A contemporary review of 1979's Richard Pryor: Live In Concert could not have foreseen the staying power of this historic performance. Decades later, our viewing experience is heightened by our awareness of Pryor's later misfortunes, and the disappointing resurrection of old hatreds by demagogues determined to exploit America's racial divide.
Pryor's transformative performance gives a tantalizing glimpse of a more harmonious America, one that could have been but did not come to pass. People on both sides remain unable to overcome their self-identification first by race, and then a long way lower down the list, by shared citizenship. Through a series of spot-on skits that reveal our culture-centric absurdities, Pryor effectively communicated our shared humanity. He showed us what might have been.
Today's viewer of this classic will detect the transformation of the mixed and initially apprehensive audience into a unified body, brought together by laughter not at Pryor's illustrations of the other side's haplessness, but of their own.
By so convincingly showing us what might have been, today's viewers now realize that Pryor was not merely the Black comedian whose career followed Cosby's unctuous panderings and pre-dated Eddy Murphy's wisecracks. He was on a different plane entirely, a visionary who like Lenny Bruce who forced us to acknowledge the self-diminishment of our lives that is the consequence of giving in to our fears.
Now considered by many to be the greatest stand-up performance ever captured on film, the venue, lilly-white Long Beach CA, provided just the right atmosphere for Pryor to drive home his humor to a near-equally mixed audience by race.
At the beginning, the viewer can sense a subtle unease among the audience, perhaps brought on by concern that Pryor's central theme, about how strange it is to be Black in America, could lead to a bad vibe in the room and even animosity.
Pryor picks up on this the moment he walks onstage. Through a spontaneous improvisation of a white man requesting his reserved seat be vacated by the Black man occupying it, Pryor's impersonation of both characters proves to be a metaphor for the chasm that exists between the races, affecting even the most mundane interactions. Disarmed and intrigued, the audience now understands that this night will be about the comedy of being human, about foolish is their behavior when people play into their respective stereotypes, meaning that ultimately the joke is on them.
By expressing the triumph of shared humanity over the damage done through obsessive self-identification with "our people," Pryor's humor illuminates the folly of prejudice through biting insight and some brilliant physical comedy. Viewers of the film were provided moments of audience reaction, and as it turned out, people laughed loudest when Pryor delivered a spot-on depiction of THEIR race's stereotypes. By the end of his never- flagging 70-minute performance, he had brought together those hundreds of people who at the beginning seemed so far apart. Pryor delivered a performance for the ages, one from which we still can learn - and laugh.
