Extinguishing Features - The Last Years of Richard Pryor

[TMC]

http://brightlightsfilm.com/56/richa...p#.UdCpPzuOQRg

Nineteen-eighty-four was a significant year for black stars in Hollywood, but Richard Pryor wasn't one of them. On the big screen, Eddie Murphy overtook Pryor's box office status with Beverly Hills Cop, one of the biggest money-makers of the year and the 23-year-old's third hit movie in a row. On TV, veteran Bill Cosby launched The Cosby Show, which quickly became one of the most successful series of the 1980s.

Pryor, however, was falling into limp imitations of Murphy's successes (the spineless Brewster's Millions, 1985, having more than a few similarities to the snappy Trading Places, 1983) or giving way to a "Cosbification" of his screen persona. This was apparent in his return to TV — seven years after his controversial, quickly aborted sketch show — with Pryor's Place, a Saturday morning children's series in which he played "a sombre, earnest figure … hosting the wholesome adventures of two black boys" on a Sesame Street-style set. Although the series represented, according to John and Dennis Williams, "a minor racial breakthrough"4 — given the casual acceptance of the blackness of its characters — it hardly befitted a performer who, only handful of years before, could hardly do anything without it being "radical."

This hadn't been the first time Pryor had presented himself in the mould of Bill Cosby. He'd begun his career trying to emulate the older performer, who by the mid-sixties was the highest-paid black actor on television and the first to achieve equal billing in a hit series (I-Spy, 1965-68, alongside Robert Culp). 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. Pryor worked for years trying to copy this style, but in a legendary "breakdown' in front of a Las Vegas audience in the late sixties, couldn't square it with himself any more. 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.

The Pryor of the '70s, of course, couldn't have been more different from Cosby, but they happily co-existed, even working together in the 1978 film adaptation of Neil Simon's California Suite. Cosby, however, had been seeing his own career limp along on TV and the big screen, so his return to prime time with the 1984 series was something of a major comeback.

But if The Cosby Show signified a new direction for "black" comedy in the eighties, it was a direction disturbingly out of synch with everything that Pryor had stood for in his best years. 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. The show's Huxtable family, with their Ph.D.s, law degrees, M.B.A.s, and diplomas, may have presented a highly positive image of blacks, but somehow they looked tailored to appeal to a rigidly non-progressive audience. They were as primly self-satisfied as the households in the blandest WASP sitcoms. Perhaps this was the series' radical raison d'etre, but for all Bill Cosby's twinkly sarcasm and the gentle reference to some distant race struggle every fifty episodes or so, The Cosby Show often appeared ultraconservative, even reactionary. The Huxtables reflected a relentlessly upbeat image of success in Reagan-era America, when the reality of many black lives couldn't have been more different. Of course, NBC wouldn't have had it any other way — the network was saved by the show's success.

Now, Pryor was falling in line with this fashion for "collaborationist comedy." If the Pryor of The Richard Pryor Show in 1977 had been a ferocious comic bulldog, not safe to be let out amongst children and the weak, then the Pryor of Pryor's Place (right) and Brewster's Millions had clearly been house-trained, able to sit placidly by as the young ones pulled at his ears — not dissimilar from the character he'd played in The Toy. Like the Huxtables, he was well-scrubbed and unthreatening; any spark of activism had been summarily defused.