Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen PRYOR RESTRAINT UP FROM BURNOUT POOR JOHN BELUSHI. He turned out not to be as funny as we thought he was. (They could write that on his tombstone.) The same thing almost happened to...
...We are accustomed to comics who take all manner of liberties with life, who treat us to the most grotesque and far-out views of it imaginable, without having anything like Pryor's credentials for doing so...
...He does a whole skit as a Mafioso...
...Back in the slammer...
...This makes us say it with a hush, as if we can't believe it either - that he's still alive...
...I like Pryor...
...Most comics talk about generic experiences, things that might have happened anywhere, any time...
...That's what Pryor himself has done...
...He talks about making Stir Crazy, for instance, one anecdote concerning a real convict he met while shooting the film at an Arizona prison...
...The gangsters in Hero aren't quite that affable, but everyone else is, from Eddie's hooker girlfriend (Margot Kidder) to the rat in his cell in Vietnam...
...Pryor continues to do the whole repertoire of ethnic types - Mafiosi and blacks and WASPs and Mudball...
...He might tell a joke with a bitter edge to it, as when he explains why eighty percent of inmates in Arizona prisons are black...
...Pryor is well aware that he's been born again for his fans, and he's no dummy...
...That someone who has virtually come back from the dead should take such a normative, unremarkable view of life seems very encouraging...
...Yet Pryor himself does not do so, amazingly...
...There is something almost symbolic about his having burned off his skin, for he's never had a specifically black identity as a comic...
...All the laughs before then he turns into the chuckles of anticipation a good comic can get out of us while he builds up to the punchline...
...he asked a black mass murderer...
...Doing so gives the impression that this rather slow-witted character thinks everything he says is a real gem...
...I think he's funny...
...His comedy still aspires to the universal humanity they represent, and now he's had perhaps the only human experience that might validate such routines...
...They bus them in...
...He's still not the kind who pretends to be a soul brother of convicts, or of blacks in general...
...Pryor comments, mocking his own naivete, "I always thought black people only killed people by accident...
...This does give them a new dimension, a certain resonance and bounce they never had before...
...Pryor was able to handle two productions simultaneously because Eddie Keller, the hero of Hero, requires no transition from being Richard Pryor...
...In the ads for this movie, the word "live" in the title is in a different type, as if spelled out in light bulbs...
...Keller also comes back from the dead, so to speak, when he returns after six years as a POW in Vietnam...
...So he bought this devil suit to come back from the dead in...
...This man had been sentenced to life three times over, which means, Pryor surmises, that if the man returned after death he would have to start serving another term...
...A lot of his humor is anthropomorphic because he can create different voices for animals and objects ranging from a cheetah he saw in Africa to the cocaine pipe that blew up in his face...
...Pause...
...Pryor's facial features don't seem to belong to just one race, and he has an ear for other ethnic accents...
...In Richard Pryor Live on Sunset Strip , he comes back in a blaze of glory again...
...Scriptwriters James Kirk wood and Robert Boris have put Eddie in a world where Richard Pryor can feel right at home...
...Turning this story toward speculation about what happens when somebody comes back from the dead is Pryor's way of teasing us for wanting to hear about his experience...
...But he quickly shrugs off a militant posture...
...He knows that they're the ones everybody is waiting for...
...He looks as if he died and went to hell, and found the same men's clothing stores there that they have on Rodeo Drive...
...He saves the gags about his self-incineration for the end...
...The same thing almost happened to Richard Pryor, you know...
...Even that Mafioso Pryor mimicks makes sweet with him when Pryor is stupid enough to pull a gun in order to collect a nightclub fee...
...But not quite...
...The only wisdom Pryor has to offer is that, as he says at one point in his monologue, "People are the same everywhere...
...He's a sunset on the Strip all by himself, a dazzling ball of fire...
...Nonetheless, I have to admit that his brush with death does bring a certain patina, a new aura, to his work...
...Magic is a word thrown around a lot in show biz, but Pryor's magic is now enhanced by a more potent kind, the sort you have to have not to die when you burn up...
...No kindergarten for you, sonny...
...He has the license of Lazarus...
...The deliberateness of the delivery makes the banality of the observations funny...
...Cause I did the 100 in 4.3...
...Except for this one ol' wino who wanted a light.'' Pryor staggers around the stage as if pursuing himself with a cigarette in his mouth: " 'Just le 'me get a li'loff the sleeve!' " This is pretty good material, and Pryor does work up to it deftly...
...It's the expressiveness of his voice and face that make the material funny, not anything inherently wild or crazy in the material itself...
...Now that he's actually spent time with some of them, he feels better about having jails...
...He has gone to the other side, and come back the same good-natured goof he always was...
...It certainly brings a new level of rapture to his audience, which clearly loved this film beyond all reason...
...Pryor is such a ball of fire now that he is currently in two movies at once...
...They was home' " was the reply...
...When he does "Mudball," a good ol' boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, who has been one of his staples, Pryor purses his lips and chews on his Southern accent...
...His comedic skill is that of the raconteur...
...Freaked out, Eddie robs a securities courier, and then has to fence the proceeds to some dangerous Mafia types...
...Yet, like Pryor himself, Eddie leads a charmed life...
...Nor does he take off only blacks, as Flip Wilson does...
...They should use it in the Olympics...
...He's a comic who's never been "burned up" in the other sense of being mad at the world...
...In fact, when he steps onto the stage at the beginning, he looks as if he is the blaze of glory...
...What happens, the gag suggests, is that you just go on as before...
...He OD-ed...
...The ones that work in the airports in Africa f- over your luggage just like they do in New York...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...A few years ago he did one of these performance films, and I found it amusing, but not great...
...Having burnt himself half to death with cocaine, Pryor could step on stage in Richard Pryor Live and say anything he wanted, and we would go along with him...
...He damn near went out in a blaze of glory...
...One thing about when you're running down the street on fire, people get out of your way...
...In Pryor's monologue in Richard Pryor Live the world is pretty benevolent despite one's troubles...
...The second is Michael Pressman's Some Kind of Hero...
...But I've never thought he was off the charts, absolutely hilarious...
...He's wearing a bright red suit, a black silk shirt, and gold shoes...
...I feel much the same about the new film...
...Fire is inspirational," he finally says...
...Having lost his best friend (Ray Starkey) there, Eddie comes home to learn that he has lost his wife, his mother, and all his money, including the back pay the army owes him...
...None of life's hassles ultimately seem worse to him than that battered luggage...
...Ain' no black people in Arizona...
...Why'd you kill everybody in the house...
...His humor hasn't been angry, and it's been especially free from black anger...
...But Pryor makes clear early in his monologue that he will talk specifically, about things that could have happened only to him...
...He says that he's always been indignant about how many black people are in jail...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 9
