“If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be A Whole Lot Of Dead Copycats…”
-Charles Mingus
Humor is a survival skill.
We laugh so we don’t cry, and if we can, we make others laugh so they don’t cry.
A laugh is an uncontrollable, spontaneous thing. You can’t control it, and it’s pretty damn tough to fake.
Being able to provoke a reaction like that is a gift. And Richard Pryor was one of the most gifted people to ever walk this Earth.
Here’s a rough idea of how old I am: when people learned my last name, they’d inevitably ask “Are you related to Richard?”
Every. Single. Time.
I don’t get that anymore, or at least not very often. But when I do, it makes me smile. Because it shows that someone out there still remembers.
When I was a kid, the answer was ‘no’. When I was a smart-assed teenager, I’d usually say ‘Sure, why not?’. But now, I respond with these two little tidbits and leave people to form their own conclusions:
1. Richard Pryor was born in Peoria, Illinois On December 1, 1940.
2. Four years later and some 288 miles away, my father was born in Mounds, Illinois.
Now, far be it from me to mistake coincidence for anything other than coincidence, but suffice it to say that there has always been a special place for Richard Pryor in my family history.
I remember very clearly going through my dads records and finding a 45 of ‘Is It Something I Said?’, which obviously I was not allowed to listen to. I also have slightly less vivid memories of stumbling upon a copy of ‘Supernigger’, which I would imagine led to a longer conversation than I remember having about it.
As a child, my experience came from watching Richard Pryor is what I now know to be mostly terrible movies. More or less everything he put out between 1980 and when his MS forced him to stop working is hard to defend on an artistic level, and, by and large, a waste of his comedic brilliance.
But who cares about any of that when you’re a kid? The guy just made me laugh.
“If you didn’t steal something from Richard Pryor, you’re probably not that funny.”
-Damon Wayans
Without a designated classic movie to his name, or very much media presence in the decade and a half before his 2005 death, he exists mostly in the exalted remembrances of the standup comedy elite.
Which stands to reason, because for an outsider, it would basically be impossible to comprehend just how influential and important Richard Pryor was to comedy. Whether they admit it or not, whether they even know it or not, nearly everyone that came after him is walking in his shadow.
He many, many things: An inspiration to everyone who has ever wanted to get up on a stage and make people laugh; a wicked iconoclast who bristled at any attempt to be controlled or pinned down; a cautionary tale writ large…
But above all, he is himself, and only himself.
And the strangeness of Marina Zenoviches’ Richard Pryor: Omit The Logic is that it more or less concludes that it’s impossible to say exactly who that was.
A documentary that aired last year on Showtime and is only now making its way to home video, Omit The Logic eschews typical hagiography to get at the darkness of the life of Richard Pryor.
And make no mistake: this is not a happy story. This is not the triumph of laughter over tragedy. This is the story of a brilliant man who destroyed himself over and over and over again. A man whose every triumph occurred on the precipice of total oblivion, because he didn’t know any other way.
To that end, and as opposed to the earlier I Ain’t Dead Yet #*%$@!!, a 2003 celebration of his comedy, there are fewer talking heads from the world of standup and more of Pryor’s ex-lovers, friends, and business partners, all of whom clearly loved him, but were never quite able to save him from himself.
“Our past is sad. Our present is tragic. Luckily, we have no future.”
-old Kurdish saying
Pryor’s comedy comes from an unerring sense of truth, a deep well of pain, and an even deeper well of humanity. Here is a man who gave his entire life over to the ideal of making people laugh. He tells us everything about himself, the raw unvarnished truth. He’s basically saying, “I’m not like you people. I’m something else. But I understand you. And if I can get you to understand me, well… maybe we’ve got something here.” But for all his truth and all his humanity, the movie gives us the impression that the minute you did understand him, he became someone else entirely.
On more than one occasion, he tears everything he worked for down, and starts over again from scratch. He leaves friends, lovers, partners behind in his wake, wondering what they did wrong.
The title of the movie comes from a friend of Pryors’, who posited that to understand his actions, sometimes you have to Omit The Logic. By which he means you can’t understand the things Pryor did by applying normal logic and values. For better or for worse, he pretty much did whatever he wanted, until the power of choice was ripped away from him.
The film skates along the milestones of Pryor’s career, never going into too much detail. His early, more dramatic work in such films as The Mack and Lady Sings The Blues get a passing mention or a couple of clips to their name; his (mostly terrible) later movies don’t even get that much, usually just a poster.
But if you’re a fan, you’ll already be familiar with a lot of the here: his job interview sketch with Chevy Chase on SNL, the story of him killing his car, the heart attack, his trip to Africa… but there are some news stories I didn’t know, like his meltdown at a gay pride benefit show, and his short-lived production company run by former NFL fullback Jim Brown, who turned down the opportunity to produce Purple Rain. There’s also some footage of a wheelchair-bound Pryor doing standup in his final months, and somehow, he’s still got it.
What’s truly remarkable, though, are the interviews. Clips from The Tonight Show, Mike Douglas, and Barbara Walters show Pryor at his loosest, and his most revealing. The way he matter-of-factly describes his childhood history to Barbara Walters would be unthinkable today, as would Johnny Carson casually dropping the word ‘nigger’ during their interview. These little glimpses of a bygone era are both shocking and endlessly fascinating.
There are some laughs to be had here. But listen: this is the story of a man who tried to kill himself by setting himself on fire. Things do not trend upwards from that point.
And as the movie headed towards its inevitable conclusion, I felt an ache in my gut. I knew what was coming. I always know that it’s coming, and it never gets any easier.
Which is absurd. It’s just a name, right? Doesn’t really mean anything in the cosmic scheme of things. And yet, there’s this powerful sense of loss. Before I knew about the drugs, the fire, the harrowing childhood… before all of that…
He was Uncle Richie.
SPECIAL FEATURES: Another half hour of interview footage, where we learn from Mel Brooks that Richard Pryor liked Chinese food; and that Willie Nelson thinks a song about rolling up someone and smoking them is a perfect analogy for Richard’s life. Which… well, he’s not wrong, I guess. But it does seem to be in slightly questionable taste…
