Beckett Failed Better, Pryor Went Electric (pt 2)
REVELATIONS, FOLK CULTURE, AND SLANG
The folk culture of Pryor’s Black America (via Peoria, Illinois) is similar to Beckett’s use of his Irishness. Beckett’s referencing of specific locales in Krapp’s Last Tape, for example, or his celebration of Irish slang in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) – his first collection of short stories, abound in an Irish anarchy that is reflective of his adoration of James Joyce, of course, and also his glee at puns, wordplay and the collision of nonsense, erudition, death, and sex – is something Pryor would have loved given their similarities.
Beckett’s subtle and downplayed insistence that God has abandoned all things and people runs through the majority of his entire oeuvre – this alone could be a remarkable bonding for Blacks, Jews, and the Irish. All capitulate to religion as a culture, but know full well…they are on their own. Perhaps this is why there is such an aggressiveness within these groups to exist and survive. And why death is both funny and sad to them. They don’t view themselves as tragic. They view LIFE’s options as tragic. And the best way to deal or get revenge? Humor. Because God, like the warden who patrols you, hates to see you laugh. It means you are responding and acknowledging a different higher power than he.
Pryor had a lot of early venom towards religion and God and Christ and all the hokum that went with it. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a comedian even doing a third of some of his routines about religion, of which he viewed as a real con job.
“The reason people use a crucifix against vampires is because vampires are allergic to bullshit.” -Richard Pryor
An unfortunate aspect of Black life that was, ironically, lost to African Americans post 1970 in their accelerated integration into the mainstream (“a burning building,” as Martin Luther King Jr. lamented) was the cherished language of the “Black codes of the underground,” the slang, sentiments, insights, and humor that only Blacks knew and shared with each other. Zora Neale Hurston, fifty years earlier, conceded that with the mainstream attention and publication of Black folk tales was the dissolution of a special bond between African Americans and their own special cultures. From Daughters of the Dust to the rap symphonies of Grandmaster Flash to the plays of August Wilson, the oral tradition and the enjoyment of Black vernacular - urbane or rural - was always something that met in the middle in African-American humor. This is very true of a lot of Irish artists, whose approaches to life were as varied as their politics, but many were bound by an un-shatterable perception of life and all understood the gallows humor of a prisoner as all Black Americans understood the wandering ways of a lone guitarist or what became known as the Blues.
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A great synthesis of these two artists - the bridge perhaps between them- is another great clown: Charlie Chaplin.
They speak from the oppressed and outward and up. Even when only addressing the wretched of the earth, Pryor makes the ruling class bite their own hand. If irony is to teach and sarcasm to hurt, Pryor, Beckett, and Chaplin are the greatest writer-performer-teacher-philosophers the 20th century ever had. They all agree that the world is not only unjust, it makes no sense and that the “little people” - the tramps - are where the poetry and truth of life reside.
This is not to imply that poverty, oppression, homelessness, drug addiction – should be romanticized. Beckett’s own inner compass that made him so attentive to the lonely and the dispossessed and Pryor’s own experiences witnessing and experiencing racism and how that was doubled when the down-and-out were Black is ripe for artistic expression. The empathy and solidarity drips through everything they ever wrote or performed. The brother asleep in the subway, the sister arrested for asking for money: these people inhabit the audiences who can understand both artist’s work better than anyone.
Pryor’s comedy and Beckett’s plays makes it clear that they don’t have much hope or interest in understanding or curing the bestiality of the oppressors, they are more concerned with recognizing the dignity of the prisoner. That’s where the power is. And there is a radicalism to this that others can’t either quite understand or precisely relate to. Beckett remained quiet and enigmatic about how he fought against the Nazis, but in a world where everyone is a gross advertisement for their trivial accomplishments – this is simply not relatable. Similarly, Black comedians, in Pryor’s gargantuan shadow, earned cheap comedy points by simply discussing their Blackness. Not who they were, but what they were. As if Black meant you were a thing. In this century, identity is less a footprint and more of a pathology now - a willfully exotic imprisonment to something. Why not employ your own perception of what it means to be part of a particular group?
The danger in Beckett and Pryor’s writing is how they relate to the oppressed fully. Pryor was so outraged at the Attica prison massacre in 1971, he did an entire program about it on his September 1971 free-form radio program in Berkeley with Alan Farley. The radical roots of Pryor are all evident to hear.
You can’t imagine a single comedian going that far today. Dave Chappelle, despite his vast talent, could never attain these political insights (not that he should be pressured to). Chapelle gives truth, as he should. But a great deal of his comic observations are facts one could find in newspapers or well-worn op-eds. Bill Burr is the same: his routines emit from a funny man’s brain, but rarely stem from his soul; that mysterious keen perception that pushes one into catharsis. Talent aside, these comedians’ art doesn’t arise from solidarity with the oppressed or radical insight. If those elements do appear they are often as afterthoughts or by proxy. It can fool audiences sometimes because our age wants to believe that radicalism has something to do with observations about race, instead of revelations. If the subject alone made one deeply acute and cutting edge, the New York Post would be any thinking man’s necessity. Now that would be funny.
For all their riches, Pryor and Beckett always remained talismans for the outsider. Most of the celebrated comedians and writers of Generation X (Chris Rock, Lena Dunham, etc) are not children of the marginalized - they are children of MTV. There have been others who contradict this (Bill Hicks, Bernie Mac), but it’s rare.
The more famous Beckett became, the more extreme and avant-garde his plays became. The more popular Pryor became, the more vociferous and militant and personal his comedy became. Pryor was a liberator. Chappelle and Burr recognize the chains, and smirk at them. They never get to the root of the problem. Radical means to get to the root. Chappelle has endowed us with a laissez-faire “hip-hop” commentary, a humor that straddles not taking anything too serious to a phony finger wagging sort of routine. His limousine liberal humor is beginning to gel with the theatrical deleteriousness of Lin Manuel-Miranda. Chappelle never ever offers himself up. His satire is smug after a while. He defends himself, pokes or attacks others. But never corporate America. Alas, the fact that Chappelle did a tour with Joe Rogan in 2021 says it all.
One of Samuel Beckett’s greatest interpreters, Rich Cluchey, was a San Quentin State Prison inmate, and one of the sole Americans that Beckett ever visited (he was not particularly amorous of the USA) outside of his great director Alan Schneider. An inmate. From San Quentin! Charles Dutton, a famous convict who became a famous Hollywood actor, I am sure has his own stories about the miracle of theater and its relationship to the imprisoned. Dutton did Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence in prison, among other plays. What a beautiful moment it would be if one of our current rising playwrights or comedians seamlessly and organically found a way of learning from and giving to society’s exemplars of the oppressed: those who exist in prison scrubs behind bars.
“Richard performed on my first two shows and we won Emmys for Best Writing and Best Special on the second. In those years…he always took care of me, no matter how high I got or how often my feminist mouth threatened to get me into trouble…he was creating great, incisive work, radical in substance and subtle in presentation.” - Lily Tomlin, 2000
“[Samuel Beckett] is saying to us…that unless we face up to certain truths about the nature of our lives on Earth, we cannot really live as human beings…I’ve never seen a greater love scene in literature than those two people in ashcans (Endgame)...that shows great compassion and understanding.”
- Alan Schneider, 1969
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THE FUNNY SADNESS OF THEIR BEAUTIFUL WORKS
The sadness of Beckett is similar as well to the sadness of Pryor.
The blues of their work is what bonds them and separates them from their peers and other heavyweight talents.
This cannot be taught, it’s something that can only be felt by the artist intrinsically.
Words kill. They also sanctify. They can grant life, liberate, and oppress. Words to a writer are everything. Words to a stand-up comedian are blood. Lifelines to a universe.
It takes a poet to show us the power of the profane and it takes a poet to show us the impact of utterances.
Both Pryor and Beckett’s writing are littered with death and suicide, sex and yearning, love and memory, and surreal interplays of the imagination and the ominousness of the law. But in both there is a marvelous hold on life that is both positive and negative, optimistic as it is pessimistic, funny as it is sad. And always, there is a shimmering truth that one can’t ignore. And this truth is partially arrived at through the realization or acceptance that life has no real meaning, that we are responsible for anything profound. Everything around us is a mystery. A horror at worst. A cosmic joke at best. And the absurdity of it all is that man does not learn from his past, he simply wants to replay or imagine it at a louder volume. So loud that it distorts and while it becomes something else, it just becomes even worse than the original terror the airwaves were broadcasting to begin with.
Sam and Richard knew the best way forward was to remember there is, in fact, something inside of us, something that does make us special as humans. What that is, exactly, is the reason why art exists.
Photo of Samuel Beckett by Richard Avedon, 1989 the year he died and Pryor on the set of his 1986 directorial debut, JoJo Dancer Your Life is Calling, the only drama he ever wrote and directed.
SAMPLES of Beckettian Pryors
Excerpts from the works of Samuel Beckett & Richard Pryor
“I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” - Pryor could have said that.
(the last line from Beckett’s novel, Unnameable)
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“The last time wasn’t so bad. How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I’d been saving up for her all my life.”
(from Krapp’s Last Tape)
(As old man, Mudbone) They say: “When’s the last time you got some pussy?”
I say: “Yesterday. That’s as far as I want to remember it.”
(Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip)
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The famous coda of “Live at the Sunset Strip”. Making fun of himself, Richard Pryor strikes a match. “What’s that? Richard Pryor running down the street.” Beckett could have written that!
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(Context: Estragon leaves his boots for another homeless person who may need them.)
Vladimir: But you can’t go barefoot!
Estragon: Christ did.
Vladimir: Christ! What has Christ got to do with it? You’re not going to compare yourself to Christ!
Estragon: All my life I’ve compared myself to him.
Vladimir: But where he lived it was warm, it was dry!
Estragon: Yes. And they crucified quick.
(from Waiting for Godot, Act One.)
Anyone who’s seen Pryor’s famous 1977 TV special could easily imagine this dialogue being included as a skit!
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Wino: You better lay off that narcotic, that shit done made you null and void. I ain’t lyin’, boy. What’s wrong with you?
Why don’t you straighten up and get a job?
Junkie: Get a job?
I worked five years in a row when I was in the joint pressing them motherfuckin’ license plates. I’m a license plate-pressing motherfucker too, baby. Where I’m gonna get a job out here pressing license plates?
(Richard Pryor, That Nigger’s Crazy 1974)
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Hamm: Don’t sing.
Clov: One hasn’t the right to sing anymore?
Hamm: No.
Clov: Then how can it end?
Hamm: You want it to end?
Clov: I want to sing.
Hamm: I can’t prevent you.
Clov: (Searching for ladder) What did I do with the steps?...Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right mind. Then it passes over and I’m as lucid as before.
(Samuel Beckett, Endgame, 1957)
Language is politics and power is form. Art is the melange of meaning and style. The academics who fawn over Beckett and now Pryor will most likely always misinterpret and warp their work. They can’t admit that great art is always for and by the people, whether the people acknowledge it or not.
It is time to give thanks to the holy clowns and the jesters making us laugh so that we can cry a little bit freer while fighting against our oppressors in the streets, the jungles, the corporate office or the auditoriums of universities, the theaters of life. The masters of drama and comedy are never too far removed or apart, despite their literal and obvious differences. As soon as we understand this, perhaps the arts in general can get back on track. It does not take genius to do that, that’s not in anyone’s control. But a little consciousness can go a long way in these times. And if you know who to learn (or steal) from - then you are at least not part of the problem.
My very dear Alan,
I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is no ease for the heart to be had from words or reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow’s fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds.
Ever,
Sam
(Samuel Beckett’s letter to his friend and director, Alan Schneider, upon learning of Schneider’s father dying.)
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I said… “Boy, why don’t you do something with yourself? Since religion ain’t your thing… maybe you take up ballet.” It makes me laugh, thinkin’ about it. I told him, “Cause you gonna be Black a long time. So you might as well enjoy yourself.’... See, I’ve lived through hard times before. People talk about these as hard times. Hard times was way back. They didn’t even have a year for it. Just called it “Hard Times.” It was dark all the time. I think the sun came out on Wednesday. And it you didn’t have your ass up early you missed it. So, I happened to be out there one Wednesday… and the sun hit me right in the face. I grabbed a bunch of it and rubbed it all over myself. Shit. I didn’t have nothin’ else. Might as well have some sun on my face. And as time went on, I remembered it was Thursday. I said. “Damn. That sun was a bitch. That’s why they didn’t want us to have none of it.” ‘Cause it’d cheer you up inside. … What the point I’m tryin’ to make is… that there is no point to be made. That’s all that there is. There ain’t no point to it. ‘Cause you didn’t ask to come to this motherfucker… and you sure can’t choose how to leave. ‘Cause you don’t know when you’re gonna go. So don’t take this shit serious. You better have some sun and plenty of it. ‘Cause when the shit old and you ask for a recharge, it’s too late. So all I can say is keep some sunshine on your face.”
– From Richard Pryor’s performance in Live on the Sunset Strip (or Track 5 on the album) - from a monologue as his wise, old alter-ego Mudbone.
Pryor by Paul Hosefros (New York Times); Beckett by Richard Avedon
There are a multitude of works about Richard Pryor and Samuel Beckett, as of January 2023, I suggest these excellent titles below:
Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul
If I Stop, I’ll Die by John A. Williams & Dennis A. Williams
Furious Cool: Becoming Richard Pryor by Dave Henry & Joe Henry
Pryor Convictions by Richard Pryor (A must-read for any Pryor fan)
Richard Pryor Boxed Set: “...And it’s Deep Too!” The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings 1968-1992
I also suggest watching Pryor’s superb performances in Paul Shrader’s Blue Collar and his entire 1977 Television Special “The Richard Pryor” show.
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Selected Works of Samuel Beckett - Grove Press Boxed Set
No Author Better Served - The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett & Alan Schneider
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson
I am not a fan of the Beckett ON FILM collection, but I highly recommend D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ documentary about Alan Schneider’s extraordinary production of Beckett’s Rockaby in 1981 at SUNY Purchase, starring Billie Whitelaw.
Zero Mostel has some interesting insights about performing in the Theater of the Absurd in this 1961 interview with Studs Terkel
The forthcoming performance documentary about Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape “Box Three, Spool Five” by the Kangalee Arts Ensemble will be available in December 2023.