Seek the Truth

by Yugen Fardan Rashad

Richard Pryor belongs in the Black History Month Hall of Fame. When news broke that the storied comedian and actor had passed at the age of 72, no name came to mind as the next great phenom ready to step into his shoes. Not Chris Rock, Chris Tucker, D L Hughley — nobody. Anybody that considered themselves mildly hip during the tumultuous 60s and 70s laughed at and with Richard. They will tell you Pryor stood alone. He was king of the mountain.

Among the earliest comedians of an era to advance the work of Pigmeat Markham, Moms Mabley, Red Foxx, and later, Lenny Bruce — all considered to vulgar for the mainstream in the 50s.

Pryor would be the first to unabashedly incorporate profanity on the main stage and found a sizeable following in the mainstream. He crossed the race line with his often racially charged repertoire. Like Bruce, he worked the extremes of comedy without fear of censorship and did it with both charm, and chicanery. The secret to his acceptance by a burgeoning mainstream was that Pryor held up a mirror of America, and said LOOK!

Pryor begin to make guest appearances on television variety shows, at one time hosting his own. White audiences that viewed network broadcasts hosted by Bob Hope, Mike Douglas and Dinah Shore soon figured out that Richard Pryor was a crazy Black man with an uncanny talent to make America laugh. He opened the door to a new kind of comic robust, forecast by an earlier generation of comics, but hitting a stride with Pryor.

Soon his contemporaries — Bill Cosby, Dick Gregory, Flip Wilson, Paul Mooney and later Eddie Murphy, expanded the boundaries, working the comic tradition into a lather. Richard brought the razor.

With cutting humor and ghetto street patois, Pryor truly revolutionized American speak and forecast Ebonics long before the ensuing debate in public education. He created a movement with the uniqueness of his soliloquy that glistened with political satire, social protest and poetic narrative. Soon his monologues began to seep into public discourse, introducing a bold and fresh interpretation of Black life that paved the way for rap, or hip-hop music.

Sadly, gangster rap and some hip-hop music re-established boundaries and expanded narrative and sensibilities during the first and second wave in the late 80s, and the decade to follow. That said, most of the vulgarity and misogyny of this music genre owes a big wet kiss to Pryor for making profanity more acceptable as an art form. I would prefer fidelity given the depths we’ve sunk.

Both are wordsmiths with the exception that Pryor’s insults were informed by a wild and insidious lust to search out the humor of life. Rooting out the diversity of life, his skillful cuddle of parody left us in stitches. Rap music in too many ways is the antithesis of Pryor the alchemist and how he used profanity to promote the funny moments of life. You can’t defend rap music’s proclivity to rename female subjects with the B-word. With the recording industry’s embrace of the undertow of American music, it leaves an indelible mark — a new vulgarity that to this day masquerades as artistic expression, and dare we say, music.

This is the margin where the controversy erupts.

Unlike rap, Pryor loaded his monologues with lyrical, rhythmic and colorful word-pictures that illuminated folks living on the edges of society, of low social economic status, but enriched by his accurate representations of Black drama, and gave face and voice to a community. Unlike the wayward narrative rap music glamorizes, Pryor maintained a long memory of a people’s pain. Modern scholarship has looked closely at the Black American oral tradition and its usage.

From the field holler to call and response, these contribute immensely to shape the nomenclature of this tradition of speech. Writes Charles H. Nichols from an essay Comic Modes in Black America: “...They (African Americans) have learned to deal with soul-destroying reality. They have inverted the accepted forms with irony and satire which bare the absurdities of our relationships.”

Pryor gave voice to inner city life, blues, crime and hopelessness, but he also raised the visibility of a subculture of underserved populations with stories to tell.

Word usage, like an Evergreen that stores water, keeps language fresh. Double meanings and nuances of the idiom are what make the oral tradition so valuable. Richard Pryor’s value as an artist is why he belongs in the Black History Month Hall of Fame.

By expanding the borders of comic relief, he also provided an expanded sense of how America saw itself as a culture, a society, a family. May Richard Pryor rest in peace, and he will as long as we don’t forget about the healing powers of humor.

Rashad’s writings deal with culture, aesthetics and spirituality. His topics, opinions and insights pay homage to the scholarly search for truth, which leads to personal responsibility and preservation of community life.