Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic
Laughter is the best medicine, man.
Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic
Fresh One Films (2013)
Dir. Marina Zenovich
Comedy is upsetting.
In its theatrical infancy, Greek actors brandished giant costume phalluses in the face of aristocrats, signifying not only comedy’s origins in fertility ritual, but its penchant for wagging an insolent … finger … in the face of a shocked status quo. In Omit the Logic, Richard Pryor brandishes the n* word, and his sex life, in the face of Barbara Walters, Dinah Shore, and Johnny Carson.
Part of comedy’s function—to let us know when we’re getting too uptight, too arrogant, or complacent.
Mikhail Bakhtin recognized the revolutionary potential of comedy when he read a French satirist describing funny renaissance carnival games, in the writer Rabelais. The point of carnival was (is)—temporarily upending the status quo, inverting the social order. Upsetting the applecart, quick as a laugh. Bakhtin, a Soviet citizen, prescribed Rabelaisian humor as an antidote to Stalinism—he suggested this to a roomful of hapless Stalinists—that’s funny in itself. He began with: “It would be extremely interesting to write the history of laughter.”
A great part of that history has to do with the leveling of social hierarchies and taboos. As Paul Mooney, one of many cultural heavyweights in the documentary, says of the boy who grew up in a bordello, and later rose to fame uttering what no one else would dare:
“People were fascinated with Richard, especially white people; they’d never heard anybody talk like that. They were fascinated with… How could this young, black person have this kind of power? That’s—power.”
Another thread in the history of laughter is less revolutionary than therapeutic. From Hippocrates to the book of Proverbs and modern cliché, laughter has long been described as the best “medicine.”
Omit the Logic leans into it: the funnyman as medicine man. There’s Bowjaws the “Mojo Healer” from The Richard Pryor Show—a bayou curandero mixed with a pentecostal faith-healer, who cures ailments of body and soul: “Let Bowjaws handle it!”
Beyond the scope of Omit the Logic, there’s early footage from The Tonight Show that suggests Pryor was toying with the concept of spiritual performance-art since at least 1966 (part of Pryor’s charisma, as Carson quickly realizes, is in being “honest”).
There’s biographer and friend Cecil Brown, describing Pryor in the language of a Catholic priest. Remembering how he “always talked about making [his audience] brave enough to see themselves. But the demons that he wanted to exorcise in the audience became demons that he found hard to exorcise in himself.” As Bowjaws says, “Are you sick? Are you miserable? Are you crippled? You’re my kinda people!” Then there are the related afflictions possessing Pryor, addiction culminating in multiple sclerosis.
Omit the Logic, too, leans on the inversion motif familiar from carnival, part of the Behind-the-Music plot line requisite of American pop tragedies. To set the tone for the film, in the opening seconds Whoopi Goldberg paints Pryor at the apex of his career, “free-flying” high above his fellow comics; in the next frame, we’re watching news coverage of Pryor’s nadir, a horrific burn accident involving free-base cocaine. When he was a “ball of fire” running down the street, according to his bodyguard—Phaeton on the ill-fated joyride, Icarus skirting the sun. Like Charlie Chaplin, Richard Pryor ascended from a traumatic childhood to the height of comedic fame, only to fall publicly from grace, with a resurrection waiting at the coda.
At least in documentaries like these.
America loves its poets mad, its artists—especially musicians and comedians—tragic, and America loves a comeback. Part of the reason this tired story arc remains so archetypal is that it’s real: artists who push the limits, the ones we adore most, usually cross the line of social acceptability at some point—and that, leadeth to a fall. Taboos are made to be broken—there’s fascination, even “power” in that—but groundbreaking transgression comes with a price, personal or professional, or both.
Especially when you’re baiting your own audience. As Robin Williams once roasted: “This man’s a genius. Who else could take all the forms of comedy—slapstick, satire, mime, standup—and turn ‘em into something that’ll offend everyone.” At the time, the offense in question was a bit of improv from 1977’s Star-Spangled Night for Rights. A benefit at the Hollywood Bowl, where like Dave Chappelle in recent years, Pryor came under fire for allegedly disparaging the gay rights movement of his day. Echoing Robin Williams, an L.A. Times reviewer marveled: “It takes a certain talent, genius (if you will) to insult 17,000 people – black, white, male, female, straight, gay, rich and poor – at one time.” As with Chappelle, the controversy over Pryor’s remarks is complicated by a closer look at the events surrounding his performance, which are worth reading about - “Richard Pryor: meltdown at the Hollywood Bowl”.
Pryor was the real deal when it came to pushing the limits of what could be said onstage, and to an extreme that’s difficult to fathom, self-immolation offstage. Call it self-sabotage, call it self-respect, it was a basic unwillingness to compromise with anything that set a limit on his vision of comedy. The pride and self-inflicted knee-capping are related. One flows from the other, according to the logic of Omit the Logic.
No sooner has Pryor been given his big break in Las Vegas in 1966, where he attempted to perform tame crossover humor—some of the freshest footage in the film shows a young Pryor, who cut his teeth in Greenwich Village, doing his version of Bill Cosby in black-and-white—no sooner has Pryor tried to play it safe, than his manager receives a call from The Sands hotel and casino: “he’s literally hanging from the chandeliers,” get him the hell out of here. As Cecil Brown paraphrases Pryor’s account of the Vegas meltdown: “I looked at Dean Martin [in the audience] through his own eyes, and saw me, looking like a damn fool”—fuck it. He jettisoned Cosby and compromise. Pryor’s “epiphany” moment, as Bob Newhart remembers: “That was probably when Richard Pryor decided to become Richard Pryor.”
The dynamic repeats itself after Pryor lands his own short-lived series on NBC, The Richard Pryor Show. When the network tried to censor him, cast member Robin Williams recalls, “He went out swinging,” relentlessly pitching inflammatory scripts he knew the network would refuse—so many ribald sketches that the few that slipped by the standards-and-practices goalie were still incendiary, by NBC standards. The show lasted four episodes. Pryor’s contentious relationship with management, coupled with a vicious reputation for substance abuse, had previously cost him a leading role with Warner Bros, after co-writing much of Blazing Saddles (1974) with Mel Brooks.
“His sensitivity made him so brilliant as a comedian,” two-time director Michael Schulz opines, “But some things were so painful that he wanted to be somewhere else.” Whoopi Goldberg adds that it’s often easier for “sensitive types” like Pryor “to self-medicate.” Part of Pryor’s genius, his heightened sensitivity to observation, required being open and vulnerable. But making an audience “brave enough to see themselves” takes unflinching spleen… an operation that sometimes requires anesthesia. In the words of former Universal Studios president Tom Mount, Pryor knew “how to excavate the human soul onstage without blinking.” A heavy statement—leavened with footage of Pryor joking about the time he first discovered masturbation. As if Live on the Sunset Strip were America’s answer to Rousseau’s Confessions—and it probably is.
Tangled up with his reputation for taboo-shattering and soul-surgery: the comedian-as-Trickster. “He was always between worlds,” Lily Tomlin observes; between the mainstream, acceptable white world and the demimonde of Peoria, Illinois, where he grew up. He stirred-up plenty of tricks and trouble moving between the two. Always “Walking the very thin line between what was acceptable on television and [in] his mind,” Bob Newhart explains, over clips of Pryor exchanging racial epithets with Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live—the “word association” (or “Dead Honkey”) sketch from 1975.
Pryor “wasn’t just telling jokes. He was telling stories,” Whoopi Goldberg recalls of his early performances in L.A., a sort of comic bard. An emotional, mesmeric, sometimes ecstatic performer (see “Bowjaws”), who risked everything, including his own life and career, to deliver his version of the gospel truth, warts and all. As a cast mate, “Reverend” David Banks advised in 1977, when he unwittingly gave a name to a 2013 documentary: Don’t try to find any method in Pryor’s madness; “to understand Richard you must first omit logic.”
A father and uncle who were pimps—“not no play pimps. These guys would pimp a Barbie doll,” Banks reiterates. His maternal-figure, grandmother Marie Carter, was the madame. He had his first child at fifteen—“I didn’t know my father was making love to her too,” Pryor informs a recumbent Barbara Walters on national television, interviewer and subject splayed-out on love-cushions. He watched his mother and aunt traipsing behind brothel doors with eager clientele at a young age. As such, “Richard had a pimp’s mentality,” Paul Mooney explains, one reason for his endless string of sabotaged nuptials. (Sad but funny, Jennifer Lee Pryor is identified onscreen as “Wife Number 4 and 7.” As Sandra Bernhard once taunted: “Immediately following the World Series, the reunion of Richard’s ex-wives will be held in Dodger Stadium”). One of the first demographics to embrace him, we’re told, was “pimps and ho’s”—which no doubt contributed to mainstream America’s fascination with Pryor. A comedian navigating his own idiosyncratic, conflicted version of 1970s Black Power, hobnobbing with Hollywood elites, enchanting Dinah Shore, Barbara Walters, and Johnny Carson.
The unconventional upbringing made for more than street cred in his early career; it gave him trenchant insights into human nature, according to Michael Schultz. “When you grow up around a bordello, you see people at their very core … there’s no facade, there’s no masks on.” Pryor’s wheelhouse, it seems, came from a cathouse.
After the debacle in Las Vegas, Pryor disappeared into the wilderness of late-sixties, Sun Ra-era San Francisco. He had no identity (no driver’s license), no bank account, no money. “Richard… [wa]s a superstar all over again. He had a new name. It was Edward or Edwin, or something stupid. He says, I’m gonna come and I’m gonna pretend like I have nothing. And get to know these… people, the hippies. I’m gonna be one of them,” Paul Mooney recalls, with a hint of bemusement. Pryor also rubbed elbows with Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton, and another voice in the film, Black Arts novelist Ishmael Reed. The Berkeley hiatus was a social and artistic experiment, Pryor’s exercise in anonymity and countercultural acceptance on both sides of the new color line. He started to “tip-toe” into using the n* word onstage around this time, a decision that would prove fateful—the taboo, which he was the first to publicly reclaim, then abandon after a soul-searching trip to Africa, is posited as a major source of America’s fascination with Richard Pryor, black and white.
An underground phenom in Berkeley, he moved into “the heart of the beast,” to L.A. and Hollywood. When his shows on Sunset Blvd. opened, the audience swelled with fellow comics who’d gotten wind of his performances by word-of- mouth. He worked without notes, without a net, and no routine, only a trusted “riff here and there,” improvising and “telling stories.” When he got to forty minutes of material, he knew had a show - and a Grammy-winning album to match his releases with Stax records and Warner Bros.
He made his way into motion pictures in a biopic about one of several tragic figures lurking in the documentary and tying Pryor to Afro-American musical tradition, Billie Holiday. In Berry Gordy’s Diana Ross vehicle, Lady Sings the Blues (1972), he was cast as a supporting character, the “Piano Man” to Ross’s Billie Holiday—until director Sidney J. Furie agreed to let Pryor improvise his lines, which was like letting Charlie Parker sit-in on your horn solo, to hear Paul Mooney tell it—“by the time they finished cutting that movie, Richard was costar.” After Warner Bros declined his lead role in Blazing Saddles, a disgruntled Pryor shot-up the voluminous aquarium in his living room, and a painting of Charlie Parker hanging on his wall—right through the heart. His first rush of Hollywood superstardom came with Silver Streak (1976)—“He basically launched a new kind of comedy, the interracial buddy comedy,” Scott Saul says, supporting Leslie Fiedler’s critique of interracial male camaraderie at the heart of American literary fantasy (see: Huck Finn and Jim).
Perhaps the most incredible revelation in Omit the Logic comes from Pryor’s former body guard and associate, Rashon Khan, who witnessed his friend’s near-fatal encounter with flame. Long depicted as a free-basing mishap, Pryor’s self-immolation turns out to be intentionally, if stupidly, symbolic (“Junkies do dumb shit” - Whoopi Goldberg). A biographical revision that buttresses the artist-as-sacrificial-genius trope—one that’s all too real. According to Khan, the two were watching a “Vietnam special” on TV, when stock footage of a Vietnamese monk dousing himself in accelerant before lighting himself on fire to protest the war came onscreen. “He didn’t even flinch,” Pryor allegedly marveled. A few minutes later, after dousing himself in Bacardi 151 in imitation of the holy man, he was running down the hallway. Then a mile and a half further, down the street, “a ball of fire.”
Aside from unblinking chutzpah, his singular stage presence and deep insight, the man set himself on fire, emulating a Buddhist monk. He died and came back to life, and audiences ate it up. (A suicide attempt, Richard admits in an interview, explaining his attempted self-destruction as self-exorcism, or spiritual rebirth: “That man’s dead,” and good riddance; “He was an awful, awful man.”) If that sounds like mere metaphor, the audiences on the Sunset Strip, at least in Omit the Logic, seemed to feel otherwise. It became part of Pryor’s mythical grip on the American imagination, his heroic attempt to overcome… himself. The aftermath is narrated in chilling detail by Pryor himself, in a comeback special where he reenacts the voice of his heart trying to communicate with his brain on the way to the hospital—a different sort of comeback, from death.
Broke and fearing irrelevance, Pryor let a manager convince him to get back onstage too soon. Sober and stricken, he became confused. He started to do his act backwards the first night. Apologizing to an equally-confused but mostly-adoring audience (although, one observer notes, “I thought there was going to be a riot”), Pryor quips— “At least you’re getting to see a motherfucker crucify himself,” onstage. The following evening, as Quincy Jones, Jesse Jackson and others attest in the film, Pryor came back and killed. In a now-canonical Sunset Strip performance, where he put everyone in stitches by describing the most harrowing event in his life, Pryor struck a chord. Repeating a joke others had apparently told at his expense during his convalescence, he struck a match: “What’s this?” he asked, wagging the flaming match head in front of his audience.
“Richard Pryor, running down the street.”
Comedy, lest we forget, is a tricky, dangerous business. Alchemizing anger or pain into ridicule and laughter can get you killed, ask any court jester. But it’s vital to an open society. Revising an old aphorism—in so many words, You got to laugh to keep from crying—Pryor remembers of his upbringing, “Nothing was too sad that some humor could not be found in it.” In the life-advice of one of his most endearing characters, the Old Man: “Keep some sunshine on your face.” It’s advice Richard Pryor often strayed from, but ultimately clung-to in the wake of his diagnosis with MS. When asked how he’d like to be remembered at the end of his life, an older, more peaceful Pryor hoped, “I’d like for people to see my picture and laugh …. to bring joy, that’s how I’d like to be remembered.”
For those who like to see Pryor’s picture and laugh, and remember… watch him bide his time, while friends and colleagues roast him at a cooler temperature, during a wrap for The Richard Pryor Show’s four-episode run in 1977.
Today it’s too hot for TV, or Logic. But it makes for strong medicine.
This is fantastic. Learned a ton. Gotta go on a Pryor bender now.