(And really damned funny.)
When I was a kid, Richard Pryor’s stand-up was the forbidden fruit of comedy. You might know somebody who had a couple of Cheech & Chong tapes or someone else who’d managed to acquire some Eddie Murphy, but Pryor was a rarity. So uncommon was actual audio that his routines became aural documents passed along playground blacktops via word-of-mouth. The result was a sizable band of little white kids with a more than rudimentary understanding of Mudbone, winos and junkies, but no actual first-hand experience with the source material.
It’s not like we didn’t know who Richard Pryor was. We’d seen him in films on pay television. Not a weekend went by when there wasn’t another showing of The Toy or Silver Streak or that movie where he has to drive a whole school bus full of ornery kids while avoiding some elaborate pyramid scheme … you know the one. And sometimes we’d see him on a rerun of “Saturday Night Live,” but they didn’t allow cursewords on NBC, so it really didn’t count towards suitable playground jokery.
The real deal, the actual jokes and stories, would be denied us directly. Until we grew up and had our own money to spend, we had only each other to depend on for those courser pieces of the Richard Pryor Gospel.
And behalf of your pre-teen followers at Cloud Springs Elementary and Lakeview Junior High, thanks.
Today’s Track: “Wino Dealing With Dracula (1974)” — reissued in 2000 on disc one of The Anthology (1968-1992).
