re: live and smokin’
In Richard Pryor’s 1971 special Live and Smokin’, he is not famous yet. He is in fact so not famous that people get up and leave in the middle of his show. He’s so not famous that for most of the show, the crowd is quiet, causing Richard to grow antsy. At one point, he picks his nose and eats the booger. When the crowd presumably looks confused, if not disgusted, he says, “What? It’s my nose!” The quiet goes on as he moves through his set. At one point, he asks, “Any requests?”
He is uncomfortable with the camera. He both says he’s always wanted to be on film and that maybe they should put up the equipment and try again without it because it’s making him nervous, that “getting filmed is a drag.” He pauses to grin at the camera for too long. When he fumbles one of his jokes, he corrects himself out loud and then looks at the cameraman, says, “Can we edit that out?” Later in the special, there are pauses in the film where he presumably did cut parts out, dug through what he had and plucked out what (more than the rest) wasn’t working.
If you saw this performance one night when you were out at a stand-up show, you might think Richard Pryor was weird and talented, or you might think he was weird and not talented at all. You might think he’s funny, and you might be the only one in the crowd who thought so. Seeing him so young and unaware of all that’s about to come his way—in just three years, he’d release his hit album That Nigger’s Crazy—it reminds me of how wild things can become if you find the audacity to keep going. People will always regard you with your most notable accomplishment in mind, but before you get there, you are as anonymous as Richard Pryor seems here, someone who could be no one, who could cause people to leave the show early because they’re feeling restless.
With all of his weird jokes and edgy racial comedy, the crowd is stiff for most of the set, but when he goes into what would later morph into his signature persona Mudbone, the audience starts warming up. He is doing his wino persona, slurring and seemingly out of touch with the world around him, reminiscent of earlier renditions of blackface and minstrelsy, the dumb Black person, who’s helpless without some greater power there to set him straight. It’s clever, but it’s not yet as specific as it will be later. Having finally gotten the crowd’s attention though, Richard goes on in this persona and others for ten, fifteen minutes, telling stories, less lucid, less present and strange in front of them, transforming into what this crowd—whose Whiteness he notes throughout the show—has been waiting for.
Cut into a moment of him personifying this agitated Black character is him lifting his head up and rolling his eyes back in slow motion, the words “used to be a genius” voiced over everything else, the laughter, the impression that goes back and back to the Irishmen in blackface, proving why they were better than Black people by making Black people seem impossible to respect. There is Richard, as he is, telling jokes about Dracula and about how he doesn’t want to be White because White people have to go to the moon, and there is Richard, as he can be if pushed, eyes wide, telling discombobulated stories in a way that’s not quite as in touch with the Black community as it will be once he’s taken more seriously, starts to get even sharper with his craft.
For now, he is quick-talking and frustrated, playing a wino, and then, he goes further, switches into his junkie persona, his words slower, his reality even less in touch, his hand—strikingly, considering the heart attacks he’d later have—clutched on his chest. The crowd does not find this as compelling as when he was just drunk. As he struggles to speak, as his body moves like he’s underwater, they are quiet. The wino tells the junkie, Richard playing both, “You better lay off the narcotic, nigga, it done made you null and void.” The junkie says that he’d rather be high, and soon after, the show ends.
On this tape, Richard doesn’t circle back around and become himself again. No more jokes about being Black or who he’s hooking up with or what it was like for him growing up. He stays in character, and while his personas are a big part of the magic of his craft, the way he can impersonate a heart attack and a German Shepard and his wives and his father, here, the shift is not yet as clarified as it will be later. He becomes, at this point, more of who they expect him to be, and something about that—about how they do not yet have to come to grips with who he will be, who he already is—it relaxes them. They’re clapping at last.
