. Frankly, I enjoyed this performance more than the more celebrated "Live on Sunset Strip." By the time of "Sunset Strip" Pryor had become a celebrity, and when every word that he speaks (some unintelligible) is greeted by laughter by an audience primed to respond in exactly that way, the "cleansing action" of great "serious humor" has been reduced to a meaningless "ritual."
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