re: live on sunset strip
Not too long into his 1982 special Live on Sunset Strip, Richard Pryor pauses the show to ask for some water. He says they told him there would be a stool up here and a cup of water, but maybe it was an April Fool’s Joke. Somebody from the crowd shakily brings him up a glass—Richard says “you’re more nervous than me”—and then he takes it, drinks it. Says he just needs to drink a little water to calm down. He says they all need to calm down, that he can feel their energy, that he can tell they want so badly for this to go well, that he wants it to go well too, but maybe they should all relax, just let whatever’s going to happen happen.
A couple of years before this special, Richard lit himself on fire. He ran down the street like that, went to the hospital, ended up quitting drugs. In this special, he talks a lot about how he’s emotional, he’s angry, he’s “no day at the beach,” but that he’s surrounded by people calmer than he is. He talks about how lawyers are all cool, will tell you quietly that it’s going to be okay in a way that makes a person wonder why they’re getting all worked up when “it’s just a 47 year sentence.” He talks about how women can be so calm, will tell you they’re going on a walk when you want to fight. He talks about how his friend Jim Brown came over to try to help him stop freebasing before the incident. He says Jim asked him if he wanted to go rollerskating. When he said no, he wanted to smoke, Jim asked if he wanted to go for a ride instead. When he said no, he wanted to smoke, Jim asked him, “What you gon’ do? Are you going to quit this stuff or are you going to end our friendship?” Richard says Jim asked him that over and over again, “What you gon’ do?” He described how the calmness of that repetition was maddening, how he didn’t know what he was going to do until Jim finally left, until he was alone with his thoughts and decided—inevitably, maybe—to keep smoking.
Throughout the special, Richard juxtaposes his intensity, his emotion, his anger with those around him who are much calmer, a contrast that made him feel crazy, but in this special, he’s calmed down too. In some ways that are probably healthy, like getting sober, and in other ways that are maybe less so, like how, in this special, Richard seems less willing to critique Whiteness the way he used to. He talks about how his wife is White and how he used to bring up their racial differences all the time, but that eventually, he grew out of it. He says, in a jokey tone, “If I can do it, you can too!” He says now the madder he gets, the quieter.
Richard says it’s a good thing we have penitentiaries because he thought Black people killed by accident, but there are a lot of cold blooded killers out there. At one point, he prefaced a joke with “not that I don’t trust White people.” At another, he couldn’t remember the name for the Klu Klux Klan. Richard says racism is an ugly thing that he hopes White people give up. He says he doesn’t like it when “hip White folks” use the n-word around him, but he doesn’t like it when Black people use it either, which got him a burst of applause, the tape switching over to a crowd of White folks, clapping their hands and smiling. While of course the whole set is jokes, his orientation to racism seems softer here, he seems less willing to comment, to involve himself in Black struggle. He says “if motherfuckers want to kill yourselves, that’s your business, just don’t do it on my porch.” The racial tension that used to be palpable in his work seems more relaxed here, but it’s not completely missing.
Someone interrupts one of his bits to request Mudbone, his signature persona of an old, slightly unhinged Black man, and Richard sighs, laughs, says this is Mudbone’s last show. I braced myself, as whenever he does Mudbone, I get flashbacks to minstrelsy, to blackface, to the idea that Black people are slow moving, slow thinking, just asking to be manipulated, a notion that proliferated during slavery to make White people feel less guilty about what they were doing. I braced myself, but Mudbone was more lucid than usual. He said Richard got some money, and he’s not hungry anymore. He said he started smoking and went all the way crazy. But ultimately, he agrees with Richard that you’ve got to get whatever sunshine you can on your face. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
In Live on Sunset Strip, Richard Pryor seems in his element. The spotlight follows him wherever he goes. He is comfortable enough to pause and drink water, to bring out the stool they eventually left for him and sit down. He embodies smell and cheetahs and the pipe he couldn’t quit when he started smoking cocaine. He makes fun of his bright red suit, and he makes fun of the audience. After his incident, he is still here, and he seems happy to be here, but maybe something about almost dying changed what it meant for him to be. Maybe money changed him, made him feel, like Mudbone said, less hungry. Less involved in Black struggle and more of a universalist. More able to sit down and ask for a cup of water, to tell everyone it was time to relax.
