Rytius Records (Substack Edition), Ch. 7.3b
Ch. 7.3: The Comedy Games: That Nigger’s Crazy (1974)
7.3 The Comedy Games
That Nigger’s Crazy (1974)
June 7, 2132
GJ brought chocolate-chip cookies, chocolate-chip-pecan cookies, chocolate-chip-cherry-pecan cookies, brownies, and hash brownies, a cornucopia of chewy crispy chocolate confections. There were pitchers of fresh mare’s milk and goat’s milk on ice. He assured everyone that the hash brownies were only very lightly hashed, and he put them by themselves on their own little end table next to the big one, clearly marked. Sugarpie bragged about how they had roasted the pecans and the walnuts, on their own, before putting them into the cookies and brownies. It made a big difference to the taste.
It was not hard to tie the album to the cultural revolution upon which her entire thesis rested, considering that it was recorded at the Soul Train Club in San Francisco’s North Beach, and that Pryor had immersed himself in Bay Area politics and culture starting in 1971.
Sugarpie began with the argument that Pryor’s use of “nigger” was a sign that the interracial counterculture of the 1960s had achieved such political coherence and ethical power that it could throw caution about such matters as offensive ethnic slurs to the wind, so certain was it of its victory over the old world, so sure was it of its own innocence and purity of heart. She allowed that it was still a counterculture, though, because his audiences clearly delighted not only in Pryor’s stories and jokes, but also in being able to take pleasure in Pryor’s open use of the word, which was then still taboo.
The questions came thick and fast, within the first several minutes, the first couple of jokes. Sugarpie lifted the needle before “Wino Dealing With Dracula.”
“How do we know he’s not just freaking out the squares?” Tellem asked, doing his best to use the lingo.
“Ain’t no squares in that club,” Sugarpie responded with a grin.
GJ laughed and said “Right on, sister.”
Fila chuckled and raised his left fist in a black-power salute.
“I’m hip, but most of the audience ain’t in the club,” jived Wascal.
“Meaning is made on the spot, and that’s what’s laid down after all is said and done. I say the record-players get the whole experience, and I don’t think they can miss it,” replied Sugarpie.
“We can’t know a man’s mind, except by what he says…,” Fila began. “But a single man’s mind ain’t meaning. Meaning is social.”
“Agreed,” allowed Sugarpie.
“So, there’s different ways things can be received. Even if we don’t know what went down per se in the event at the given time, we can see the possibilities, and so we know what might have gone down,” Fila continued.
“Granted,” said Sugarpie.
“Eliminate the extraneous possibilities,” Tellem said.
“‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’,” quoted Kloz.
“That’s all square business, but we need to be able to feel the range of possibility deep in our bones. We don’t know so much… So, how do we know that Pryor’s use of that word, even, or even especially, among the hip, wasn’t something more corrupt, like an invitation to a sort of private counterculture, a semi-public ritual in which Pryor absolves his white audience members of historical guilt and shame for the price of a concert ticket?”
“Like the Catholic Church selling indulgences,” said GJ.
Fila nodded. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“That doesn’t even need to happen in the club,” Wascal added.
“Because the technology, the recording, affords both the pure local experience and other ones,” Fila said. “We don’t know which happened or if it was both or just one or what.”
Sugarpie listened calmly. “I think you’re underestimating the power of the change at work here, and the possibility that the new hope overpowered the other possibilities. It would look the same, and we could have the same discussion.”
“Or maybe Pryor was just foolish to leave such a gaping ambiguity in his work?” Kloz offered.
“And now you’ve circled back to my point,” Sugarpie noted. “All we’ve been doing is raising the stakes, putting meat on the bones, seeing the real issues involved in the renewal and social change of the time. Remember, I’m proposing that Pryor’s work was not ambiguous. Like Fila said, we lack the feeling of the lifeworld of that time, so we don’t see right away how he was received the way I propose.”
Those gathered realized that she was right—this was, indeed, precisely her point. They had circled back around. Fila still wanted to argue for the range of possibilities, but he didn’t, because it didn’t speak to Sugarpie’s hypothesis. Both could be true. But he felt like he was missing something. Sugarpie dropped the needle back down on “Flying Saucers,” and Pryor pulled laughs out of example after example of ongoing racial prejudice and state oppression of the black population of the United States in the 1970s. All the questions that had seemed foreclosed at the end of the first half were reopened.
“The man wouldn’t be a comedian doing this show, or maybe even at all, if racism weren’t ongoing into the 1970s,” Tellem claimed. “What would he be talking about?”
Fila agreed. “Yeah. I know you still think a spirit of renewal is at work here, but you have to allow that the oppression was ongoing,” Fila challenged Sugarpie.
“I never said the oppression was over,” Sugarpie responded. “I said that the counterculture was confident it would win, and that this new spirit enabled Pryor’s comedy and gave it meaning. The battle had been joined, and they were already changing the world, in many ways.”
“What about the police brutality?” Kloz asked. “That’s state repression, and that’s official. That goes to Tellem’s…theory.”
“Not if the people are busy making a new world,” Sugarpie stated.
Fila frowned and twisted his lips in confusion. He closed his eyes.
“I think we have to look at the possibility Fila raised,” Wascal said. “That would betray your new hope.”
“I don’t see how,” Sugarpie responded. “We don’t have a way to compare the weight of the new spirit against any corruption afforded by the recording medium, but we do have a whole lot of changes in the world, and many more blacks flourishing and creating in the decades after the 1960s.”
“You want to look at data here but not there,” said Tellem. “You want to tally up salaries? Count the heads of business leaders and elected officials?”
Fila said “Yeah,” though his eyes were still closed.
“Why not?” asked Sugarpie. “You count prisoners.”
“I proposed that the state expanded its repression beyond the blacks, but continued it without improving their position. Blacks were no longer singled out in the law, but repression…repression became colorblind, and that didn’t mean that blacks escaped, but that more people were caught in circumstances formerly reserved to the blacks,” Tellem responded.
“Slavery and segregation are fundamentally economic relationships,” Fila added, opening his eyes.
“Exactly,” said Tellem.
“OK, but what about this mass-market sale of indulgences?” Wascal rejoined. “The fact that we can’t weigh the pure hearts of the hip against the corrupt practices enabled by anonymous mass distribution isn’t an answer, because you have to admit that it’s possible that the one outweighed the other.”
“You know what I am going to say, right?” asked Sugarpie.
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“That Pryor’s work is still an embodied performance of the new spirit, and that this is all that you have claimed?” asked Wascal.
“Yes,” Sugarpie said.
“OK, but doesn’t it mean something if that spirit is just hemmed in on all sides?” Wascal continued.
“That’s where I have to point to the evidence of growing black representation in the arts and in business and government,” Sugarpie said.
“But again, we know that the laws changed,” Wascal continued. “Blacks could get elected and get better jobs. But we also know what Tellem told us last week, that the repression hitting the majority both of the black population and the broader population was essentially the same or worse, even though it was colorblind.”
“I don’t see how that changes anything,” Sugarpie responded.
“Maybe the representation you’re talking about is also like an indulgence,” Wascal replied. “They called it tokenism.”
“Maybe with the politicians and business people, but not with the artists. Something clearly broke loose in the 1960s,” Sugarpie argued. “And it continued into the twenty-first century.”
“You relied on context to judge the new spirit in Pryor’s work,” said Wascal. “Even though you now admit that the new spirit can be outweighed by its context. You have to admit that later developments must be subject to the same possibility: corruption in the medium allowing them to be outweighed by bad context, hemmed in by their broader reception.”
“Oh!” Fila exclaimed. “Yeah! That’s right. You’re begging the question. You assume context to show that Pryor’s ‘nigger’s are spirited and not corrupt or foolish, but then you reject context showing that they might be corrupt or foolish, because Pryor’s ‘nigger’s are spirited.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying the whole time,” Tellem said.
“I know. You’re right. I was just trying to think of the name of it. It’s a circular argument. It’s slippery too, though, because there was such a big social change, and things did look so different,” Fila said.
“But now,” Fila continued, turning toward Sugarpie, “it seems like you cannot possibly adequately address the question of the corruption afforded by the medium—tokenism and the sale of indulgences—because you have to show the spirit’s effects beyond these individual artifacts you’ve been using. You mentioned that we lack the feel of the lifeworld of that time. You have to show that spirit creating significant supportive context, and you just can’t do that with what we have. We can reconstruct some sort of mosaic, but we can’t tell how important the pieces are in relation to each other.”
“Well, listen,” Sugarpie began. “I don’t know why I have to do that. First of all, I still think the body of work created after the civil rights movement stands as evidence of something liberatory, even if I might not be able to prove it, just with the records themselves.”
This seemed like the beginning of a humble concession of defeat, couched in defensive language.
“And second of all,” she continued, “artists are not responsible for the reception of their work.”
Kloz’s Clauses erupted into a cacophony of shouts, denunciations, jeers, curses, and abuse.
“Oh, but no.”
“After all that spirit jive, too?”
“Now she comes with this?”
“I know she didn’t.”
“Oh, yes, she did.”
“Niggers still ain’t got no sense.”
Sugarpie has never admitted that this was a copout. She attempted to withdraw it and reground her position in the individual artist’s practice of comedy.
“It’s all about the work,” she yelled, but they shouted her down. GJ tried to quiet the room, and they shouted him down too.
Kloz was laughing with Wascal and Tellem was amirth with chuckles, so Fila figured he had to be the one to do something in the way of moderation. He gestured to Sugarpie that he would be speaking next, then he stood, and the jeering died down a little bit.
“I’m game! Let’s talk about Pryor’s work more closely, then,” he began, as though nothing had happened. “It’s mostly stories. He uses ‘nigger’ in vernacular stories about the blacks, just like they did in their everyday lives. That tells us that it’s not the word, but it’s the stories that are important. And the stories are important, notable at all, because he is telling the so-called white folks, who haven’t heard them before.”
“Nice,” said Kloz. There was broad assent. Sugarpie agreed as well, so Fila continued.
“But they’re funny like all humor, because of surprises and violated expectations. Like a crazy answer to a normal question. Or putting the emphasis on the wrong word. What do you think?” Fila asked Sugarpie.
She had remained seated by the record player. “I agree. Comedy is mostly surprise surprise, or shock, or subverted expectations. That’s no crime or corruption, though.” She was feeling a bit defensive.
“OK, but it has to be funny, right?” Fila asked.
“Yes, it does, and he was. That’s the only way he became important. Well, that and the social changes preceding his own transformation, which include the spiritual renewal and the broadcast and communications technologies, which had been around, but they were dominated by the old order.”
“Are you about to go back on your context trip?” asked Kloz.
“No, I’m just saying…maybe his work was countercultural, fighting against a bad context, like Wascal said, and maybe that context overwhelmed it. We don’t know,” she finally admitted. “But that whole counterculture had an aspirational aspect to it, and that demanded that artists sometimes perform aspirationally.”
“Encouraging and inspiring the audience,” GJ said.
“Exactly,” Sugarpie said.
“What about Lenny Bruce? He was a white comedian using the word ‘nigger’ a decade before,” asked D-Man.
“That was before the laws changed,” Sugarpie argued.
“And Bruce didn’t have Pryor’s experience and stories,” said Fila.
“I think you might be on to something with this aspiration,” Wascal said. “Social change has a cost, and somebody has to pay. If there was a new spirit, its bearers had to make sacrifices, even to find each other. But how can you establish trust? Somebody has to step up and step out.”
“Even losing a war somebody has to wave the white flag,” said Fila.
“And trust they won’t get killed,” said Tellem.
“The warriors share values, like chivalry and honor,” Fila noted.
Wascal continued. “So it might even look like selling indulgences, but it could be much more complicated. On one level Pryor is an individual seeking acceptance for his outrageous conflicted self. On another level he’s offering himself as a focus of the social conlicts. It’s not insincere, because he himself is conflicted and hurt, and so he’s a good example. On the third level, he is trusting the audience to laugh with him, thereby to share and bear the past with him. Maybe only the hippest can go all the way, and the rest would end up having bought an indulgence. But somebody has to do it. And it only works if it’s funny.”
“Very nice,” Sugarpie nodded approval, pleased that someone was building on any part of her work so far.
“I want to agree with you, in a way, too,” Fila added. “On shared context. You had wanted to say that Pryor’s work embodied a context—a spirit of rejuvenation. But I want to go the other way… Twentieth-century Americans had shared assumptions about family dynamics. He said, nope. Not mine. They had shared expectations about how men and women should get along, and he said, nope, not over here, not for a long time.”
“OK, but what’s backward, what’s reversed?” Sugarpie asked.
“He was airing a bunch of dirty laundry,” Fila said. “His stories showed how people couldn’t live those assumptions and aspirations—shared values—because of social conflicts like racism.”
“You’re saying he was revealing the shared values by showing how they were violated,” added Kloz.
“Because dirty laundry is still laundry, and everybody has some idea about how dirty it can get,” added GJ.
“Right,” Fila continued. “So instead of arguing that Pryor’s work represents this or that, which you can’t really prove, you can argue that it reveals that this or that must be true.”
“Or false,” added Tellem.
“I don’t see why not,” Fila said. “But the whole thing is, Pryor is trying to put twentieth-century American society back together again, in a way, by showing the similarities in the differences. The more shocking the difference, the bigger the laugh, and the clearer the basis of judgment: the shared values.”
“And how do you know those shared values are different from the ones of the spirit of renewal?” Sugarpie asked, trying to pin down the distinction.
“They are different. The values have to be shared for the comedy to exist, for the jokes to work. Not the other way around, that the comedy shows some values to exist. The values I’m talking about are therefore prior to any spirit of renewal, and they are the basis of any spirit of renewal, if it existed. I think it’s just all the old humanist stuff, the rights of man, liberté, égalité, fraternité,” Fila answered. “Pryor is taking black and white, the expected and unexpected, and, by the exposure of egregious, violent, shocking difference, revealing what the people have in common. He’s reminding everybody that they are a unity already, anyway.”
“Yeah, remembering the unity of a whole. Remembering literally means to re-member, to put something back together, that had been dis-membered,” Wascal said.
“You said it,” Fila agreed. Folks had started to pack up.
“Listen,” Tweety Bird Andrews stood and yawned. A poet and electrician, Tweety was something of a social butterfly, at ease anywhere, impressive everywhere, and women were often eager for his attention. So they watched when he moved, and everyone listened when he spoke. “Y’all know Richard Pryor changed his mind about ‘nigger’, right?”
“What do you mean?” asked Sugarpie, carefully lifting the album off the turntable.
“Yeah, in Live on the Sunset Strip in 1982. That was his first show after setting himself on fire smoking cocaine, and taking a trip to Africa. He had a change of heart about the way it was being received.”
“Is that right?” asked Tellem.
“It is,” continued Tweety.
“Why didn’t you say something earlier?” asked Fila.
“I wanted to see what you niggers came up with,” he grinned. That was good for a few laughs.
“Wordplay is great,” Kloz said, standing and stretching. “But part of why we got caught in that loop earlier was because we were dealing with words trying to make meaning of words.”
“Good point,” said Fila. “Trying to figure out if these words are good or bad using other words from elsewhere that might also be good or bad.”
“Let’s talk about comedy in a different key,” Kloz proposed. “No words. Next week I want to play you all some Thelonious Monk, a piano player from around the same time.”
“Out of sight,” said Fila.
“Righteous,” said Wascal.
“Far out,” agreed Sugarpie.
“I’m not hip,” said Tellem, who stood to show off his injured leg, clack his cane, and crack a smile. “But I will be.”
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