Richard Pryor

This clip is deep...on many levels...
It shows how fast he was, how sad he was, how truthful, and how brilliant...I want to say he is funny -- and of course that goes without saying -- but really, when he is at his best, there is so much truth and sadness, sometimes i find it hard to laugh...
Throughout the "interview" -- really a cocaine-fueled monologue -- oppression, terror, self-loathing, come up again and again.  Every joke is made with an understanding of history, an awareness of how he is perceived, and how he feels as a black man in america, an understanding that he is one of few who made it -- and also how viscerally scary racism is when you know it can kill you at any minute. Almost any other person in his situation at that moment would be relaxed and happy to be there.  Why wasn't he relaxed and happy? Hadn't he achieved more than he had ever hoped?  Shouldn't he have been basking in his his success?  Well, to paraphrase Wordsworth, the world was too much with him late and soon... His past and his personality wouldn't let him enjoy it.  Drugs were just a coping mechanism for the shitty life he had to cope with growing up, for feeling the world too much, for being hyper-aware of everything instantaneously, for his self-loathing... Despite all of it, his brilliance and his humanity overcame all of the bullshit until the end.  It makes me think that one of the biggest divisions in the human race isn't skin color - or even class - it's the division between people who feel the pain of humanity and those who don't.  I think -- as it is in many things -- that it's a spectrum: at the lowest level you have sociopaths and psychopaths, and at the highest you have people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.  Richard was far from perfect, but in the end, he was firmly on the side of those who feel humanity's pain; but he continued to affirm humanity, and he did more than his part to keep it alive while he was here... ~J