Richard Pryor’s First Stand-Up Special, ‘Live In Concert’, Remains His Best

Our favorite movies and music we can go back to whenever we want to find comfort, solace or escape. Comedians do that for us, too, in the here and now – although comedy, unlike other performing arts, doesn’t always hold up the same over time. Some jokes reference fleeting fads that make little sense decades later. Some work once or twice but lose their impact upon repeated listening. Some pushed envelopes then, but don’t seem so edgy or revolutionary now that everyone else does it; while others feel outdated or behind the times of current society. With that in mind, we bring you Humor in Hindsight, an ongoing column devoted to stand-up specials and comedy documentaries streaming online that, much like wine or cheese, give us more texture and better perspective with age.

Ask popular comedians to name the best working stand-up today, and many of them would say Dave Chappelle. Best ever, though? For that, Chappelle himself calls Richard Pryor the undisputed king.

Chappelle said that in the opening minute of the 2013 documentary, Richard Pryor: Omit The Logic. The late Robin Williams called Pryor the John Coltrane of comedy, and the film goes to Whoopi Goldberg and more to help cement Pryor’s legendary status and place in the pantheon of punchline-makers. That they repeat these declarations over scenes from Pryor’s 1979 concert film, Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, is no accident.

Although Robert Klein and George Carlin had filmed stand-up specials earlier in the decade for HBO, never before Pryor in 1979 had a stand-up performance been captured specifically for the cinema-going box-office. In many respects, Live in Concert – recently added to Netflix – remains first not only in chronological order, but also first among his present and future peers. As Chris Rock wrote on his website: “This is what every comic is striving for and we all fall very short. The perfect concert.”

Patton Oswalt, winner of this year’s Emmy for his Netflix special, Talking For Clapping, wrote last year of Pryor’s film that “it was something that woke up more shit in my head than most other movies I’d seen, you know, where they’re just throwing a lot of different visual things at you. It wasn’t just the social stuff he was doing in his act, either; it was the way he’d give the wind a personality, or a dog a personality, or a car he was shooting with a gun a personality! They way Pryor was vocalizing all this stuff, he was making me see a film in my head.”

Since Pryor broke new ground by putting his stand-up in movie theaters, the 78-minute performance directed by Jeff Margolis doesn’t employ any of the more common tricks of contemporary comedy specials. No opening sketches or montages, no cutaways to audience members bowled over in laughing fits, no showstopping set pieces, neither pomp nor circumstance. No need, even, to turn the house lights down, no need to introduce him. Pryor just strode onstage while audience members milled about, and microphone in hand, proceeded to deliver live commentary on his audience as they scrambled back to their seats from intermission.

Pryor thanked Patti LaBelle for performing beforehand, and text in the credits had informed us that she “was an important part of the following program,” but added, “Time does not permit us to include her in this recording.” That doesn’t seem as likely upon retrospect, when we have all the time in the world, but duly noted.

If you think giving every audience member a phone that records audio and video with the ability to upload it immediately to YouTube and everywhere else is a scourge upon the art of live stand-up comedy, then you’ll do well to remember – even in December 1978, even the most venerated comedian could and did find his act derailed in the opening minute by a lone guy with a flash Kodak camera, not only stalking him in front of the stage while snapping several pics, but also extending his hand and receiving a handshake from Pryor before retreating into the darkness.

Pryor used the moment to segue into a bit about how amusing white guys are when they cuss. He’s an OG when it came to white people do this, but black people do this material in comedy. Only Pryor never said black, of course. He titled three of his albums with the N-word, and made the racial slur so mainstream he almost got Dinah Shore to say it while interviewing him and definitely had Johnny Carson referencing it, as well as Chevy Chase in an all-time classic Saturday Night Live sketch.

But Pryor’s vulgarity didn’t strike as much of a chord with audiences and comedians alike as did his honesty, sincerity, and through both, his vulnerability onstage that set him apart from Bill Cosby. In his first TV appearances, Pryor had gone out of his way to be another Cosby, mimicking his tendencies and sometimes also parroting his premises. Only when he realized that growing up in a bordello raised by his grandmother, he couldn’t be true to himself by trying to be a clean-cut Cosby clone; only then could he get himself fired from Vegas and find himself in San Francisco among the hippies. Only then could he become the comedy voice for his own generation, as well as the one that followed.

All that sex and all those drugs wreaked havoc on his personal life, but he realized nobody else could or would talk about those experiences onstage like he could and did.

He had shot up his house, putting bullets in his fish tank and a pricey painting after Warner Bros. executives ousted him from a starring role in Blazing Saddles. Four years later, he’d fire his gun into two of his own cars following a domestic dispute that got him arrested. He’d also recently recovered from a heart attack.

So he wasn’t blowing smoke when he said in Live in Concert: “And I am really personally happy to see anybody come out and see me, right? Especially much as I done fucked up this year.” He expressed his desires to never interact with police again, and in words as regrettably relevant now as they were then, he joked that cops carry guns, too. “They don’t kill cars. They kill nig-gars,” drawing out the latter word to achieve the rhyme.

What nonchalance he had back then, describing police killing black men by shooting them and by choking them, and noting how only the white audience members ever react with surprise.

You want to debate the propriety of rape jokes? Pryor had one and only one in his first film, and he used it to say rape is so vile of a crime in robbing women of their humanity, suggesting women at least have the recourse of locking up their vaginas to arrest the rapist in the act.

You want to debate the propriety of inserting politics into stand-up? With only 10 minutes to go in his performance, Pryor paused for water and asked for the house lights to come up, publicly acknowledging the co-founder of the Black Panthers, Huey P. Newton, and asking him to stand. “Thanks for coming, Huey. I’m happy that you’re here,” Pryor said.

You want glimpses of influences? When Pryor demonstrates how to react to a snake in the woods, he walks confidently by in the same “We Bad” manner he’d teach Gene Wilder to go Stir Crazy in prison. You can hear inflections in Pryor’s voice and impersonations that rubbed off a few years later on Eddie Murphy.

And those personalities Pryor vocalized that caught Oswalt’s attention when he was only a teen? Pryor acts out dialogues with himself, with nature, with animals, and later with his angels and demons. Most memorably, perhaps, when Pryor recalled the fear of his first heart attack – not overacting it out a la Redd Foxx in Sanford and Son, but as a play-by-play act out that finds him lying on the stage floor, talking to his heart, to God, and to the angels guarding the gates of Heaven. He joked about wanting to die as his father had, of a heart attack at 57 while having sex with an 18-year-old, but vowed that his grandmother, Marie, had recently lectured him into quitting cocaine.

Now we know that Richard Pryor filmed Live in Concert just three weeks after his grandmother had died, and that he had flown back and forth to Peoria to sit bedside with her in the weeks before that. Without her presence to ground him, Pryor would float ever more toward his vices and away from his virtues.

He took a trip to Africa and vowed to stop using the N-word in his comedy. He tried launching a movie production studio, but failed to deliver on its hopes and aims to have black-owned, black-made films to won over the mainstream.

He did film two more stand-up concerts for the cineplexes, 1982’s Live on the Sunset Strip, and 1983’s Here and Now. The former is most remarkable for our knowledge now that he initially bombed, only to return the following night for a do-over that found him ready and able to make light of his professional and personal shortcomings, including his cocaine relapses and the day he attempted suicide by setting himself on fire. Multiple sclerosis weakened Pryor in his final two decades, and it was indeed a heart attack that killed him on Dec. 10, 2005. He was 65.

But watching Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, you’re immediately taken back to a time when Pryor reigned supreme, and jokes that prove as timeless and remarkable now as when he first delivered them almost four decades ago.

[Watch Richard Pryor: Live in Concert on Netflix]

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.