CONSPICUOUS ENDURANCE

CONSPICUOUS ENDURANCE

RICHARD PRYOR Live On Sunset Strip (Warner Bros.)

Richard Meltzer

I am writing this because Mimi Meltzer (no relation but a name’s a name) recently co-hosted a benefit f'r the Foundation for Burn Research w/the famous artist in question. She got burned on a river-raft trip (July 4, 1980) when a boiling kettle fell on her foot. “I have pain every day,” she is quoted f as saying, but you don’t see her ’ doing an alb about it, interior decor is hr biz. Said artist howev, comedy is his biz, so if low-fat milk & cookies once upon a time blowed up in his face (as he recalls on final routine, side two) you’re gonna hear about it on vinyl, in the privacy of your own home, and get some laughs, watch some TV maybe, and go to bed. Whereas if somebody twisted Mimi’s arm and made her record similar, you would just watch TV and go to bed, maybe call her up in the morning and have her do your drapes.

The poiht(s) being: 1.everybody gets burned and everybody’s funny (I mean right?), but people who are funny for a living can, in the long run or short, manage to have got burned for a living as well (Aristotle,one of the few exceptions to the above—his entire life was not worth 2/5 of a laugh—would call this “adventitious material cause”); 2. lots of people are not as professionally funny as Richard Pryor, live, on record, or in some crummy film, whether their material is “highly personal,” out-in-the-ozone, variations on standard cliche or whatever (Steve Martin fr inst, Martin Mull, the vastly overrated John Belushi, lousy wrestler Andy Kaufman, Lily Tomlin two TV specials out of three, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, forget about lesser jerks like Robin Williams and Billy Crystal, etc., etc., etc.,).

As of April ’82 Richard Pryor is funny, and more to the point he’s funnier. By Hook, crook, and the semi-impressive feat of being marginally less a commodity-for-commodity-sake, he’s outlasted a whole slew of equally overhyped “comic geniuses,” living (although not necessarily stronger than ever) to continue to tell the tale: freebasing your face off is one thing, but surviving showbiz fame & fortune (stand-up comedy still being more heinously “of” the world of mere entertainment than even the unending repulsiveness of rock ’n’ roll) is the true tipoff re this guy’s conspicuous will to endure. Sure he’s made worthless pics w/Gene Wilder and Bill “Eat Your NumNums” Cosby, but at least he hasn’t (yet) surrendered like Woody Allen and pulled the big 180 (for mere wideangle sake), persona-izing the neurotic within who simply hasta be funny and, failing to be so, will shamelessly grovel in the mud for a poignant, non-generic round of claps.

By similar token, the actual mileage he’s getting out of no mo’ coke (routine three, side two) is far less objectionable than the anti-drug shenanigans of Carol Burnett or Mackenzie Phillips, and we can certainly be thankful he hasn’t taken that other fashionably easy lobotomy (y’know: the whole bornagain b.s.) which many others might’-ve opted for in, er, similar circumstances. And while his “highly personal” has gotten a wee bit “merely topical” (coke as a subject matter will do that), he’s still capable of throwing in a merely silly funny-animal number (last cut, side one) just to let you know he’s not George Carlin (or an updated Will Rogers). Plus, even if his hairtrigger self-awareness (final riff on the disc is a “Richard Pryor joke,” one of those post-freebase matchstick laughems) has probably gotten the terminal better of him (life as instant joke—instantly jokified— with all the world presumably laughing), he’s still got years to go before he gets rococo, in that dept, (or be/ore-the-fact) as Charles Bukowski.

So, anyway, there’re still lots of clowns harder to take than Richard Pjyor. If he’s lost anything over the years it’s nothing more crucial than his credentials as an existential hoodoo operative—which isnot quite as bad as, say, losing your soul, and which most “entertainers” (about 110%) never had in the first place (so what the hey).