Bicentennial Nigger, Richard Pryor’s 1976 album, is simply brilliant. It brims with a sharp, eviscerating humor through which Pryor highlights his country’s founding contradiction: its profession of democratic principles despite its history of racial oppression. True to Pryor’s style, none but the last track assumes the serious tone of that objective. The first track, in fact, features Pryor imitating a hillbilly screaming at the moment of orgasm, and the second depicts Pryor’s varying degrees of success in satisfying the sexual appetites of both black and white women. Using his trademark ability to mimic cartoonish but clearly identifiable “white” and “black” voices, Pryor sets off a raunchy play of stereotypes. White women are docile: they consent to sex easily, don’t complain if they do not reach orgasm, don’t put up a fight when they are physically threatened, and are happy to stay at home when their man goes out in the evening. Black women, by contrast, are assertive and intractable: when their men announce that they are going out, they start getting ready too; they fight right back when their men threaten them with violence and refuse to give oral sex but complain when they do not achieve orgasm. After unsatisfactory sex one of them says (in Pryor’s imitation of a sassy “black” woman), “Nigga, that’s some sad dick!”
Without Pryor’s unmatched gift for delivery, his play with stereotypes could be seen as simply vulgar or even scandalous (especially since it involves his controversial use of the “N” word). However, he invariably grounds his outrageous humor in the harsh realities of American racism and reveals how it perpetuates the ideologies of slavery. Since transcriptions of his performances allow us to examine the design of his stand-up, in this chapter I first consider in detail particular tracks in the bicentennial album and the design of that album as a whole. I also examine his other major albums and film concerts, produced between 1968 and 1983, for they reveal how Pryor twists the tradition of the conjuror discussed in chapter 1. Invoking the past and seeking catharsis, Pryor uses his power as conjurer to stage rituals of redress with respect to American slavery. At a crucial point in his career, however, Pryor recoils at his power as a conjurer and redirects it. Why he recoils and what it reveals about the power he taps into through his conjuring is the focus of later sections of this chapter. Highlighting the ritualistic aspects of stand-up comedy, already a ritualized medium with its own codes and system of rites, stand-up in Pryor’s performances became not only a vehicle for catharsis—both for the release of racial tensions and for the purging of racist attitudes—but also a medium through which he symbolically redressed chattel slavery and its aftermath. Arising at the end of the civil rights and the beginning of the Black Power movements, Pryor’s work, like Ishmael Reed’s, is part of a larger movement toward redress, conceived as retribution, correction, and reparations for American slavery. At the same time, it expresses a conscious awareness of the impossibility of that redress given the enormity of the breach: the genocide caused by the slave trade and the institutionalized brutality of plantation slavery.
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How does Pryor mobilize black humor to redress American slavery? In Bicentennial Nigger he does not exclude himself from the stereotyping play with which he opens the album, presenting himself as the kind of sexually insatiable black man who has inspired an uneasy mixture of fear, desire, and abhorrence in America. But he uses the stereotype to expose the contradictions of this mixture. Although, on other occasions, notably in Wanted/Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1978), he parodies the idea of the macho man and laughs at the myth of black male genital superiority, in this performance he speaks of easily pleasing white women and in general about black men’s exceptional sexual powers, thus playing with a taboo so potent that it had been criminalized only nine years before the bicentennial. Pryor more than fulfills the fantasy that had upheld the law against miscegenation; he flagrantly flaunts it for white men who might, given the power of the taboo, imagine him as a sexual competitor with the upper hand as well as for white women who might imagine him as both a threat and an object of desire (depending on sexual orientation, white men might also see him as such). Knowing that black women in the audience will judge him for liking white women, he announces the fact that he has dated both black and white women in a mock confessional tone. Then, suggesting that these women might go so far as to refuse him sex after his disclosure (“Right on, motherfucker, beg me”), he declares the fact that he will sleep with white women nonetheless. In each case, he is an outlaw who exhibits his criminality with the gusto implied by the sexual satisfaction he provides, which he makes explicit by focusing on his performance of cunnilingus on both black and white women.
The audience quite audibly laughs, because, as Freud might have put it, Pryor has given voice to a taboo and allowed the energy involved in keeping it in place release through laughter. As in other performances, however, audience members—at the very least, blacks and whites—laugh from different perspectives and “in and out of symmetry.” As John Limon notes, Pryor plays with stereotypes of “black lawlessness,” “vulgarity,” and “coolness” as against “white mechanicalness” and prudishness. In this and other performances, such as the opening act of Live in Concert, black folk “see themselves as whites see them,” in the tradition of double consciousness articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois, “but they like what they see,” and whites “now see themselves from the outside as well; but they are content, for the length of the occasion, to lend their mechanical bodies to the comic machinery.” Blacks and whites “laugh from different positions that go in and out of symmetry,” argues Limon, but “they all laugh.”
Aside from disrupting the possibility of passive spectatorship, Pryor thus creates communities that, while laughing “in and out of symmetry,” find common ground, at least for the duration of his performance, in the volatile history of racial tensions that his self-transformations conjure. He also gives his performance a clear context. His flamboyant play on stereotypes in the skit about black and white women is rooted in the taboo against miscegenation, which, as the album makes clear, is itself rooted in the history of slavery. Even in “Hillbilly,” the album’s first track, Pryor suggests a historical context as he not only imitates a racist white man having an orgasm, but also adopts his voice to give an exaggerated version of America before its birth as a nation, as the heathen place that Europeans would civilize. The irony, of course, is that Pryor plays the white man’s role as a civilizing agent with a crassness that betrays that role while making him the object of derisive laughter. Bicentennial Nigger ends with an eponymous track in which Pryor delivers a short but potent history of the Middle Passage and slavery, told from the perspective of a “two-hundred-year-old” “nigger in blackface . . . with stars and stripes on his forehead.” Pryor thus couches his outrageous impersonations of stereotypes in between two tracks that provide clear historical referents even as he exaggerates the distortions that such stereotypes set in place.
~~Laughing Fit To Kill: Black Humor In The Fictions Of Slavery -By- Glenda R. Carpio
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