re: bicentennial n—
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.
In this last joke of Bicentennial N—, there is way more edge and way more bitterness than there is when Richard Pryor is talking about the people he grew up with or poking fun at the Black church. There is not the same sense of playfulness he has when making fun of White people or when commenting on Black struggle. Here, he pushes what’s comedic so far that it becomes awkward. We’re reminded that humor can only take us so far, and that if you push it further than that, if you try to lather the most violent of oppressions with a forceful yuk yuk yuk, it makes the moment even more violent than it felt before.
This last joke of the album feels like it’d be sampled in a Kendrick Lamar song, reminds me of “The Blacker the Berry,” where Lamar, too, leans into stereotype in order to show how ill-fitting it ultimately is. When someone else says X, Y and Z about you, the disconnect between them and you might make their words feel true, but when you say the same words, there it is: the flatness of the idea, the sense that it doesn’t even start to cover all of who you are.
It’s interesting to see how Pryor—who so seamlessly speaks to the Black community at large and often in a way that makes White people feel comfortable listening in—can have these moments where he steps away from crowd and says with much more bite that things are not okay. In these moments, he seems to reminds us that a lot of things can be made into a joke, but that doesn’t mean we can forget the violence that lies underneath.
