re: live in concert
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.
He says the mean German Shepard that lived next door came over and asked, What’s the matter, Rich? When he told him what happened, the dog couldn’t believe it, said, Aww, I was going to eat them, too. His and Pryor’s disappointment comes from different places, but there’s a moment of stillness here, of empathy, that’s striking to me, even with the comedic undertone. The dog is comforting in his own way, warns Pryor to not linger on that shit for too long, ‘cause that shit’ll fuck with you. Then, as he heads out, the dog lets Pryor know that he’ll be back chasing him tomorrow.
In this special, Pryor seems to continually be drawn back to questions of mortality and death—his monkey dying, his dad dying, his own heart attack, his grandma dying, him almost drowning. He even asks at one point, Do I have a tumor, or did it get dark in here? But even as there’s this fixation on what can cause one to die, there is so much life in his embodiment and personas. He is everyone here, from his own heart to a deer scared to drink water to his wife to his kids, and he’s on the floor and he’s dancing through the air, and perhaps part of his fear of dying is due to this abundance of life he has in him.
He’s able to take these moments of fear and trauma and contort them into comedy without fully shaking off the gravity of what it means that these things have happened. He talks about how once his dad punched him in the chest, hard, and how his chest caved in response, wrapped around his dad’s fist and wouldn’t let go (Pryor is hopping around chest bent in as he explains the story).
Sometimes, restlessness about the past can manifest in a worldview that’s almost surreal. A lot of Pryor’s comedy is this way, taking our world from us and presenting it back at a slant where you forget your rifle when hunting and realize it just as a bear’s behind you, or you go to pick out a switch for your grandma to whoop you with, and when it’s too small, she threatens to whoop you with the whole tree instead. Anything is possible, maybe, in a world where bad things have happened to you, and this can be terrifying, it can be paralyzing, but it also means you live in a world where anything can happen, where you can tell a story and something not fully possible suddenly is—you’re always surprised and you’re able to surprise others too with the way your stories go, with how often the audience is presented with something they couldn’t have seen coming.
In Melvin Van Peeble’s 1971 classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song—a movie I wrote about in my dissertation because of this same tendency for the world to slant surreally in it—the main character protests against the forces that keep people like him hemmed in, and when things take a turn, he has to go on the run. Whereas in reality, or in a more realist story, he’d likely be caught and punished, in this movie, he’s never caught, just spends the whole movie running, through the desert, fighting off dogs and running some more, his community shielding him from the consequences he’s facing because they know all about it, both where he’s coming from and where he could end up. It takes being able to see things differently, see what might be outside of the square you’ve been put in, to make a movie like that, where things don’t proceed to their logical conclusion but instead go somewhere entirely bold, somewhere brand new.
Pryor’s surreal imagination is all over this special. He comes back to death, and back to death, but he doesn’t stay there. Instead, he’s jogging around the stage, and then lying on the floor, and then pausing to drink some water, to ask for some more. He’s so alive here, sweating through his shirt, pausing to ask the stage managers to turn on the lights because Huey P. Newton’s in the audience, and he wants to say Thank you for coming, and I’m happy you’re here.
Pryor creates and upholds his own world here, and at the same time, he’s in touch with the world he’s a part of. The Black world, as Kevin Quashie puts it, one that can surpass the everywhere and everyway of black death, of blackness that is understood through such a vocabulary. Richard Pryor is thinking of death, and he’s beyond it. He’s maybe heeding the advice of that mean German Shepard after all, trying not to linger for too long.
