Book review: 'Furious Cool' tackles the brilliance of Richard Pryor

Nonfiction • Authors trace performer's heritage into the world of absurdism.
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"Is stand-up comedy literature?" David Henry and Joe Henry, a fraternal author team, ask this as "Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him" enters the home stretch. Their answer cites Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and follows a confident discussion about the resonance of Pryor's "Live on the Sunset Strip" with Dante's "Inferno," a discussion made alongside a daring critical interpretation of Eudora Welty. Thus, their answer to that question is an excited "Yes, of course."

One is willing to go with them a long way in giving the work of Richard Pryor (1940-2005) a grand reading. He was a superlative American monologist and comic writer. "Furious Cool" maps Pryor's cultural heritage (Jerry Lewis and the Chitlin' Circuit, vaudeville organs and whorehouse pianos) and suggests how he transformed such influences into an unprecedented voice creating works in the genre — naturally enough for a black American — of absurdism.

The Henrys acknowledge this with the book's epigraph, which comes courtesy of Antonin Artaud — a passionate lament about our living hell of artists "dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames." The authors link Pryor to Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty," thus encouraging a view of Pryor's best work as surrealism attacking societal sickness.

But the Artaud quote takes on a special meaning in light of the death-defying, life-defining 1980 incident in which Pryor — during the most unpleasant of many mean and crazy drug binges — lit himself aflame. The Henrys are at once serious about reading Pryor rigorously and onto the game of riffing on his celebrity image and cultural symbolic value, and so for them that crazed self-immolation suggests not just temporary psychosis but an instance of performance art.

Which is a legitimate reading. The only way to construct narrative order from the ugly mess of Pryor's biography is to understand the freebasing incident as existential protest art — as the act of a loudmouth voicing something unspeakable and of an author burning the text of his only book. This seems soft-headed, somehow. But Richard Pryor's particular pathos is that this is the view of his life in which he's most legible.

"Richard is a junkie first, a genius second," said Paul Mooney, Pryor's longtime friend and writer. This is not true of, say, Miles Davis, the comedian's patron, colleague and drug buddy. Reading Davis' life, you can grapple with a coherent self, despite the jazz artist's thorough remoteness and years of junkie opacity. Pryor's life was formless except where it was hollow.

Pryor's lack of inhibition in picking at the scabs of black American history encourages a comparison to his era's pop icons of black masculinity. He had designs on updating the snazziness of Sammy Davis Jr., but lacked the Candyland sweetness or the ability to be apolitical. He lacked the confidence and discipline to be a triumphant Ali and the smoothness to polish his raunch à la Redd Foxx. But there are traces of these archetypes in the Pryor icon, plus a lot of Stagger Lee. When we consider, also, Pryor's flagrant history of abusing women, it becomes clear that it's impossible to salvage him as a hero. The readiest way to make sense of him — and to hold at arm's length the pathology that overshadowed and overpowered and informed his genius — is to approach him as some kind of martyr. That formulation requires an embrace of rock and roll ritual sacrifice.

Thus, the Henrys' intellectual approach to pursuing the helplessly sensational life develops a mystic quality. Of a transformative retreat amid the bohemian vibes of the Bay Area, they write, "Like Jesus to the wilderness, Robert Johnson to the crossroads, and Malcolm X to Mecca, Richard went to Berkeley." This is how a stand-up becomes a saint.

But how does he produce literature? The Henrys' defense of their approach arrives just after they've recounted an academic's analysis of Pryor's "Live on the Sunset Strip," one that treats it as a modern American analog of Dante's "Inferno." They don't wholly embrace this notion, but they treat it with intrigued respect, despite acknowledging that there is no biographical evidence that Pryor knew the epic poem.

For the Henrys, it is a setup for a claim about monomyth and mysticism — the suggestion that stories sometimes know more than the storytellers to whom they deliver themselves. "Richard's characters were wiser and more clear-eyed in their understanding of the world than he ever managed to be in navigating his own life," they write. "But when he was all alone in command of a bare stage with no obstacles, he could go with them anywhere and not stumble." —

Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

David Henry and Joe Henry

Algonquin Books

Pages • 400

Cost • $25.95