Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Self-proclaimed comediologist and professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University, Eddie Tafoya makes a case that Live on the Sunset Strip is a modern American answer to Dante’s Inferno. “Just as Dante did for the world at the beginning of the Renaissance, Pryor provides for twentieth-century America a literary and spiritual assessment of the times. “In his immensely entertaining The Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-Up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form, Tafoya breaks Richard’s filmed performance down into twenty-eight separate bits, which he then roughly equates to the Inferno’s thirty-four cantos, and arrives at the conclusion that Richard is perhaps “the only person of the last century able to venture into the depths of this particular Hell.”
Live on the Sunset Strip “belongs to the world of classical literature,” Tafoya writes.
When taken as a single unit, the twenty-eight bits included in the performance tell a story with a classic mythological structure, one that begins with a rebirth and ends with a dual baptism by fire and water, a story that follows closely the initiation-separation-return hero cycle Joseph Campbell describes in his seminal book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
As with Dante, the venture into the Dark Wood is initiated by the loss of female love. Just as Beatrice’s love is lost with her death and then returns with the message from Virgil, Mama Bryant’s love is lost and then resurrected in the person of Jennifer.
Tafoya offers no evidence that Richard had any particular knowledge of or interest in Dante’s fourteenth-century epic. For this, we hold him blameless. The all-embracing scholar Guy Davenport published an essay that laid out in meticulous detail how Eudora Welty had transmuted the symbolism and imagery of the Greek myth of Persephone, queen of the underworld, in her novel Delta Wedding. When they later had occasion to meet, Welty chided Davenport in her playful way that it was news to her that Delta Wedding had anything to do with Persephone. That made no difference at all, Davenport insisted. The story, he said, had known it for her. Stories can do that. Just as Richard’s characters were wiser and more clear-eyed in their understanding of the world than he ever managed to be in navigating in his own life. But when he was all alone in command of a bare stage with no obstacles, he could go with them anywhere and not stumble.
—————
Is stand-up comedy literature? It is if you accept Ezra Pound’s contention that literature is “news that stays news.” The oldest, mustiest, and most venerated literature we have managed to flourish for centuries as popular entertainment, delivered by performers equipped with nothing but breath, gesture, facial expression, and memory.
Is it poetry? Our answer comes, fittingly enough, from Pound’s lifelong friend and sometime tormentor, the physician and poet William Carlos Williams, who, when he wasn’t treating jaundiced factory workers or delivering babies, wrote stanzas such as this, often on the backs of prescription pads while pulled over in his car on the side of a road in Rutherford, New Jersey. “It is difficult to get news from poetry,” he wrote, “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”