PART ONE
“Get out!”
That whispery, strangulated voice belongs to an emaciated and prematurely frail Richard Pryor doing a dead-on impersonation of the demonic spirit from The Amityville Horror. He was in a good mood, playfully dismissing the questions put to him by Peoria Journal Star columnist Phil Luciano backstage at Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall on New Year’s Eve 1992 midway through a comeback tour that would prove to be his last.
Once upon a time a lanky and loose-limbed Richard had bounded onto the stage with acrobatic grace, shape-shifting himself into all manner of people and things: pious preachers, rum-soaked raconteurs, white guys on acid, drunken brawlers, drooling junkies, angry black militants, bullet-punctured automobile tires, an infant at the moment of birth, a deer alerted by the sounds of hunters crunching leaves in the forest, copulating monkeys, police dogs, an especially potent strain of a Vietnamese venereal disease—even his own heart as it threatened to kill him, forcing him down on one knee to beg for his life. But on this night he made his way across the stage in cautious, shuffling steps, flanked by an alert pair of handlers, one on each arm. Universally hailed as the greatest stand-up of all time, he performed this final tour sitting down.
More than thirty-seven hundred people paid $37.50 apiece to see what reviewers of earlier stops on the tour had warned would be a brief, disjointed performance. During his show at Detroit’s State Theatre, he had struggled to read from cue cards fanned out on the floor in front of him while a onetime fiancée in the audience fought back tears. Kicking off the tour in San Francisco months earlier, he had trembled visibly and slurred his words. And when he segued into his most famous character, the street-wizened Mudbone, he barely needed to alter his voice. After a mere twenty minutes, he had to be assisted off the stage to prolonged applause. People were just happy to see him, to thank him. That was all. But on this particular night in D.C., he showed more of his old self, lasting a full forty-five minutes. He seemed stronger, funnier, as he confronted the ravaging effects of multiple sclerosis head-on. “I got some shit here that fucks with me real bad. This is a thing, like, God said to me, ‘Slooow down.’ Well, fuck, I was going that fast?”
Onstage, the man was fearless, prepared to reveal anything. During his show at the Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos, California, a woman in the audience called out, “Does that shit mess with your sex life?” and he ran with it.
It’s something when your dick be hard, then look at you and laugh and go away and go, “Aw, fuck it.” And it looks like my dick gets scared to death when it sees some pussy. My dick gets hard sometimes, like I get ready to play and masturbate, and my dick will look at me like, “Come on, Rich . . .” It’s a bitch when your dick get hard and there’s nothing you can do but say, “I can remember . . .” And I have it in my hand. I know I’ve got it! And the dick be waiting for me to stroke it so it can die. You guys are laughing but I’m telling you this shit fuck with your johnson!
There’s something that happens to your bladder. I can be out on Sunset talking with eight or nine womens and I start pissin’. That shit be running down my boots . . . I say, “Damn, baby . . .” She say, “It’s alright.” How come people always say it’s alright when it ain’t them? And you have piss trailing a mile and a half.
After the D.C. show, Richard’s face lit up when an assistant introduced Luciano to him backstage.
“Really? You’re from the Star?”
Up close, he seemed smaller than he had on stage. His fifty-one-year-old body scarred by third-degree burns and ravaged by the early onset of multiple sclerosis, his rheumy eyes magnified by oversized glasses that dwarfed his shrunken but still-iconic face. The star seemed genuinely awed that a writer from his hometown paper would come all this way to see his show.
Within moments, though, a swarm of hangers-on invaded the room and he was back on again, performing for the benefit of the room, cracking one-liners in answer to Luciano’s questions, killing any chance for a genuine exchange between the two.
Asked about his health, Richard deadpanned, “I’m gonna die one day.”
“Do you feel happy?”
“I’m here,” he said, “so I’m all right.”
And so on.
That final question Luciano put to him was this: “Do you have any message for the folks back in Peoria?”
Richard answered in his horror-movie rasp: “Get out!”
That was it. Get out.
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“My home’s in Peoria,” he told a sparse crowd at the hungry i in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in 1966. “Whatever you think of when you hear the name, that’s what it’s like.”
Usually, people applaud when an entertainer mentions his hometown. If it’s Brooklyn, the crowd goes wild. But Peoria? “Last night,” he told them, “somebody threw up.”
Peoria. That famously average embodiment of Middle American values, three-time winner of the National Civic League’s All-America City Award. Peoria has long been a demographer’s dream, a city-sized applause meter reliably registering what the great unwashed will embrace or believe, what they will buy and what they won’t. As the largest city on the Illinois River, it was a major stop for musicians and vaudeville troupes traveling between Chicago and St. Louis. In the days of vaudeville the old saw was that if an act went over in Peoria, it would play anywhere. Hence, “Will it play in Peoria?” became a catchphrase of the uniquely American theatrical phenomenon that evolved out of blackface minstrelsy, medicine shows, olio, and dime museums and provided a livelihood for itinerant jugglers, plate spinners, ventriloquists, crooners, baggy-pant comics, acrobats, barbershop quartets, hoochie-coochie dancers, human oddities, and animal acts for nearly a century, roughly from the mid-1800s through the 1930s when radio stole America’s heart away and held it hostage in front rooms and parlors. Unlike vaudeville itself, the phrase has endured on Madison Avenue and in political campaigns.
Peoria prided itself in being seen as a model city, a coded phrase that meant, “We have our Negroes under control,” Richard would often say. Yet things were decidedly more lax on North Washington Street where Richard spent his childhood. Hookers, winos, gamblers, musicians, politicians, and street-corner men populated both Pop’s Pool Hall, owned by his grandfather, and the brothels run by his grandmother. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Peoria was awash in gambling halls, speakeasies, whorehouses, and corruption, a haven for gangsters and bootleggers. Known as Roaring Peoria, it was “a wide-open river town in the old meaning of the word,” says retired police chief Allen Andrews.
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In a 1977 New York Times profile headlined “Richard Pryor, King of the Scene Stealers,” author Joyce Maynard wrote, “Pryor has been given to saying that he was raised in a brothel, which is evidently not the case.”
Maynard gave no reason for doubting the stories Richard told of his upbringing, but she wasn’t the only one. Perhaps the idea that a red-light district could prosper openly in America’s model city during the wholesome Eisenhower era simply beggared belief. Yet a federal report issued in the early 1950s cataloged 132 brothels operating in and around Peoria’s “Aiken Alley” alone.
Aiken Alley was not an alley at all but the popular name given to a notorious stretch of Aiken Avenue that ran west from Briss Collins’s tavern at the corner of Franklin and Jefferson, down to where it intersected with Reed Street.
Whorehouses such as the ones Richard’s grandmother ran weren’t just outlets for illicit sex; they were part of the fabric that held African American neighborhoods together. Playwright and performance artist Jovelyn Richards learned the lore of brothels from one of those prostitutes who went by the name of Satin Doll, immortalized in song by Duke Ellington.
The madam and the other ladies took care of the community around them, of the families of the women whose men didn’t have steady work . . . The madam would pay the grocery store to deliver eggs and milk to families, and loved the fact they didn’t know where these were coming from, that they could make up their own stories about how the box of groceries or the coal got to be on the front porch.
As a child of the fifties, Richard felt a mind-messing disconnect between his own surroundings and life as depicted on TV shows such as The Life of Riley and Father Knows Best. “On television people talked about having happy lives,” he wrote in Pryor Convictions, “but in the world in which I grew up, happiness was a moment rather than a state of being. . . . It never stayed long enough for you to get to know it good. Just a taste here and there. A kiss, a sniff, a stroke, a snort.”
The gleaming postwar automobiles, big as boats, favored by the city’s upper crust, would likely have drawn attention in a neighborhood like Richard’s had they not been such a commonplace sight parked along the curb. Onstage, years later, Richard would recall playing in his front yard when some untouchable white man would “drive up and say, ‘Hello, little boy, is your mother home? I want a blow job.’
“That,” said Richard, “was our mayor.”
The joke was barely an exaggeration. Mayor Edward Nelson “Dearie” Woodruff, who served eleven terms as Peoria’s mayor over the course of nineteen elections spanning forty-two years, presided over a brazen administration that imposed a strict schedule of “fines” for various illegalities, including, but not limited to, gambling and prostitution. The mayor famously defended the city’s thriving brothel trade by saying, “You can make prostitution illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular.” One December, when the city council authorized a crackdown on the red-light district, the mayor objected on moral grounds, arguing that it would be “unchristian” to shutter the brothels so close to Christmas.
To give Peoria its due, let it be said that Abraham Lincoln publicly denounced slavery for the first time in a speech delivered there in 1854. The first African American ever to vote in the United States cast his ballot in Peoria on April 4, 1870. The original mold strain for penicillin was discovered in Peoria. And, in 1945, early civil rights activist Rev. C. T. Vivian joined forces with Barton Hunter, a white minister at West Bluff Christian Church, in leading a nonviolent direct-action campaign to integrate Bishop’s Cafeteria on Main Street. Vivian and Hunter organized their efforts a full decade before Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery bus boycott following Rosa Parks’s refusal to comply with a Jim Crow law that required her to give up her seat to a white man. That she did so on Richard Pryor’s fifteenth birthday hardly seems worth noting, but there it is. As John Cage said: “Everything we come across is to the point.”
Peoria is also the city where Paul Robeson was banned from performing a concert just two days after the House Committee on Un-American Activities cited him a Communist Party sympathizer, where a fourteen-year-old Charles Manson served his first jail time for robbing a grocery store, and where Richard Pryor’s 1993 comeback tour abruptly fizzled out for lack of ticket sales.
Buoyed by big turnouts elsewhere along the tour and by the outpouring of affection from his audiences, Richard agreed to an additional string of midwestern dates. Among them was a June 11 show at the Peoria Civic Center, marking what would be his first hometown performance in nearly twenty years. But, then, just three days before the date, Richard abruptly canceled the show, along with the remainder of his tour. Clearly stung by reports of sluggish tickets sales (civic center spokeswoman Amy Blain declined to say how many of the twenty-five-dollar seats had been sold), Richard’s spokespeople offered up the hastily concocted excuse that he needed time to prepare for an upcoming television appearance. Transparently false because his next TV role didn’t come until 1995 when he received an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of a multiple sclerosis patient on an episode of the CBS hospital drama Chicago Hope.
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Peoria has yet to make peace with Richard, his street-level profanity, his frank sexuality, his fury, or his wanton drug use. Even today, the town barely acknowledges him.
In October 2001, while Richard languished in deteriorating health in his Encino, California, home, confined to a wheelchair where he spent his days watching a DVD of The Silence of the Lambs on repeat play, the Peoria City Council begrudgingly voted 6–5 in favor of renaming a seven-block stretch of a nondescript residential street Richard Pryor Place. In 2011, more than a half decade after Richard’s death, when Phil Luciano wrote a column suggesting that the city choose a more fitting site to commemorate its most famous son—the city’s new arts center, perhaps, or a major thoroughfare—his readers responded thus:
I have a perfect suggestion: Match a memorial with his mind and his mouth. In other words, find a nice sewer somewhere and name it after him. —Wally
He was just like any other foul-mouthed comedian. Some of his stuff was funny, most wasn’t. There was absolutely nothing special about him. So he came from Peoria, who the hell cares? At the end of the day he’s just another semi funny, dead drug user. —AM
I’d hate to plan the Pryor exhibit in the new museum. Exactly how does one “honor” this man and still keep the exhibit rated “G”? Elementary schools will make up the majority of attendees. Do you leave out the facts that he was raised in a whorehouse, that he made profanity funny and that he often joked about his illegal drug abuse? —Anne
To the reader Anne, Luciano replied: “Leave that out? Why? Pryor didn’t glorify hookers, drugs or abuse—he put a spotlight on it. Maybe that’s why many Peorians never liked Pryor: They didn’t like what he made them see.”
“I get this kind of crap every time I write about Pryor,” says Luciano, a transplanted Chicagoan. “People always say, ‘Why don’t you ever write about Fibber McGee?’ I say, ‘Because nobody gives a fuck about Fibber McGee.’ ”
Fibber McGee, children, was a character created by Peoria native Jim Jordan who costarred with his wife and Peoria high school sweetheart Marian Driscoll in the radio sitcom Fibber McGee and Molly which aired on NBC from 1935 to 1959. One of the longest-running and most successful radio shows of its time, it depicted the foibles of daily life in the fictional midwestern town of Wistful Vista.
Peoria was also home to feminist author Betty Friedan, musician Dan Fogelberg, comedian Sam Kinison, and, most happily for our purposes, Charles Correll, the cocreator of Amos ’N Andy.
When Correll and his vaudeville partner, Freeman Gosden, were offered the opportunity to create a radio series on WGN in Chicago in 1928, it seemed natural, Correll said, that they should continue to perform in the same black dialect they had developed on vaudeville stages in the South. “We might just as well have done Irish or Jewish dialect,” he said, “but we knew that of Negroes.” Besides, Correll maintained, he and Gosden were laughing with blacks, not at them.
Regardless of who may have been laughing at or along with whom, the fifteen-minute broadcasts of Amos ’N Andy drew huge audiences at 7:00 p.m. every week night for fifteen years from 1928 until 1943 when it switched over to a half-hour weekly format. It was said, with claims of only slight exaggeration, that one could take an after-dinner stroll through almost any American town and not miss a single line of the show as it wafted from the open windows and front porches of an estimated forty million homes.
When CBS proposed a TV version of the show, the network, in a television first, cast African American actors for all the roles. Chief among them were Alvin Childress as Amos, Spencer Williams as Andy, Ernestine Wade as Sapphire, and Tim Moore as George “Kingfish” Stevens—veteran vaudeville comics all. However tempting it may have been for Correll and Gosden to play the principal roles themselves, their business sense prevailed. The television era, they knew, would not tolerate white actors in blackface.
Despite drawing huge audiences, the TV incarnation of Amos ’N Andy survived only two seasons. CBS programmers later acknowledged their miscalculation in airing the series premiere during the 1951 national convention of the NAACP, a coincidence that prompted the group, in a fervor of reform, to pass a resolution condemning the show’s depiction of African Americans—or “colored people,” as the NAACP preferred—and filed for a court injunction that would have forced CBS to stop the show. (It’s worth noting that the NAACP’s national office had declined to endorse a similar protest launched by the Pittsburgh Courier against the radio show in 1931.)
In a 1975 Ebony article titled “Black Humor—Full Circle from Slave Quarters to Richard Pryor,” film and broadcast historian Donald Bogle pointed out the irony of an integrationist movement insisting that blacks surrender their own rich heritage as the price of admission into an unwelcoming white culture.
How fitting is it that, after thriving twenty-seven years on radio starring white actors who caricatured black voices, the TV version, featuring the medium’s first all-black cast, fell under a storm of civil rights protests? Doubling down on this irony, the Gosden and Correll–voiced program continued to chug along as a weekly radio sitcom until 1955 and then as a nightly disc-jockey show until 1960.
—————
At the time Richard canceled his 1993 hometown comeback performance at Peoria’s downtown civic center, it was the only venue in the town with the capacity to house such an event. Yet, when Richard was born in 1940, the city of barely 105,000 people boasted more than two-dozen performance theaters that had sprung up during vaudeville’s heyday. For longtime Peorians, the names of those theaters—among them the Duchess, the Majestic, the Deluxe, and the Palace—still conjure up images of bright marquees and glamorous performers.
Although black performers were sometimes seen in these vaudeville theaters, black audiences were not. For their own entertainment, they went instead to taverns, after-hours clubs, and sporting houses.
As the audience for black entertainment grew too large to ignore, a group of enlightened businessmen in the early 1900s established theater circuits exclusively for African American performers. Chief among them was TOBA (Theatre Owners Booking Association—or, if you asked the performers, Tough on Black Asses), founded in 1907 by Memphis-based Italian businessman F. A. Barrasso.
Performers on the TOBA circuit might play as many as ten shows a day while paying their own travel expenses and seeking out their own accommodations, often staying in private homes since Jim Crow laws barred them from most hotels, restaurants, and restrooms. Yet TOBA afforded many the opportunity to play to all-black audiences—although (nice twist here) some theaters roped off small sections for white patrons.
Initially, nearly all TOBA comics appeared in blackface, as they had done since the days of minstrelsy, covering their faces with burnt cork or black greasepaint and using a white flour compound to accentuate the whites of their eyes and teeth. In effect, blacks adopted the same techniques whites used to caricature blacks. It was one of the few areas in which skin color made no difference. Everyone “blacked up” for comic effect. The first time vaudeville comedian Johnny Hudgins worked the Apollo without blacking up, he said backstage that he had felt naked out there.
Harold Cromer, one-half of the famed team Stump and Stumpy, said, “What people today don’t understand is why the artists did all the things they used to do. [Performing in blackface] is what you did if you wanted to eat.”
The times demanded that black entertainers performing before white audiences restrict themselves to acting in skits or in teams. They could crack wise with each other, exchange banter with straight men, or enact a scene, but black performers on the Keith vaudeville circuit—the largest and most reputable circuit of its day—were explicitly instructed not to address anyone in the audience. Any black performer attempting to elicit a personal response would be making an assumption of equality intolerable to most whites at the time. Not until the early 1950s did black comics, led by Dick Gregory, speak directly to white audiences as peers without the buffer of clownish costumes or in the guise of a character. The few TOBA-era comics who adopted the monologue approach pioneered by the likes of Jack Benny, Milton Berle, and Fred Allen soon found themselves shunned by white booking agents and remained largely unknown outside of black clubs and theaters.
The exception to this rule, and a notable one at that, was Charley Case, an African American songwriter and vaudeville comedian of the late 1800s famous for his monologues, which he performed in blackface while passing for white. Some historians credit Case as having single-handedly invented what we now know as stand-up comedy. (His only likely rival to that claim would be Mark Twain, who began a wildly popular sideline career as an after-dinner speaker with an impromptu address at a printers’ banquet in Keokuk, Iowa, on January 17, 1856.)
Because of the restrictions imposed by white theater owners, hundreds of black entertainers—many now recognized as the finest performers of their time—flocked to TOBA, among them Silas Green from New Orleans, Pigmeat Markham, Butterbeans & Susie, Pen & Ink, Moms Mabley, Slappy White, Johnny Hudgins, Miller & Lyles (widely credited as the inspiration for Amos ’N Andy), Stump and Stumpy, Dusty Fletcher, and greatest of them all, the Jamaican-born Bert Williams.
Williams was the most popular entertainer of his day and arguably the first African American superstar. Erudite, highly educated, and aspiring to theatrical greatness, Williams quickly learned that he could draw greater laughs if he dropped his refined manners and kept his learning to himself. According to vaudeville historian Trav S. D., Williams found it much easier to lose his inhibitions and play the clown when he donned blackface. W. C. Fields recognized both sides of the dilemma when he declared Williams “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.”
Williams built his act around a character he described as “the shiftless darky to the fullest extent, his fun, his philosophy. Show this artless darky a book and he won’t know what it is all about. He can’t read. He cannot write. But ask him a question and he’ll answer it with a philosophy that’s got something.”
Adopting a style of storytelling that recalled Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales, Williams recounted the exploits of one Spruce Bigsby, a street-savvy savant. Like Richard’s character Mudbone, Williams’s Bigsby played off the sentimentalized image of the tale-spinning Negro who had migrated from a bygone South only to find himself beguiled by life in the industrial North.
Bert Williams’s most enduring character, however, may be his charlatan minister Elder Eatmore, a direct forebear of Richard’s recurring preacher, as evidenced in this excerpt from Williams’s recording of “Elder Eatmore’s Sermon on Generosity”:
The Lord loveth a cheerful giver. Tonight, my friends, you can omit the cheerful. The truth is the light, and here is the truth: y’all is way back in my salary and something has got to be done here this evening. . . . Because if something ain’t done, your shepherd is gone. That’s all. THAT IS ALL. I admit that times is tight because when there used to be a ham coming here and fowl or two there from different members of this flock, I managed to make out fair to middlin’. They all comes to he who waits. But you all done learnt me that self-preservation is the first law of he who gets it. And the Lord helps they who helps their selves.
Everything has got so scientifical nowadays, that they done commenced building such things as smokehouses and hen houses out of pure concrete. And they’ve invented locks for them the same as the combination on the First National Bank. True, true, that makes it harder for all of us. It’s pretty nigh ruint me. And my friends I need, I need . . . T’ain’t no use talkin’ about what I need I needs everything, from my hat down, and from my overcoat in.
When Richard created his version of this archetypal preacher, the truth poured out of him. And the truth was he had nothing but contempt for the needs of his flock and couldn’t be bothered to offer up even a pretense of compassion or moral rectitude.
The Walker family brought in their son and they said to me, ‘Can you heal our son?’ Well, I apologize because he’s a big wally-head boy and I wasn’t going to touch the motherfucker, I’m tellin’ you that right now. Little nigger had a head about this big and they wheeled him in his head was bobbing back and forth. I was not about to touch the motherfucker because that shit’s contagious. Give the nigger a big hat or something—leave me alone!
And some of the deacons come down on me for that. But I’d like to say to the crippled peoples that come here, can’t you find another church to go to? Goddamn! You come in here knockin’ shit down, breakin’ up furniture and shit. Learn how to crawl! Shit! And you deaf and dumb motherfuckers who can’t talk, we don’t need you here! All that “ah-whoo ah-hah” shit—kiss my ass!
Silent movies wounded vaudeville. Still, the two managed to cohabit peaceably for a time, sharing bills in the same venues, although the performers could not help but notice how many new theatres were being built without stages, only screens. Then radio came along and killed vaudeville completely.
With the advent of radio, people could hear their favorite stars without even leaving the house. Milton Berle and Jack Benny entertained far more people in a single broadcast than they could have in a lifetime out on the road. Those who made the leap to radio found themselves suddenly flush with cash—and frantic to come up with new material every week or, in some cases, every night. In contrast, a vaudevillian could live off one well-honed routine for an entire career.
Such was the case with Clinton “Dusty” Fletcher who performed a solo skit called “Open the Door, Richard” for more than twenty years. The premise: Fletcher’s character returns to his rooming house late at night without his key. He pounds on the door and calls out to his roommate to let him in. The audience never sees or hears Richard. He may not even be in there. The skit inspired a hugely popular song of the 1940s and for years remained a popular catchphrase.
Jazz saxophonist Jack McVea had seen Fletcher perform the bit hundreds of times in the early 1940s as the opening act for Lionel Hampton’s band. On a rainy afternoon in Portland, Orgeon, McVea, in need of material for his own band, set a simplified version of the skit to music. When McVea recorded the song in October 1946, it went through the roof.
The song’s refrain cropped up in routines by Jack Benny, Phil Harris, Jimmy Durante, numerous Bugs Bunny cartoons, in ads for everything from ale to perfume, and generally made life miserable for anyone named Richard.*
Time magazine reported that radio comedians “had only to mention the word Richard on the air to put their studio audiences in stitches.” The phrase became part of the early civil rights movement, as the title of an editorial in the Los Angeles Sentinel calling for black representation in city government. In Georgia, college students marched to the state capitol demanding the resignation of segregationist governor Herman Talmadge with banners that read OPEN THE DOOR, HERMAN.
With the song’s success, Dusty Fletcher emerged from semiretirement to claim authorship, saying he had written the skit after seeing a drunk thrown out of a railroad station bar in South Carolina. The ejected patron, Fletcher recalled, stood out in the street and yelled for the bartender to let him back in.
Once the song broke, it seemed every singer and band in the country rushed to record it. Within months of McVea’s hit, at least eighteen versions were released by the likes of Louis Jordan and his Tympani Five, Dick Haymes, the Pied Pipers, Jo Stafford, Burl Ives, and Bing Crosby. Both Count Basie and nightclub trio the Three Flames scored number-one hits with the song. There was even a Yiddish version by a quartet known as the Yokels.
But, at the end of the day, “Richard” belongs to Dusty Fletcher. The recordings were mere novelty numbers, whereas Fletcher had honed his stage performance to a work of art incorporating pantomime, pratfalls, and an acrobatic balancing act atop a freestanding ladder. Happily, it was captured twice on film, as a ten-minute short directed by William Forest Crouch, and as a vignette in the Cab Calloway movie Hi-De-Ho.
Fletcher portrayed his nameless character as a drunk who mutters to himself between shouts up to his unresponsive roommate. In each segment of the routine he peels back layer upon layer of a complicated man gamely soldiering on with his threadbare existence in a harsh, uncaring world.
Critic Jake Austen notes that Fletcher’s work, like Richard’s, dealt with “fairly horrifying subjects: abject poverty, extreme alcoholism, spousal beating, homicide, and other rib ticklers.” Traces of genetic material from “Open the Door” show up in Richard’s “Wino & Junkie,” the signature piece he developed over a period of several years. It grew along with him, becoming deeper, ever more fearless, and less dependent on jokes. By the time Richard recorded it for his 1974 LP That Nigger’s Crazy, there was nothing overtly funny about it.
WINO: You better lay off that narcotic, nigger, that shit done made you null and void. I ain’t lyin’, boy. What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you straighten up and get a job?
JUNKIE: Get a job? Motherfucker, you talkin’ to the kid, baby. Shit! I worked five years in a row when I was in the joint pressing them motherfuckin’ license plates. I’m a license plate-pressing motherfucker too, baby. Where a nigger gonna get a job out here pressing license plates?
Black comics learn their craft on the street corner, Richard once said. “That’s where niggers rehearse. If you want to be a speaker, you rehearse your speeches. You tell your stories. Singers start there. Players run their game. . . . That was my stage.”
In communities large and small, African Americans found free expression in games of signifying; playing the dozens; and exchanging raunchy, rhyming tall tales of “bad niggers” like Stagolee, Shine, Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law and trickster characters harking back to High John the Conqueror, Br’er Rabbit, and the Signifying Monkey. Richard found genius in this cosmology of language and humor that, up until that time, had kept sanctuary in barbershops, pool halls, street corners, front porches, and back rooms. Then, to nearly everyone’s dismay, he went and paraded it out in front of company.
“White folks don’t play enough,” Richard contended. “They don’t relax. They don’t know how to play the dozens . . . nothing.”
We used to have good sessions sometimes. I remember I came up with a beaut, man. I killed them one day. We was doing it all day to each other, you know? Bang bang—“Your shoes are run over so much looks like your ankles is broke,” and shit like that. And I came up with, I called the motherfucker “The Rummage Sale Ranger,” you know what I mean? ’Cause that’s where he got his clothes. “The Rummage Sale Ranger”—that was a knockout. I saved that one for the last. That ended it.
Black Panther Party minister of justice H. Rap Brown recalled how he and his friends played the dozens for recreation “the way white folks play Scrabble.”
In many ways, though, the Dozens is a mean game because what you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words . . . It was a bad scene for the dude that was getting humiliated . . . It was like they were humiliated because they were born Black and then they turned around and got humiliated by their own people, which was really all they had left. But that’s the way it is. Those that feel most humiliated humiliate others.
Playing the dozens—aka mother-rhyming—has been known to turn deadly. Most often, though, in the words of British author and blues scholar Paul Oliver, young men play the dozens to “work off their excesses of spirits in a harmless and cheerfully pornographic blues-singing competition.”
Black humor as practiced in the community or after-hours clubs seldom, if ever, concerned itself with mainstream or non-black existence, either in imitation of it or in reaction to it. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it, these performances carried “an invisible racial warning sticker: For domestic consumption only—export strictly prohibited. . . . You don’t want white people to see this kind of spectacle; you want them to see the noble dramas of August Wilson, where the injuries and injustices perpetuated by the white man are never far from our consciousness.”
Factor in Richard’s observation that “white folks get upset when they see us laughing—‘Wha’d’ya think they’re doing, Martha? Are they laughing at us?’ ” and it’s likely that the one aspect of black humor whites would find most disconcerting (were we privy to hear it) is how largely absent they are. Gates, again, describes a production making the rounds of the Chitlin’ Circuit as recently as 1997: “The subject of racism—or, for that matter, white people—simply never arises.” What black humor concerns itself with most are the immediate problems and pleasures of everyday life: love, jealousy, sex, death, rivalries, tall tales, intoxication, and food—the same territory covered in the blues and other black music, which, praise be to popular recordings, we have in abundance.
Although the blues has its origins in the music of West Africa, it is unique to the United States. The music entered the United States by the port of New Orleans, then migrated upriver to spawn—mutating, crossbreeding, and adapting to regional conditions as it spread out through the tributaries. All manner of love songs, folk legends, feats of derring-do, murder ballads, conjure tales, ghost stories, courtly European balladry, and blues got passed down and passed around, openly consorting and cross-pollinating with each other.
It was similar to the way the scattered stories and figures that make up The Iliad and The Odyssey had been recited, embellished, and bowdlerized by generation upon generation of Ageans before someone like Homer came along with the wit to see what it could be, gathered up all the strands, wound them together, shook them up in his sorcerer’s hat, and pulled out those epic twin pillars of world literature.
So it was with Richard. In the truest Homeric tradition, he soaked up everything around him and, by virtue of wise blood or mother wit, made of it something new. And if it now seems as though that new thing had been there all along, waiting for someone game enough to grab hold and take it for a ride, either to see where it would go or how long one could hang on, that’s because it was.
All of which is just to say, as Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale observed in ascribing the forces that gave rise to the movement, “It was already going on.” And, as Robert Fitzgerald wrote in the postscript to his translation of Homer’s Odyssey, “Our poet came late and had supremely gifted predecessors.”
Skinny and bearded, Richard Pryor holds the stage of a dark basement club, its brick walls lending it the air of a boiler room fallout shelter where a small crowd nervously laughs and awaits an all-clear of something from somewhere. Steaks and peppers are listed for sale on a chalkboard behind him; chicken curry, beer.
There is a silence that follows each jab of a phrase, the mostly white audience puzzled and uncomfortable as Richard sticks and moves, looks for his way inside . . . talking aches and pains, winos and whores and politicians and pimps; catching the clap, and having sucked another man’s dick. These are not jokes he tells but character sketches and vignettes that spool out and surprise like a tablecloth snatched off a birdcage, revealing no living bird but something furry and feral in its place, uncomfortably large for its quarters, grunting and pissing.
Richard seems not to register the quiet and discomfort, or he pays it no mind. He keeps watch over his shoulder, is patient and slow as he lets out his line. He weaves fractured scenes above the heads of those in attendance but seems rarely to glance their way. He is already seeing beyond; over them; out.
* When Bob Dylan and the Band reinvented the song during the raucous 1967 recording sessions in West Saugerties, New York, that would come to be known as The Basement Tapes, Dylan changed the title to “Open the Door, Homer,” even while keeping “Open the door, Richard” as the song’s refrain, because, it is said, the Band’s keyboardist Richard Manuel detested the original song, having been taunted with the phrase his whole life. And Allen Ginsberg, no less, declared that “Open the Door, Richard” had influenced his poetry during the pivotal road trips he took with Jack Kerouac in the late 1940s: “I would say ‘Open the Door, Richard’ opened the door to a new sound and music, to new consciousness.”