In Richard Pryor’s 1979 special Live in Concert, there’s a part where he talks about his pet monkeys dying. He had somebody watching them while he was traveling, and they weren’t as attentive as they needed to be, and long story short: both monkeys died while he was away. Pryor doesn’t joke about their deaths, so much as what happened after.

In Bicentennial N—, after talking about the difference between dating Black and White women, shouting out Black celebrities in the audience, and playing his signature persona Mudbone, Richard Pryor ends with a bit that’s much less in time with the audience before him. Instead, for this last joke, the one that the album is named after, Pryor attempts to transcend time and space to comment on America’s racial history. He personifies a character who is alive during slavery and still alive today. This character is Black but in blackface, his blue eyes and bright red lips giving him away. I’m so glad y’all took me out of Dahomey, he says. I used to live to 150, and now I die at 52 from high blood pressure. The character laughs at how so many of the people he crossed the ocean with died on the way, he laughs at how he was separated from his family, each time the laugh becoming more delirious, a yuk yuk yuk that first makes the crowd laugh in response, but eventually quiets them as what prompts the laughter grows more and more grim. I don’t know why you white folks are just so good to us, he says, and then adds, I don’t know what to do if I don’t get 200 more years of this. Pryor ends the album, still in persona, with Y’all probably done forgot about it, but I ain’t gon’ never forget. By then, the crowd’s laughter has gone hesitant, then silent.