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Richard Pryor: Live in Concert |
by Rob Gonsalves
"The greatest comedy concert film ever made."

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In 'Richard Pryor: Live in Concert,' the eponymous great comedian drops what has become euphemistically known as âthe N-wordâ forty-two times.The word, in Pryorâs hands, becomes a rueful acknowledgment of fellowship, of shared indignity and terror and general craziness connected with being black in a racist white society. Occasionally he puts it in the mouth of a white person, but most often Pryor uses it interchangeably with âbrother.â (As a man in the â70s, Pryor was not especially enlightened on matters of feminism â but that doesnât mean he was unconcerned with womenâs struggles, either.)
Eventually, in his later concert film Live on the Sunset Strip, Pryor talked about his trip to Africa, and said âI ainât gonna never call another black man a nââ. You know, âcause we never was no nââs. Thatâs a word thatâs used to describe our own wretchedness.â In the 1979 film, though, Pryor is (and would later remain) conversant with his own wretchedness â his embarrassing, screwed-up humanity, the ways in which he was down in the dirt with the rest of us. He was the first to call himself out, and he fashioned his foibles into poetry. Live in Concert is not art as filmmaking â director Jeff Margolis, who has helmed TV specials and awards shows for decades, basically just keeps Pryor in focus. Itâs the text, the material, that I value as art, as literature, as hilarious and heartbreaking memoir.
Pryor flits from subject to subject, but the jewel in the crown of Live in Concert is his account of his heart attack, in which Pryor famously gives voice to himself and to his own aggrieved heart (âYou thinkinâ about dyinâ now, ainât you?â the organ growls as it goes into cardiac arrest; âYou didnât think about it when you was eatinâ all that porkâ). Pryor will occasionally lapse into a truism â âThe hospital ainât no place to get wellâ â and then chase it with âYou can die in there and nobody give a fuck,â something so bleak and blunt it forges its own hilarity. In reviewing Sunset Strip, Pauline Kael â a big fan of Pryor â somewhat uncharitably noted that his routine about his self-immolating suicide attempt (which he passed off then as an accident) couldnât help but be a pale echo of the earlier heart-attack bit. But Pryor so often abused his own body, as if in twisted solidarity with his abusers from his childhood, that it was inevitable that he should work up comedy about his own physical self-disrespect.
When Pryor hops from being Pryor to being his heart to being an indifferent phone-operator angel in heaven, heâs firing on all cylinders and doing what he did better than anyone â breathing life into people and things, animate and inanimate, raising monkeys and dogs and deer and car tires to his own level of awareness â sharp, paranoid, lowdown and unsentimental. Pryor, especially here, doesnât do anything so mundane as tell jokes. He embodies; he inhabits. Sometimes, not to get offensively voodoo-mystical about it, he seems to channel alien consciousness and reinterpret it through his own wounded yet tickled human experience.
Pryor creates for us an entire world, in seventy-some minutes, with just a microphone â a world of danger and rage, yes, but also one of mitigating ironies. âI woke up in an ambulance, right,â he says after his heart punks out on him. âAnd there wasnât nothing but white people staring at me. I said, Ainât this a bitch. I done died and wound up in the wrong motherfuckinâ heaven.â For Pryor, whose art and viewpoint were so snugly connected to his experience as a black man, ending up in white heaven (âNow I got to listen to Lawrence Welk the rest of my daysâ) would have been the ultimate indignity and joke.Pryorâs comedy draws on deep African and African-American traditions of folklore, storytelling, playing the dozens, anthropomorphism. He was an original, a visionary, a crowded house of voices â an American sangoma, healing with visions and laughter and empathy, divining by throwing his own bones.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=2933&reviewer=416 originally posted: 04/04/07 06:09:54
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USA 02-May-1979 (R) DVD: 01-Aug-2006
UK N/A
Australia N/A
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