Richard Pryor: ...And It's Deep, Too!

Richard Pryor was one of the funniest and most fearless comedians of the last century, his keenly observed takes on the human condition (particularly scatological and racial matters) influencing every funnyman from open-mic night on up. What made Pryor so special The answers all lie in …And It's Deep, Too!, a valuable but budget-priced nine-disc set that includes each of Pryor's out-of-print Warner Bros. albums, as well as a few bits rescued from the vaults. Through manic anecdotes and carefully orchestrated dialogues, Pryor freed the wild man inside: These weren't performances, they were transformations, and once the audience got into the act, the shows often brushed transcendence. Shocking as much for their candor and verisimilitude as for their sheer profanity, Richard Pryor and That Nigger's Crazy kept no one safe from Pryor's viciously honest and occasionally bitter observations about the differences between whites and blacks. Pryor's bit on the "New Niggers" of Vietnam from 1975's …Is It Something I Said is a scathing and telling take on how racism at home manifests itself as racism abroad, while "Just Us" uses a joke about Nixon in prison as a pretext for assaulting the unjust inequality of sentencing. His powerful delivery induces laughter even without the benefit of his physical contortions, but his seething anger lingers. Pryor peaked with 1979's Wanted: Live In Concert (though his "Prison," "Africa," and "Freebase" routines from the subsequent Live On The Sunset Strip also stand out), but his work continued to resonate in the routines of comedians like Eddie Murphy. But since the master has retired to deal with multiple sclerosis, time has done strange things to Pryor's act (always stories, rarely easy jokes). The cultural offenses that raised Pryor's ire—sparking the rage that forced him to break from Bill Cosby's school of safe comedy and tread radical new ground—still exist, which is why the pointed humor of Chris Rock sometimes sounds like a intentional continuation of Pryor's themes. History may repeat itself once as tragedy and once as farce, but, as the best comedians have demonstrated, there's humor in tragedy. This collection puts both laughter and suffering safely in the context of history.