Review, John A. Williams and Dennis Williams, If I Stop I’ll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, 1991, December 1, 1991

“You all know how black humor started,” Richard Pryor begins his classic routine “Bicentennial Nigger.” “It started on the slave ships. Cat was on his way over here rowing. Dude say, ‘What you laughing about?’ He says, ‘Yesterday I was a king.’”

This line captures the underlying tension of much African-American humor. Laughing at their situation provides blacks an outlet for emotions that otherwise might surface as rage and bitterness. No one represents this tendency better than Pryor. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when expressions of black anger supplanted the earlier civil rights rhetoric of integration and riots ripped through the ghettos of cities across the country, Pryor emerged as a young comedian who somehow accomplished the impossible—he voiced the anger of black Americans while making all Americans, black and white, laugh. As John Williams says in his preface to this biography, “Whatever his topic, Pryor spoke the unspeakable. When he said what we were thinking, he lifted our burden of murderously vengeful thoughts we’d buried without laughter deep within ourselves to his own shoulders for preciously few moments that seemed a lifetime. He gave us motive for feeling and behaving the way we did. That created laughter.”

Williams, an African-American novelist, and his son Dennis, a journalist and novelist, trace Pryor’s career from his childhood in Peoria, Illinois. The dominant influence in Pryor’s early years was his maternal grandmother, Marie Carter Bryant, a strong matriarch who, according to Pryor, managed three houses of prostitution. Pryor’s youth provided the basis for many of his comedy routines. Like Bill Cosby’s characters such as Fat Albert and Weird Harold, the authors say, “Pryor’s people allowed us a look-in at boyhood peers, heroes, neighborhoods; however, there was not the undercurrent of fear and violence in Cosby’s life that we find in Pryor’s.”

Unlike Cosby, and most other black comedians who appealed to white audiences, Pryor spoke the language of the street. His characters were winos, junkies and street-smart raconteurs whose outward bravado masked a fundamental vulnerability. He unabashedly spoke black English, replete with double negatives and peppered with four-letter words. He reflected a tolerant and open view of sex. His ultimate compliment was that something or someone made his penis erect; his ultimate insult was that someone could not have an orgasm (as when he said that Ronald Reagan “looks like a dick. . . . Not even a hard-on”). As Cosby once said, “Richard Pryor is perhaps the only comedian that I know of today who has captured the total character of the ghetto.”

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Pryor’s ghetto persona was his excessive use of the term “nigger.” The word appeared in Pryor’s album titles, such as That Nigger’s Crazy and Bicentennial Nigger, and repeatedly in his routines. In the skit “Have Your Ass Home by Eleven,” the Williamses say, the father calls his son “nigger” approximately every fifth word. Though the term was common in street parlance among blacks, its public use by Pryor in front of white audiences made many blacks uncomfortable.

Pryor’s use of the term reflected long-term historical trends and the growing radicalization of blacks in the 1960s. As the African-American author and civil rights activist Julius Lester has written, “The slave owner profaned the Portuguese word for black, ‘Negro,’ and made it ‘nigger.’ It was a brutal violent word that stung the soul of the slave more than the whip did his back. But the slaves took this ugly word and . . . made it their own. In their mouths it became an affectionate, endearing word. As much as was possible they robbed it of its ability to spiritually maim them.” In the 1960s, blacks hesitantly began using the term in racially-mixed company. Comedian Dick Gregory titled his 1964 autobiography Nigger, writing in his dedication, “Dear Momma—Wherever you are, if ever you hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember they are advertising my book.” Similarly the young African-American author Cecil Brown, a friend of Pryor’s, titled his 1970 novel The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. Pryor’s use of the term, the Williamses say, “exposed the word, pried open its nuances as used between black husband and wife, between white and black (male, female), and between black and black (male).”

The authors say that “the acceptance of Pryor’s comedy by large numbers of contemporary Americans of all colors and creeds indicated that we are capable of understanding, empathy and maybe action that might lead to something better than we now have.” Such a view seems overly optimistic given the human capacity for cognitive dissonance—the ability to simultaneously hold contradictory views. Pryor’s acceptance by white audiences did not necessarily indicate increasing racial tolerance. Spike Lee expressed a more realistic view in his 1989 film Do the Right Thing in which the black character, Mookie, confronts the white racist, Pino, asking who his favorite athlete, movie star and musician are. When Pino responds that they are Magic Johnson, Eddie Murphy and Prince, Mookie says, “Sounds funny to me. As much as you say ‘nigger this’ and ‘nigger that,’ all your favorite people are ‘niggers.’”

It may have been recognition of this cognitive dissonance that led Pryor to drop the term “nigger” from his routines in the early 1980s. The Williamses fail to recognize this possibility, unquestioningly accepting instead Pryor’s own explanation that upon traveling to Africa he had seen that “there were no ‘niggers’ there.”

The book’s major weakness is its failure to place Pryor’s humor in the context of broader African-American history and culture. The authors mention that Pryor is part of a long line of black comedians going back to the vaudeville performer Bert Williams, but they don’t explain the nature of this continuity. For example, they attribute Pryor’s penchant for playing hunted animals to the fact that he enjoyed hunting as a teenager, but fail to point out that weak animals have been a staple of black folk culture at least since the slave tales of Brer Rabbit.

Similarly, the Williamses state that ministers have always played a central role in many black communities and that Pryor frequently parodied black preachers. But the authors go no further in explaining how Pryor’s routines delineated the relationship between ministers and the black community. As the sketch “Bicentennial Prayer” shows, Pryor understands the enormous complexity of this relationship. His black preacher is, by turns, lecherous, greedy, profane and devoted to the needs of his community. Though he frequently is a figure of ridicule, the preacher also serves as the chief interpreter of the black experience to his community, as seen in his refrain, “How long will this bullshit go on?”

The authors tend to focus on the most sensational aspects of Pryor’s career and private life. Considering the subject, it would be difficult not to, since Pryor regularly integrates his most personal experiences into his routines, as in his searingly honest and funny description of his cocaine addiction and freebasing accident in the film Live on the Sunset Strip. As Dennis Williams says in his afterword, “Other comedians play What If; they think of something funny, something that would be absurd or outrageous, and tell the story. Pryor, like a great blues singer, had lived it—at least some of it, we knew—enough to give all his stories the credibility of a survivor bearing witness.”