Brown was a popular black figurehead — he and Pryor had made for a loveable badass couple. Cosby, of course, was already a well-known stand-up by then, and he had succeeded by avoiding issues of race to present a laundered, family-friendly form of comedy that relied on his dry but affably avuncular delivery for its impact.
One night, he abruptly left the stage and fled for California. Only then, settling in Berkeley, going deeper into drugs and hanging out with counterculture figures, could the birth of a unique comedian truly begin. Cosby, however, had been seeing his own career limp along on TV and the big screen, so his return to prime time with the series was something of a major comeback.
The Cosby Show ran for seven years and dominated the ratings, but it achieved its success not only by avoiding the edgy and confrontational aspects of race-oriented comedy, but also by appearing to bask in a smug, upper-middle-class elitism. They were as primly self-satisfied as the households in the blandest WASP sitcoms. Like the Huxtables, he was well-scrubbed and unthreatening; any spark of activism had been summarily defused. Told from the mystically omniscient vantage point of a literally burnt-out comedian, swathed in bandages in a hospital bed after setting himself ablaze while freebasing cocaine, Jo Jo Dancer sees its eponymous hero Pryor retrace the steps of his life, and pay ghostly visits to his younger self at key episodes in his development.
It is a curiously empty and detached film, ultimately drowning in its own pious solemnity. Perhaps the worst thing about Jo Jo Dancer is Pryor himself. In what should have been a primal scream of a performance, a fusion of the electrifying power of his best stand-up with the howling demons that dogged him off-screen and offstage, the actor instead gives an awkward, largely poker-faced turn, occasionally hitting the high notes but generally looking lost in his own movie.
All that can be said about it now is that it does give us one last glimpse of a Richard Pryor who in some way resembled — physically at least — his old self. But all this would change in the months that followed. In , on the set Critical Condition , Pryor tried to respond to a call from director Michael Apted but found himself unable to get out of his chair. The director asked him to stop kidding around, but Pryor was frantic.
Alright, Let's Call It A Draw
He tried whacking his thighs, shaking his legs, but they remained inert. Some moments later, they came back to life, and Pryor got on with the scene he needed to shoot. This being , the rumours soon pointed to AIDS. And just to confirm that he was a red-blooded family man, he brought along his new wife his fifth , Flynn BeLaine, to appear with him.
But in truth Pryor had been concerned about his health since that episode on the Critical Condition set. More symptoms soon began to afflict him. He experienced problems with balance and movement and later wrote that his eyesight started to come and go without informing him of its schedule. His condition was eventually diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, a chronic, disabling, and degenerative condition that attacks the central nervous system.
The extent of how the disease had started to affect him was evident when Critical Condition was released in If ever a movie was aptly titled, Critical Condition Must be it. In comparison with his last few films, Pryor certainly looks out of sorts here — thin, spindly, and frail. But the most telling signs are in his face. Watching the film at the time, however, suggested simply, if disturbingly, that his comic essence must have somehow evaporated. And although Pryor is agile enough for the low-rent hysterics of the plot, he does display some awkwardness with the physical gags, which also jars, given his usual reliance on his body as a hopping, gyrating tool of comedy.
For his keenest fans then, Critical Condition must have made for pretty disturbing viewing.
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Nevertheless, over the next couple of years the comedian was able to get through three more movies: Harlem Nights was one of the major disappointments of its day, not least because of the absence of any spark of chemistry between Murphy and Pryor. Indeed, they reveal little about Murphy himself, and look packaged and polished. Nevertheless, Murphy has always been vocal about his debt to Richard Pryor. But the Pryor of Harlem Nights was very different from the man Murphy had admired for so long.
Indeed, Pryor in Harlem Nights is a void — stiff, hollow, and unsmiling, a frozen image of a man hobbled by some morose lethargy. As thirties club-owner Sugar Ray, he is not meant to be the comic centre of the film, but the Pryor of a decade earlier could at least have breathed some life into the proceedings. Here, the whole thing dies in the water. He does try to energize a couple of scenes, but his undernourished look and awkward gait conspire against him, and most of the comic heavy lifting is left to Wilder.
His legendary philandering inevitably started to suffer too. He later recounted a painfully humiliating story about pulling up at some traffic lights he was being chauffeured because he could no longer drive and getting the eye from a beautiful young woman passing by. He beckoned her over and began talking, but before long they were both shocked to see that Pryor was in the process of pissing his pants. Another You has to be one of most distressing and dispiriting experiences any Richard Pryor fan will ever have to sit through. He is not just physically awkward but patently disabled — stick-thin, rigid-stiff, looking almost desperately weak.
As he was making it, Pryor was all too aware that this was going to be his last film as a comedy star. The MS took over. Needless to say, Gene Wilder again has to carry the entire thing on his shoulders, but his efforts are in vain. Another You Is a painful end to an unofficial partnership that once held a sporadic but true comic chemistry. Just before the release of the film, Jennifer Lee visited Pryor again and was dismayed to see that he was now almost unable to do anything for himself. A bag of bones, he could barely shuffle around the house without collapsing.
Cut off from many of his old friends and now too ill to work, he was convinced that he was paying for a lifetime of excess, indulgence, and abuse. During her stay, Lee, who Pryor had previously subjected to savage beatings, had to rescue Pryor when he fell in the shower, and wrote in her journal: I lift the love of my life and am amazed at how light he is. Jennifer ended her stay with a poignant reflection: He still had material, perhaps now more than ever before. Over the next year, he began to talk openly about his condition, and, when he felt up to it, even started working on a new stand-up act.
Pryor performed for the last time at The Comedy Store in , sitting down on the stage in a large armchair, gripping a cane for support. He had some stories to tell about the trials of life with MS. The spectacle of this former titan of stand-up sitting pitifully in a chair was too much to take in: Nobody could laugh at suffering itself, suffering like this. The Comedy Store audience in was suitably warm, however; they were probably aware that this was the last chance to see their icon perform.
Art Talk – John Pryor of ‘Dollar Slice Bootlegs’ | theranchhands.com
Pryor was nonetheless buoyed by it, and he planned a tour. His career was effectively over now; he was fifty-two. Pryor showed every sign of throwing away everything he had achieved at least three years before the MS became apparent.
Of course, the comedian has to take much of the blame for his catastrophic sell-out during the s, and no doubt had a lot to do with bringing about his own chronic health decline, but as John and Dennis Williams point out, an inherent racism may have prevented Pryor from truly becoming the King of Hollywood. If this appears overly defensive, it is worth recalling the kind of trash Pryor had to accept to get to his pole position in Just as Bill Cosby seemed to be rewarded for the overriding complicity of The Cosby Show, Pryor had to be castrated before the studios gave him a real shot.
It is interesting to compare the Pryor of the s with the Eddie Murphy of recent years. After four or five years of astounding success, the young Murphy quickly fell into a series of duds The Golden Child , ; Boomerang , ; The Distinguished Gentleman , ; Vampire in Brooklyn , Echoes of The Toy?
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Pryor may have had angry reservations about this in , but in the eighties he quickly became an accessory to his own sanitisation. He divorced Flynn a second time; another ex-wife, Deboragh, returned and assumed the duties of a hour nurse. He published an autobiography and later remarried Jennifer Lee.
But Jennifer was the mouthpiece now, the creative force.
Pryor was no longer lucid enough to give interviews or even articulate his own comments. Things were changing in Hollywood, but slowly. Jamie Foxx went on to win in , Forest Whitaker the following year. His work is unique, expertly crafted and imbued with a sense of comedic danger — creations that you can imagine offering you a joint and a beer as they playfully destroy everything around them. Describe a memory from three stages of yr life …. What role has Mr. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. First things first, thank you. Like in the 80s!
At age 10 I was miserable in a new school getting the snot kicked out of me daily….. But pivotal moment in the early days? I was almost 4 and it was Christmas. That blew my fucking mind. I never fit in through school ever, so when I found hardcore and straight edge I dove head first into it. Well on my 20th birthday I met the band Saves The Day and they started taking me along on California tour dates, from there I met tons of folks in the music world..
Pictures below of John in his salad days Personal motto? Favorite TV show s? So the tv was def a large part of my life. List off all my fave flicks like a MySpace profile? Obvi the Star Wars trilogy was a huge part of my life. So I pretty much spent a huge portion of my toddler life flopping around w those movies going just absorbing that whole universe. Favorite books and comics? Killer Mother Fucking Bootlegs , destroys the game with his creativity!
Hands down that guy is on another level! I also love the shit outta Falcon Toys , dude owns the Star Wars bootleg mash up game ya know? Worst aspect of the contemporary art-hustle? Door mirrors and Instagram plus Star Wars bootlegs. Best aspect of the contemporary art-hustle?
Extinguishing Features: The Last Years of Richard Pryor
All the money, fame, models and fast cars. Fun shit I wanna have on my shelf that stokes me out to see and make. Putting good energy in the universe? I remember the 1st issue of Nintendo Power had just come out… Anyways he came to visit and brought me a set of colored pencils, pens and tracing paper. That lit a fire under my ass like nothing! What did you draw as a pre-teen child? What did you draw as a teen? Shit my teen years I spent a lot of time drawing band logos or straight edge warriors on notebook paper.
Oh man yeah, 8 months ago pivotal artistic moment when I found the bootleg resin scene!! It was like a kick in the face.