If I Stop I'll Die, by John A. Williams and Dennis A. Williams
Queenan, Joe
W hether its subject is Eastern European totalitarianism, Watergate, colitis, the rise and fall of Freddie Prinze, or Sudanese irrigation projects, no genuinely awful book can be deemed completely...
...Or walk it like he talks it...
...So while it's easy to understand the use of the word "comedy" in the book's title, it is less easy to understand the use of the word "tragedy...
...Pryor himself sired and abandoned a child while still in his teens, nearly killed himself in a 1980 accident while freebasing cocaine, and lately has been stricken by multiple sclerosis...
...If I Stop Die The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor is a bad, pretentious book that fails to do justice to one of the funniest people America has produced...
...On albums such as Bicentennial Nigger and Is It Something I Said?, Pryor tore into everything and everybody—ghetto preachers, rock stars, heroin addicts, Republicans—but very little of Pryor's high-energy comedy comes through in the Williamses' dour book...
...Written by a father-and-son team (the older Williams, John, is the author of such novels as The Man Who Cried I Am, while son Dennis is a former Newsweek reporter), the book attempts to explain how Pryor, a militant child of the civil rights movement, who built his reputation by bringing the ghetto into America's living rooms, could Joe Queenan is a frequent contributor to Barron's and other publications...
...Finally, for a pair of devotees who claim to be hooked on Pryor's down-home comedic style, the Williamses are anything but loose...
...This isn't Paul Robeson we're talking about here...
...Since 1968, Pryor has appeared in forty-one films, almost all of which are absolutely dreadful...
...end up making so many dreadful movies in which he incarnated the very same racial stereotypes that he ridiculed on stage: the hustler, the con man, the pimp...
...his mother may have worked as a prostitute...
...Jacques we're talking about here...
...But just to be on the safe side, they have also referred to Aristophanes (the Greek comic playwright), Plautus (the Roman Neil Simon), and intellectual heavy hitters on the order of George Meredith, Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, and Gregory Peck...
...John A. Williams and Dennis A. Williams are aware of this dictum, and they dutifully cite both Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre in their magically stupid new book...
...There are, first off, the recurrent tragedies and upheavals in Pryor's own life: his grandmother ran a bordello...
...This isn't Raymond St...
...Let's get some historical perspective on this...
...I'm impressed...
...Pryor achieved renown in the sixties and early seventies with hilarious routines about Richard Nixon's first day in an all-black prison, or a wino meeting Dr...
...The comic has gone through wives the way some people go through socks, and has clearly been disappointed by his failure to attain the kind of wealth, acclaim, artistic independence, and overall power achieved by Bill Cosby and Eddie Murphy...
...IF I STOP I'LL DIE: THE COMEDY AND TRAGEDY OF RICHARD PRYOR John A. Williams and Dennis A. Williams Thunder's Mouth Press/234 pp...
...This, of course, is the same white society that held a gun to John Belushi's head and forced him to appear in Caddyshacic Animal House, and 1941, the same white society that forced Chevy Chase to make twenty bad movies, Dan Aykroyd eighteen, Bill Murray twelve and counting...
...Hyde, or a black drunk giving a black junkie advice on how to impress white people...
...Consider this passage, in which they discuss syntactical nuances in the work of the iconoclastic stand-up comic: The double negative flourished in writing as well as in speech, an example of which is Pryor's "I don't wanna be no accident...
...W hether its subject is Eastern European totalitarianism, Watergate, colitis, the rise and fall of Freddie Prinze, or Sudanese irrigation projects, no genuinely awful book can be deemed completely idiotic unless it contains at least one passing reference to "the banality of evil" and "bad faith...
...The authors are correct in accusing Hollywood potentates of refusing to make intelligent movies...
...The notable exceptions are Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, a 1982 release that captures the comic's brilliance as a live performer, and passable commercial fare such as Silver Streak Uptown Saturday Nighty Superman III, and Stir Crazy...
...All this in a biography of the now-fading stand-up comic, movie star, cokehead, weapons-code violator, and failure-topay-child-supporter Richard Pryor...
...which was finally rendered as "Zappening...
...Your Life Is Calling...
...I be walking" was more powerful—and picturesque—than "I am walking...
...In none of the commercial films does Pryor strike the viewer as a surpassingly talented actor...
...If Pryor ended up losing that beat, it was because of his failure to walk it like you talk it...
...Or something...
...This isn't James Earl Jones we're talking about here...
...he simply gives the impression of being a black Bob Hope or Bill Murray—a funny man doing an adequate job in a profession that is not his true calling...
...The authors conclude that white Hollywood, and, by extension, all of society, is responsible for Pryor's appearance in such numskulled films as Dynamite Chicken, Car Wash, Greased Lightning Wholly Moses, Bustin' Loose, The Toy, Harlem Nights, and Jo Jo Dancer...
...But they are incorrect in accusing them of doing this because they are racists...
...But again, we come back to the same point: there are no laws on the books forcing adults to appear in movies with names like You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose That Beat...
...Are we supposed to think Pryor is a tragic figure because he never got to play Othello...
...They do this because they are morons...
...yielded "What's happening...
...19.95 Joe Queenan 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991...
...Two or three words were converted to one: "What is happening...
...The intransitive verb, be—to exist not only in actuality, but also in a specific place and time—became the hippest way to use the verb am...
...Jekyll and Mr...
...I be impressed...
...Hell, Billy Dee Williams can out-act this guy...
Vol. 24 • September 1991 • No. 9
