Make 'Em Laugh, page 45
He was a caterpillar who became his own butterfly. And he finally got the message of who he was. I used to tell him all the time who he was, and he would say sometimes to me, “I’m not Martin Luther King; I can’t have that responsibility.” But you have it whether you want it or not. You’ve been chosen.
As he was breaking out, according to Pryor, “An agent said to me, ‘Be the kind of colored guy we’d like to have over to our house.’ And I’m buying this shit. They were gonna try to help me be nothing as best they could.” He was determined to get as far away from “nothing” as possible. George Carlin observed that “There was so much pain in Richard’s work. That was wonderful, because it was working through the pain. And using it. And of course he had great skills delivering it.” Pryor tapped into his gift for community, creating a street-corner sage named Mudbone; he carried on conversations between two, sometimes three, different characters; he indulged his remarkable gift for mimicry, imitating hookers, vampires, exorcists, dogs, white people—even his own heart. But one word kept appearing and reappearing. When Lenny Bruce said it in his act, it was shocking. When Pryor used it, it was an authentic statement:
Ain’t no niggers goin’ to the moon, you know that. First of all, ain’t no niggers qualified, so you all tell us. … Niggers was hip, they help y’all get to the moon. “Hey, man, let’s organize and help these white motherfuckers get to the moon, so they leave us alone.”
Chris Rock put it into context: “He wasn’t doing this so white people could hear him—he never thought white people were going to hear it. He didn’t do all that so, you know, he could sit next to Bob Hope or something.” Pryor was bold enough to put the word in the title of his third comedy album in 1974, and That Nigger’s Crazy defied all industry expectations. It crossed over to a white audience, went gold, and won the Grammy. The same year, Pryor—whose routines were studded with every conceivable profanity—received his first and only nightclub bust in Virginia, for “disorderly conduct.”
The white man who owned the club there called another man and had me busted. Why? Because they’re white and they had nothing else to do that weekend. “That nigger talks about Jesus!” They just thought I was a smart nigger, and wanted to shut me down, but they can do that because they white. And the niggers who were booking me said they loved my albums.
By the end of 1974, Pryor had cowritten the smash hit movie Blazing Saddles, was popular enough to cohost the conventional Mike Douglas Show for an entire week, and received an Emmy as a writer for a Lily Tomlin TV special. Tomlin recalled trying to sign him up:
He knew me from Laugh-In or whatever, but still, I kind of had to prove myself to him, that I was enough of a soulful person. So he made me go to a porno movie with him. And I said, “Okay, but I’m paying my own way.” And then, he took me down in the neighborhood, and when he saw that a lot of black folks knew me and liked me from Laugh-In, then that was pretty good and affirming.
Inevitably, Pryor made his long-awaited debut on the hottest comedy show on TV two weeks before Christmas, 1975, and brought his knack for controversy with him. Saturday Night Live wanted something cutting edge from Pryor and this job application-word association sketch fit the bill:
CHEVY CHASE: Spear-chucker.
PRYOR: White trash.
CHASE: Jungle bunny!
PRYOR: Honky.
CHASE: Spade.
PRYOR: Honky-honky.
CHASE: Nigger.
PRYOR: Dead honky.
Finding the voice: Getting to his roots; Pryor in Live from the Sunset Strip (1982).
It would be the first time a white man called a black man a “nigger” on a nationally televised comedy sketch.
During the following year, Pryor’s film career was on the express track, with three hits that year, including Silver Streak, which earned $30 million, making it one of the top fifty films of its time. The next year, NBC came calling again and produced The Richard Pryor Special? in prime time. The show was so successful that NBC wooed him for a prime-time series commitment. Pryor demurred and deferred but eventually agreed to a ten-episode variety show and was given $2 million by the network. The variety show featured scathing sketches, but for all its groundbreaking social commentary, it trailed well behind Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley in the ratings. The network standards and practices department blue-penciled much of Pryor’s work; sick of it all, he pulled the plug after only four of ten scheduled episodes. “One week of truth on TV could straighten out everything,” Pryor said. “But they’re not going to write shows about how to revolutionize America. The top-rated shows are for retarded people.”
In his entire career, Lenny Bruce never made more than a handful of television appearances. Pryor walked away from a comedian’s dream—a showcase in front of millions of viewers weekly. He wanted to reach his audience in his own way, no censors, no compromises. In 1979, he got his chance with Richard Pryor: Live in Concert. Live in Concert was the first successful film of its kind: nothing but a comedian, a mike, an audience. To avoid an X rating, the film has a disclaimer: “WARNING: This picture contains harsh and very vulgar language and may be considered shocking and offensive.”
Isn’t it funny that Richard Pryor uses badder language than almost anybody else and yet for him, in that situation, it was appropriate. You were never shocked because he was talking about his life and his experience. And I was never shocked by the four letter words that Richard Pryor used because he was such an artist and so brilliant. He communicated what it felt like to be a black man in his time.
–Dick Van Dyke
As the eighties began, Pryor’s career was, to use the title of one of his film hits, bustin’ loose, but so was his personal life. He was seriously addicted to cocaine. In the middle of a benefit for gay rights in the Hollywood Bowl, he turned on the audience, telling them that “You Hollywood faggots can kiss my rich, happy, black ass.” Months later, he shot his own Mercedes Benz with a Magnum .38 into the bargain. “He was enormously self-destructive,” said Robert Klein, “and he did not take good care of himself, but then he was so honest about talking about it—these self-confessions, but they were so funny that they weren’t self pitying.” He could be full of surprises: after a visit to Africa, he decided to give up using the word nigger in his act. “It can’t make you feel good, because when the white man calls us that, it hurts no matter how strong we try to be about,” he said.
Dark star: Allergic to network censorship; with buddy Gene Wilder in Stir Crazy (1980).
For all of his rollercoaster publicity, his career was riding high. And then, in June of 1980, it all went up in smoke. It would be six years before Pryor told the public the full truth. Paranoid after a hit of freebased cocaine, he had tried to commit suicide by setting himself on fire. For any other celebrity, the publicity alone would have been devastating. Perhaps one or two brave comedians might have mentioned it again in their acts. But as anyone who saw Pryor’s next concert film, Live from the Sunset Strip, can attest, no one else could have made the incident so heart-breakingly hilarious. The sight of Pyror equating himself with a lit match—“Richard Pryor running down the street …” —remains one of comedy’s most brilliant moments.
Pryor moved in and out of movies, some of which were worthy of him, many that were not. In 1986, he suffered another setback; a bout of multiple sclerosis. It was difficult for friends and colleagues to watch his decline, and most shockingly, his silence. Every now and then, there were sparks of the old flame:
They had a program called The American Comedy Awards. We went to a press function afterward and we were sitting there and Richard turned to me, he said, “I stole your album.” I said, “What, Richard?” He said, “I stole your album. In Peoria. I walked into the record store and I put it inside my jacket, and I walked out.” That’s about as high a compliment as you can receive, that Richard Pryor stole your album.
—Bob Newhart
Still, Pryor’s disease, and his death from a heart attack in 2005, could never diminish the distance that he had pushed the American public. One of the many black comedians influenced by Pryor, Tommy Davidson, called it: “Richard Pryor had the most authentic black voice in America probably still to this day. But it was a black voice not only filled with rage but insight. The dignity in him was second nature because it wasn’t about explaining who these people were; it was about expressing what these people were about.” As Pryor once said, in the voice of his “truth-teller” Mudbone:
KISS MY RICH HAPPY BLACK ASS
I knowed that boy … see. He fucked up. See, that fire got on his ass and it fucked him up upstairs. Fried what little brains he had. ’Cause I ’member the motherfucker—he could make a motherfucker laugh at a funeral on Sunday Christmas Day.
“YOU CAN PRICK YOUR FINGER, BUT YOU CAN’T FINGER YOUR PRICK”
GEORGE CARLIN
I love words.…I want to tell you something about words that I think is important. They’re my work, they’re my play, they’re my passion. Words are all we have really. So be careful with words–some can hurt, some can heal.…
–George Carlin, Class Clown
George Carlin was fascinated by words from the moment he was born in 1938 into an uptown New York Irish neighborhood; he called it “White Harlem” because “it sounded bad.” Carlin was raised almost single-handedly by his mother. “My father was absent,” he said, “but he was very gifted verbally. He was an after-dinner speaker. He won the Dale Carnegie nationwide public speaking contest in 1935 against twelve hundred entrants. So, as they say in Ireland, ‘I didn’t lick it off the rocks,’ you know?” His mother “drove home to me the Irish gift of language, whatever that is, by sending me to the dictionary.”
Like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce before him, Carlin left home at an early age to join the service. Appropriately, he was deployed to drop bombs—by the Strategic Air Command, serving as a mechanic on B-47 bombers trained for nuclear exercises. Also like Sahl and Bruce, he proved to be too much of a cutup for the service. He was following a pattern. During his relatively brief existence, he had already been kicked out of the Boy Scouts, the altar boys, the choirboys, and summer camp. By 1957, the twenty-year-old Carlin wanted to be “an actor/comedian/impersonator/disc jockey/trumpet player.” He teamed with a comedy partner named Jack Burns, and by 1960, they were turning up on national television, performing an act that was rebellious and snarky but not quite original enough to become big.
Carlin went solo in 1962 and pursued a single-minded mission: he toned down his act so he could get more television gigs and use the television gigs to get parts in movie comedies. He borrowed riffs from his disc jockey days and mixed them in with “observation comedy,” still employing his fascination for words. He developed a small following with his character Al Sleet, the “Hippy Dippy Weatherman”: “Tonight’s forecast: Dark.” He hit all the big variety and talk shows. By the late sixties, Carlin had become a regular on a jovial middle of the road variety show called The Kraft Summer Music Hall with John Davidson. His career dream had come true—only now it was beginning to look like a nightmare:
Dippy, not yet hippy: Carlin as comedy relief in With Six, You Get Eggroll (1968); straight-laced comic on the variety scene.
It’s great to do a Perry Como special ’cause you’re gonna do a stand-up on an important show. But then you’re in the bunny number. And you’re in the pirate number. And, you know, in all this moron stuff. Hey, I thought, I’m wasting my time with these people, I don’t like these people—I’m entertaining the enemy. I had to get in touch with the comedian who says fuck you, who says you can’t do that.
Just when it looked like his career was going to bell-bottom out, Carlin played the prestigious Frontier Hotel in Vegas in 1970; he saw the whites of the enemy’s eyes—and fired at them:
I had a little routine I did in Vegas where I said the word “shit.” I said, “You know I don’t say ‘shit.’ I don’t say ‘shit.’ Redd Foxx says ‘shit’ right down the street. Buddy Hackett says ‘shit’ over and across the boulevard there. I don’t say ‘shit.’ I’ll smoke a little of it. …” And it got its laugh, but after that show they just said, “That’s it. You’re fired—and you don’t get the money.” So that was the thing that broke the mold completely.
Carlin grew out his beard, grew his hair longer, junked his white polyester bell-bottoms for jeans, and left the lounge crowd for good. “I’ll go to the colleges—that’s where my audience is,” he told his wife. “If all I ever do is fill coffeehouses all weekend—Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday—I’ll be happy.” The stripped-down Carlin was immediately apparent on the cover of his new 1972 album FM/AM. It was a dress rehearsal for his shift from comfortable—AM-comedian—to provocative: FM-comic. His second album of 1972, Clown Class, was opening night.
We have more ways of describing dirty words than we have dirty words…that seems a little strange: bad, dirty filthy foul, vulgar, coarse, unseemly, locker room language, bawdy, naughty, saucy, raunchy, obscene, off-color, risqué, cursing, cussing.
I wanted a list—that’s the problem, nobody gives you a list. Wouldn’t that make sense, if they didn’t want you to say something, they’d give you a list. Nobody even tells you when you’re a kid what the words are you’re supposed to avoid. “Shit.” Pow!! I wanted to know the words that were always filthy.
The routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” was the natural extension of Carlin’s innocent childhood fascination with words. The words themselves were anything but innocent.
The left brain in me wanted to tell the people that there were some words you could say on television that were not considered nice depending on how you used them. Depending on the meaning, there were some words you could use. And one I used the most delightfully, I felt, was, “You can prick your finger, but you can’t finger your prick.” But there are seven words I’ve been able to find that have no redeeming meanings. And they are: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.
The album was a hit, went gold, and won the Grammy. “Seven Words” became a signature bit for Carlin and he expounded further with “Filthy Words” on his next album. Blockbuster albums, sold-out college concerts—he was finally connecting with the audience he was always searching for. It was a far cry from the persecution of Lenny Bruce. “Some people have erroneously connected me with Lenny because of profane language,” Carlin once said. “He was the first one to make language an issue and suffered from it. I was the first one to make language an issue and succeed from it.” Carlin’s concert career became hugely successful by the fall of 1973, helped in no small measure by his albums, but in October, the “Filthy Words” routine went from being famous to being infamous. WBAI-FM, a Pacifica Foundation listener-supported station in New York, broadcast a program called Lunchpail, a show about language with a disclaimer that “Filthy Words” would be played and that some listeners might find it offensive. As Carlin recounted:
There was a complaint. One complaint to the FCC, in a city the size of New York, think of all the radio receivers, counting cars, there would be at that time. One complaint to the FCC by a kind of professional moralist. He was in the car with his son, and he had his son listen to it. I’m not sure the son was morally corrupted by the experience. But, because this guy wanted to do his moral agitator thing, he made a complaint. The FCC fined the station just a hundred dollars.
But the FCC also voted to censure WBAI, which was a serious mark against a station for its license renewal application. The station fought the censure and won on appeal, but the FCC took the case to a higher court—the “Big Daddy,” as Lenny Bruce called it—the Supreme Court. The case, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, was in the courts for five years, and the ruling handed down in July of 1978 upheld the FCC action, by a vote of five to four, ruling that the routine was “indecent but not obscene.” Justice Brennan though the opinion was “misguided” and wrote in his dissent:
Pacifica explained that “Carlin is not mouthing obscenities, he is merely using words to satirize as harmless and essentially silly our attitudes towards those words.” In confirming Carlin’s prescience as a social commentator by the result it reaches today, the Court evinces an attitude toward the “seven dirty words” that many others besides Mr. Carlin and Pacifica might describe as “silly.” Whether today’s decision will similarly prove “harmless” remains to be seen. One can only hope that it will.
“ ‘Indecent but not obscene,’ ” said Carlin, “was kind of a new category of filth for me, initially for me. The only case in the Supreme Court based on a comedian.” Carlin himself was not a party to the lawsuit, nor did he testify in any way, but “I knew it would validate the piece of material and the thought behind the piece of material which was the center of my identity and act—‘Let’s all feel a little freer, and not be bound up with all this crap that religion and the culture put on us.’ ” And in a sign of some kind of progress, Carlin’s routines were at least broadcast in his lifetime. More than a year before the Supreme Court ruling, Carlin found himself triumphing in another arena, where his language was beyond the reach of the FCC—cable television. Carlin did his first HBO special in 1977, then continued to perform on the network for thirty more years, a dozen specials in all.
“SHIT.” POW!!
I WANTED TO KNOW THE WORDS THAT WERE ALWAYS FILTHY.
By the end of his exceptional decade of the 1970s, Carlin had become a kind of elder statesman of comedy for a younger generation. He hosted the first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975. But the decade exacted a price from Carlin: Like his hero Lenny Bruce, he had a series of substance abuse addictions—cocaine, painkillers—as well as two heart attacks, which sidelined him in the early 1980s. In the late 1990s, Carlin branched out into publishing some of his perceptions, thoughts, and routines. His last book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, was full of Carlin’s fascination with euphemism:
