Abstract
This chapter argues that Richard Pryor is not a comedian but a conedian and that he does not belong to humanity but to humaniry. Only by taking these two typos seriously, the author suggests, can one conceptualize Pryor’s comic singularity, think his monstrous hilarity. In the 1960s and 1970s Pryor forged a comic subjectivity whose humor seemed to be constantly on the point of combustion. The aim of this chapter is to exhibit this radicality through the construction of a theoretical portrait of his combustible comical substance. The author argues that Pryor engenders a subject that puts the form of humanity itself into question. The blackness of Pryor’s comedy addresses itself to the loss of this form.
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Notes
- 1.
The essay was originally published as Hilton Als, “A Pryor Love: The Life and Times of America’s Comic Prophet of Race,” The New Yorker, September 13, 1999. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/09/13/a-pryor-love. For textual citations of this essay, I refer to the following edition: “A Pryor Love: The Life and Times of America’s Comic Prophet of Race (1999)” (McCluskey 2008, 245–267).
- 2.
Pryor confessed that he was in “awe” of Lily’s performances, of their strange sensuality. Here is Als: “Sensuality implies a certain physical abandonment, an acknowledgement of the emotional mess that oozes out between the seams that hold our public selves together—and an understanding of the metaphors that illustrate that disjunction. (One of Tomlin’s early audition techniques was to tap-dance with taps taped to the soles of her bare feet.) It is difficult to find that human untidiness—what Pryor called ‘the madness’ of everyday life—in the formulaic work now being done by the performers who ostensibly work in the same vein as Pryor and Tomlin” (McCluskey 2008, 249).
- 3.
I am here alluding to both David Felton’s account of Pryor’s fumbling attempt to load and cock a recently purchased weapon and an early episode in Pryor’s life (Felton 1974). After having dropped out of school in the eighth grade, he joined up with some hoodlums and at one point they tried to rob the local store. Catching him with his hand in the till, the shopkeeper simply scolded him, telling him never to return and that he was going to tell his father (Pryor 2018, 60).
- 4.
Her statement in its entirety runs as follows: “They were all like humans. Everybody had these incredible highs and terrible lows, everybody was afraid of something. They could be real petty and ugly, or they could be just real beautiful and uplifting and have wonderful little quirky moments where they made you laugh and other moments where you just hated them. And I saw that nobody knew anything. Nobody knew any answer to anything” (McCluskey 2008, 216).
- 5.
“‘Richard has almost Nietzschean ideals of what is good, what is powerful, what is superior,’ says Brooks. ‘He just reports terribly accurately and does not stretch. When he does a junkie or he does a drunk, he does ’em fuckin’ right on; I mean, that’s it. He gets all the nuances; he gets the breathing right. You say, “I know that guy, that’s true.” And that’s blindingly brilliant and amazing’” (Felton 1974).
- 6.
He follows up this revelation with the following joke: “Family is a mixed blessing. You’re glad to have one, but it’s also like receiving a life sentence for a crime you didn’t commit” (Pryor 2018, 33).
- 7.
See also Maynard (1977).
- 8.
See “Beyond Laughter: zany comic Richard Pryor seeks to solve his own enigma” in Ebony, September 1967, 87, as cited in Saul (2014, 170).
- 9.
Pryor is interested in the way in which truth can put into question one’s belief in it. In Furious Cool, David and Joe Henry report a story that Eldridge Cleaver tells of how the Black Panther Party was given a car by a white man in Berkeley that had Florida license plates. “Once, an Oakland cop stopped him demanding to know who’s car it was. Cleaver told him that a white man from Florida had donated it to the Black Panther Party. ‘You expect me to believe that story?’ the cop said. ‘No white man in his right mind would give the Black Panthers a car.’ Cleaver had a ready reply. ‘Maybe this white man is crazy’” (Henry and Henry 2013, 116).
- 10.
From “John Williams interview with Claude Brown,” recorded July 29, 1983, Box 171 John A. Williams Papers, University of Rochester, as cited in Saul (2014, 252).
- 11.
From “Beyond Laughter: zany comic Richard Pryor seeks to solve his own enigma,” Ebony, September 1967, 90, as cited in Saul (2014, 170).
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Kukuljevic, A. (2019). Richard Pryor, the Conedian. In: Mascat, J., Moder, G. (eds) The Object of Comedy. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_12
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