#85, December 2005

Pryor Intervention

 

 

 

Who knew that Richard Pryor co-wrote the screenplay for Blazing Saddles?  It makes perfect sense when you think about it.  The character who plays the black sheriff who rides into town and receives the laurel and hardy handshake from the town’s mayor was meant to be Pryor, but he was considered too controversial for the role.  He certainly would have added a little bite to the role, though I quite like the performance of Cleavon Little – it was a fairly comforting performance, one that made many white Americans and Europeans instantly recognize injustice and stupidity (though many more would have been oblivious, I am sure).   But what an incredible screenplay and film, and what a tribute in its own right to the importance of this great comedian!

 

I remember seeing Blazing Saddles at the Richmond Odeon when I was just sixteen.  Frankly, I didn’t get the humor.  It didn’t make much sense to me.  I had seen A Night at the Opera and I had been a Norman Wisdom devotee, so I knew how to laugh, but I just couldn’t quite follow all the allusions being made in the movie.  There was the farting scene around the campfire, but that didn’t seem that hysterical – well it caused a guffaw, but with no intellectual residue.  I was a little nonplussed, I believe, which is a shame, as I think if I could have gleaned more from this movie it would have helped my intellectual development along no end.  But one needs to be ready for such things, and as a sports jock I certainly wasn’t.  Every time that I have watched the movie since, I have been astounded by what it says about the genre of westerns, and about race and gender – and even about political corruption – in the United States.

What a difference a few years can make!  During my second year as an undergraduate at Edinburgh I became incredibly interested in film and would want to go to the movies at almost any opportunity to see everything from Bunuel to Resnais, to everything put out in the United States – Animal House (which I didn’t get), The Deer Hunter (which grabbed me, barring the last scene), Unmarried Woman (got to love Alan Bates!).  One of the movies that made me realize that this was time well spent was the film version of Pryor’s stand-up routine (Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, 1979).  Swear words, the liberal use of the n-word, talk about sex, blunt commentary on race – it was all pretty shocking stuff, but incredibly funny.  The manner in which Pryor was able to get people to laugh at themselves – I think in part because he was willing to laugh at himself – was astonishing.  And the movie was incredibly radical it seemed to me.  I had a tendency, I think, to see things as transformative, when they may have been for me, but they were not for other people.  But I was right to some degree.  While many people just saw this movie as funny, and then went about their business as usual, it nonetheless had a profound impact on the way people talked about race.  While it was clearly a commentary on Bill Cosby’s humor, at a time when many radicals were also criticizing Sidney Poitier’s screen conformity (unfairly, one might add), it in many ways created a huge space for both the likes of Cosby and those who would follow in Poitier’s footsteps.  The success of The Cosby Show, Eddie Murphy, actors like Denzel Washington and Will Smith among others, and directors like Spike Lee, seem inconceivable without this prior intervention.

 

For me, having heard Richard Pryor meant that when I went to the United States for the first time and enrolled in an African American history course at Penn, in which I was the only white student and in which the fundamental, governing assumption was that race and racism were central to American history, I knew enough not to be affronted.  I could laugh at myself and recognize that even if I wasn’t necessarily to blame, I was certainly implicated (historically speaking at least).  That is the humor of this cosmos – Pryor seemed to understand that better than almost anyone.