One Funny Motherfucker

And It’s Deep Too: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings, Richard Pryor, Rhino Records, 2000

This beautifully packaged boxed set demonstrates that the most important subset label currently out there is Rhino Records (now folded into some conglorporation), the rescuer of forgotten classics, overlooked gems, and taken-for-granted standards. I have found more oldies that I’ve loved through them then just about nearly any other label currently doing business in volume.

That said this boxed set is a true meeting of beauty and light bringing together the depth of Rhino’s vaults (as it were) with the twentieth century’s greatest comedian, Richard Pryor. This collection is filled with the seven albums Pryor recorded for Warner Brothers, his best material as well as a final disc filled with unreleased material, alternate takes, and snippets of Pryor’s latest appearances, of which there weren’t apparently enough to form a cohesive album. What drinking, drugs, depression, and romantic difficulties couldn’t stop, multiple sclerosis has at least considerably slowed down.

The book accompanying the box set is filled with essays regarding Pryor’s influence and influences, biographical sketches, and tribute paragraphs written by those who worked with him and those who saw him perform. There are pictures from his concerts and from his personal life, all in all a lovingly prepared tribute. But the real true greatness is in the CDs themselves, nine of them with cardboard jackets reprinting the original cover art. An especial favorite of mine being the picture of a robed Pryor tied to a stake as other berobed men with torches bear down on him. Was It Something I Said? the cover asks.

Disc one, the self-titled Richard Pryor, demonstrates his gift almost fully formed from the start of his recording career with Warner Brothers. The incisive sketches mixed with bodily humor hearken back to his earlier days of struggle, captured in a soon to be released double album from Rhino entitled Evolution/Revolution. This earlier work is more mundanely profane than his work later became, the pain that is laced through all of Pryor’s work less obvious, less piercing. The sketch “Prison Play” reminiscent of Lenny Bruce’s sketch “Father Flotsky’s Triumph” in its skewering of prison stereotypes one ups the earlier bit by tackling race in an era when the “race question” was very much on people’s minds.

Disc two, That Nigger’s Crazy, climaxes with one of Pryor's most transcendently human back and forth dialogues, this between the town wino and the town junkie. It is at turns harrowing, hysterical, and real to the bone. His wino is a recurring character, previously in the disc mocking Dracula for having bad teeth and dirt on his neck. “I know Jesus,” the wino tells us at one point. “Shit, I remember when the boy got kilt, that was on a Friday down at the railroad depot.” In telling us of the woman he lost earlier, the junkie says that she was “so fine I wanted to suck her daddy’s dick.” The wino to the junkie again later, “You don’t know how to deal with the white man, that’s your problem. I know how to deal with him. That’s right. That’s why I’m in the position I’m in today.” We are also introduced to Richard’s father, who will become a recurring character in his comedy, a stern, often vicious man, tough but funny in his own way.

What’s somewhat sad about Disc Three, Was It Something I Said? is how early Richard discusses his addiction to cocaine. He sounds so hopeful, the elation of the newly straight (or at least the pretense of same), in between crashes. Pryor’s life and his comedy was filled with such ups and downs and what remains most remarkable on hearing it is how poignant his mining of his personal tragedy for laughs is. This album also introduces the character of Mudbone in his earliest incarnation. The old man voice who tells of Mudbone in later discs becomes the voice of Mudbone himself. A joke from Mudbone lends the box set its name (two big-dicked men wanted to have a contest to see whose was bigger; they hung them off the Golden Gate Bridge and one said, “This water’s cold,” the other replied, “And it’s deep too.”) This disc also captures the beginning of Pryor’s black minister lampoons, a bit he would riff on in nearly each successive concert. These ministers were combination showman, circus barkers, rappers, conmen, singers and excuse makers.

Disc four, Bicentennial Nigger, is perhaps Pryor’s most significant achievement. It shows his confidence on stage becoming truly fully developed, his opening banter with the audience prickly and insulting without ever being offensive. The ongoing bicentennial celebrations of the time inspired some of Pryor’s most cutting racial humor culminating in the “Bicentennial Prayer.” The seriousness is let go before the sermon is over, dipping into water-headed babies, the collection plate, accidental drownings during baptisms. Pryor will return to the theme of the bicentennial and America’s history by disc’s end with a scathingly mock-Sho’Nuff darkie delivering a speech, an indictment of the shortchanges black Americans faced and face to the ironic toodling of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Pryor here also demonstrates his comic abilities where he milks laughs even out of introducing celebrities in the audience like Natalie Cole, Cecil Brown, and Rosalyn Cash. Of course Mudbone shows up and delivers this witty telling of a fight he had: “And I was real strong in them days, y’see. That’s right. I was strong enough, just enough to pick up my pistol and shoot that nigga in the ass.” Just prior to the climax Pryor does an extended bit about the time he took acid, which is an auditory hallucinatory transport of hilarity climaxing in a re-enactment of the battle between Hal and Dave in 2001, replete with parts of Also Sprach Zarathustra in the background.

We move on the double album Wanted, the first to reveal the personal misfortunes Pryor faced including his arrests and his heart attack, as well as the death of his monkeys. This is Pryor at his height, just before the real tragedies set in. There is at least one annoying moment on disc two in which nearly five minutes of jokes require seeing what makes them funny. It’s small enough to get lost in all the rest of the laughs. This concert collection also introduces us to Pryor’s love of three prime black athletes, Muhammad Ali, Leon Spinks, and close personal friend Jim Brown who will return for Richard’s next concert.

Live on Sunset Strip contains the quite rightly famous Africa bit which surrounds this nugget of pure epiphany, poetry:

One thing that happened to me that was magic was that I was leaving, sitting in the hotel lobby, and a voice said, “What do you see? Look around.” And I looked around, and I looked around, and I saw people of all colors and shapes, and the voice said, “You see any niggers?” I said, “No.” It said, “You know why? ‘Cause there aren’t any.” There ain’t no niggers in Africa! ‘Cause I’d been there three weeks and hadn’t said it once. And it started making me cry, man. All that shit. All the acts I’ve been doing. As an artist and comedian. Speaking and trying to say something. And I been saying that. That’s a devastating fucking word. That has nothing to do with us. We are from a place where they first started people.

This concert also is Pryor’s first after his infamous self-immolation. He approaches this gingerly, starting the show by borrowing a match which he pointedly does not use and only makes a passing reference to his needing to be careful. Later Mudbone pops up to talk about how that Pryor boy was a fool who got his mind messed up with the drugs. The audience is quieter than in other parts, the few who are laughing being overly loud, nervous, waiting for the unspoken thing to be addressed. Mudbone can’t help but digress, that being his nature, yet the audience remains uneasy, waiting. Mudbone’s story peters out, but by the next bit Richard has worked up the courage to come at freebasing and his fire directly head on. But at the end, he apparently flinched, because in later interviews after he was diagnosed with MS, he explained that everything he said about it previously, about it being an accident, was a lie. To have this knowledge and to hear his public lies about it, feeling the love you ultimately come to feel for Richard Pryor so confessional is his comedy, it’s hurtful, saddening. But Pryor can find comedy even in almost dying, as when a man comes to get an autograph as he lies in the hospital bed, saying “Hey, come on, Rich, how ‘bout this last autograph?” Later, he works the laughs out of hearing his own death announced on the television. Finally, the show climaxes in him bringing back the match from the show’s start, striking it, making it bounce up and down, and saying, “Yeah, I heard this one. What’s this? Richard Pryor running down the street.”

Here and Now, Pryor’s seventh and essentially last album returns to familiar subjects: men and women, black and white relations, Africa, and his problems with drugs and alcohol. “I had to stop drinking because I got tired of like waking up in my car driving ninety.” When he touches on politics starting with his meeting Ronald Reagan, you wish he was still working today, just to get Pryor’s take on the current administration, one ripe for blistering comedy. (I often get the same feeling when listening to old Bill Hicks albums.) The disc ends with a sometimes barely audible interview with Pryor that provides not much insight, the subdued comedian quite a contrast to the stage presence.

The ninth disc, a collection of bits and alternate takes, This African-American’s Crazy, includes a still funny alternate version of the “Acid” bit, demonstrating Pryor’s incredible ability with mimicry. The whirring sounds and quick takes are reminiscent of celluloid versions of an acid trip and evokes “Revolution #9.” Also included are uncollected bits of performance like Pryor’s take on Patty Hearst. It ends with a bit of stand up since Pryor’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. Immediately a heckler shouts out, “You ain’t dead!” This allows Pryor to revisit the notion of hearing reports of your own death, then to delve into the setbacks MS has dealt him, like suddenly losing bladder control in front of women. Again and again, Pryor proves that even in the depths, even at the bottom of the abyss, his comic sensibilities haven’t left him, he can still coax the laughs out of tragedy.

What sets Pryor apart is how much pain is laced through his comedy. It isn’t simply fart and dick jokes or women versus men, it is laughing through the tears, laughter that lifts Pryor’s comedy above merely giggles making it into cathartic pain exorcisms. If there’s a weakness to all of this, it’s that while Pryor may have overcome the nigger-mind feelings, he remained trapped in the male versus female bitch-mind, even women he admires such as Natalie Cole being described as bitches. After his revelations in Africa, you’d have thought the power of words in general, not merely specific, would have opened up to him. It’s a disappointment that it didn’t.