What Pryor Does Next

Just a few minutes after his opening remarks upon stepping onstage, Pryor decides to talk a little about himself:

Pryor talks quickly, his pitch varying up and down over the course of the description; the effect is one of improvisation, like he is excitedly telling the audience something that has been bothering him for a long time and now is his chance to finally come clean. He slurs a little on the sibilant sounds, like “sucked.” On the tape recording, I notice the “gg” sound in the word “faggots” carries a little static, as though the recording apparatus, personified, has taken a ragged breath and blown into the consonant, making the glottal “gg” harsh, wielding the sound toward maximum hurt. To my ear, the word’s lack of clarity makes its semantic meaning all the more shocking when I finally register it. There’s a voice in my head, a failed duet with Pryor: “Did he really say what I think he said?” The audience’s uproar of angry shouting and shocked exclamations seems to indicate they were on a similar journey.

The Black male voice is a fetishized object in US sonic cultures; I want to attend to how Pryor’s voice, as a recording artist, indexes this tendency. Maurice O. Wallace notes the centrality of sonic vocality for Black preachers in performance, identifying Martin Luther King Jr.’s vibrato as essential to what is often declared his innate “transcendent preaching” abilities, but that instead are made possible by “the acoustic calculus of voice, architecture, organology, and audience.”Footnote ¹⁷ Voices mark subjectivity, and they are also social forces; King’s powerful vibrato sounded out against and through his listeners, as well as through the space and the instrument (pipe organ, as Wallace notes) present. I hear Pryor’s voice as a kind of depraved version of Wallace’s theorization of King’s vocality, but instead of a “calculus” that makes the performance feel transcendent to listeners, Pryor’s intoxicated rage and hate speech perforate the intended purpose for the event: the “Star-Spangled Night for Rights” as a celebration has been briefly suspended for the duration of the performance, creating an epistemological rupture between Blackness and queerness as opposing forces, in a noisy reproduction of racist and homophobic norms. Pryor’s language is ambivalent—reflexive. He is naming the event’s real purpose—gay rights—by including himself in the gay community by virtue of his past actions. But in this specific context, of both Pryor’s specific complaints in his tirade and the space of the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles in the fall of 1977, the inclusion is something other than comradely.

Indeed, a few moments later Pryor disavows any affiliation with homosexuality or acts deemed homosexual based on how, in the environment he does avow, sucking dick is a common practice and experience untethered to identity. He explains: “’Cause niggas don’t care about who sucks what. Slight pause. You know you live in the ghetto if you suck a dick and its coooool ’cause a lot of people be sayin’, ‘hey, suck my dick.’”Footnote ¹⁸ Pryor’s relationship to and depiction of his own sexuality was complicated and changeable over the course of his life, with mainstream knowledge of his sexual and/or romantic relationships with men only a recent phenomenon.Footnote ¹⁹ His speculations are hostile as he describes the kinds of interests and activities in which this community partakes. I hear a dark sense of delight in his tenor voice as he rushes, freely, through the description and impact of his activities with Wilbur, colliding with the audience’s indignant sounds of confused anger. This collision heightens the deep sense of corporeality and the imbricative relationship between the sense of violence and the sense of vulnerability that is the heart of Pryor’s performance. Pryor’s enunciation of “faggots” is uttered like a punch in the face, even with the “gg” sound, as mentioned, somewhat obscured. I hear the profane and derogatory term purposely and dangerously balanced on Pryor’s tongue like a razor meant to hurt—both himself and the audience.

Pryor’s sonic, vituperative language highlights the mortality and vulnerability of the people he is discussing. Pryor’s voice samples—that is to say, records the attenuated homosexuality of the space—and edits, or remixes this discourse in(to) a supplementary act of creation. This creation, however, is a reproduction. Via idiosyncratic sonic techniques, Pryor deploys transgressive language, vocal speed, and hate speech and hegemonic discourse—namely, heteropatriarchy and the erasure of queers of color. In the desire for justice, Pryor attempts to censure the whiteness of the space by criticizing the night’s decadence.

Indeed, in the line about Wilbur he describes their sexual relationship as “beautiful,” though the beauty was too much, and so he “had to leave it alone.” This reflexive relationship to desire/disgust exemplifies E. Patrick Johnson’s observation about Black comic culture in the latter part of the twentieth century. Johnson notes that there is a tendency for Black, male, and heterosexual performers—especially comedians—to “appropriate signifiers of queerness to stereotype, demean, and repudiate black gay men as well as attempt to delimit the parameters of authentic black masculinity.” Simultaneously, in this effort to discipline and punish, these performers “ironically and unwittingly queer heteronormative black masculinity.”Footnote ²⁰ Like Pryor mixing noise with language and hate speech with comedy, the quick alignment of Blackness with heterosexuality in the performance of masculinities necessarily brings epistemological rupture, wherein all identity categories come into question as it emerges how much each category relies upon the others in order to exist.

But Pryor isn’t performing heterosexuality per se. He does a careful dance of disclosure and indictment, naming his actions as homosexual and using that as a basis for legitimating his censure of the audience. But then he dampens the impact of the disclosure, while owning up to actions, by announcing that the environment from which he comes forecloses the ability really to name the actions as relevant to identity.

Then, Pryor introduces the specter of queer Black women into the performance, ensuring his sonic violence spares no one. He is derisive, almost huffing with contempt: “And I KNOW a lot of Black bitches who love pussy who ain’t here tonight. . . .” The audience responds with “ooooh” sounds of sudden realization; I also hear a few boos. Pryor waits, then finishes the thought, blaring, a bright smile entering his voice as he goes up in pitch on the last word: “and tear pussy UP!” He chuckles softly into the microphone, then, with a cadence of stream-of-consciousness: “Do you hear me/Yes sir. Kill the pussy/make you embarrassed that you leave the pussy alone sayin’/‘go on mama, you can handle it, shit.’ Get doooooooooown, bay-BAH!” Pryor’s direct acknowledgment of the existence of lesbians—despite not saying the word “lesbians” in favor of describing activities that, for him, define this group (yet another essentialism)—is, clearly, a complicated moment. In a sense, Pryor’s direct address to the audience here is a perversion of the very culture he declaims. Black lesbian culture is a comic culture; what Pryor does here is the opposite of what, for example, Pryor’s predecessor Jackie “Moms” Mabley or LaWanda Page cultivated in their sonic outputs. As Katelyn Hale Wood notes, Mabley, a queer Black comic who played with the presentation of her sexuality depending on her audience, “pioneered an overtly political style of stand-up comedy that influenced her male mentees such as Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory.”Footnote ²¹ The jokes these women told were often overtly sexual; J. Finley writes, “LaWanda Page was the only black woman comic during the 1970s who achieved popular success using primarily explicit humor.”Footnote ²² Her influence cannot be understated; for Page, among other “working-class black women comedians performing in the 1970s and 1990s, exploiting hardcore sexuality through joking was a means to celebrate control over their immediate environment, erotic control—in terms of arousing their audiences by recalling sex acts and scenarios to evoke pleasure.”Footnote ²³ This method is even constitutively sonic, framed as “corporeal orature.”Footnote ²⁴ Despite Pryor’s debt to his forerunners and his responsibility to pay attention to his contemporaries, Pryor talks about lesbian sexuality as a means to “control” the audience by deploying lesbian sexuality as an invective, as malediction, rather than to cultivate a community of pleasure.

Members of the audience included lesbian critics, who wrote about the experience. Jeanne Córdova, in the Los Angeles–based newspaper The Lesbian Tide, noted Pryor’s use of subterfuge in his indictment:

She quotes the line that made the women present especially angry, leading them to stand up and boo: “You bitches don’t need no Equal Rights Amendment, take your money down to welfare.”

Hearing the audience respond to his rage, Pryor only unravels further. With a quickness, he asks: “You ever put cocaaaaaaaaaaine on the clit?” The statement is dynamically phrased in such a way as to be almost musical. The long, low stretch of the “aaaaaaaaaa” sets up a sense of anticipation for the punch line, “clit,” toothy and direct on the “t” sound of the word. I hear the audience laugh and exclaim, much louder than before. I hear loud whispers, roars of booming laughter, and also low but loud whistles of disapproval. As the audience’s wave of sound dies down, Pryor’s voice returns, interrogative and bright: “. . . and suck on iiiiiit?” The audience freaks out.

The “cocaine on the clit” moment is meticulous in terms of timing and cadence. The vocal speed maximizes the element of surprise—the sense of the new—that is central to the epistemological rupture between and through Blackness and queerness that night, as well as to stand-up as a form. Describing the avant-garde as an impulse—its own kind of epistemological rupture—literary critic Michael North writes that, under capitalism:

Pryor’s refusal to “diffuse,” or dissolve, or self-abnegate in the face of resistance from the audience is coupled with and made possible by the vituperation of his language. The fact of it as a commercial performance—not despite, but because of the event’s goal of innocuous entertainment—is, I believe, part of what makes Pryor’s performance ruptural in the first place. The sense of surprise and urgency of the ruptural impulse becomes all the more palpable by its juxtaposition with the self-serious banality that immediately precedes and follows it. The alliteration of the “c” sounds in “cocaaaaaaaaine” and “clit,” combined with the assonance and rhyme of “clit” with “iiiiiiit” make, for example, Christopher Lee’s “Ascent of Man” monologue at the top of the show seem banal rather than stirring or profound.

This refusal to diffuse connects to Nina Sun Eidsheim’s observation about “the acousmatic question” (“Who is this?”).Footnote ²⁷ To be clear, I am not asking this question. As Eidsheim points out, the acousmatic question is a futile one (which is, of course, what makes it so fascinating). This is because voice is a cultural phenomenon, sourced by the listener.Footnote ²⁸ In this article, I hope you are reading me as a listener, but one who listens to other listeners, including Pryor, the speaker. The words aren’t cruel in and of themselves; they are targeted to the queer audience at the Hollywood Bowl, and they are carved out of sounds and the language of transgression and the desire for violence.

I now turn to a discussion of the role of profanity as transgressive language in Pryor’s performance. This element is crucial to the epistemological rupture, as its deployment here reveals the ultimate futility of language to communicate Pryor’s ideas and experiences, crucial to the disconnect/unbearable signification of Pryor’s performance of language.

Transgressive Language: Noise, Hate Speech, and Malediction

According to Douglas Kahn, noise is created by the discursive oscillation between what is outside of signification and what is known. He writes, “Noise can be understood in one sense to be that constant grating sound generated by the movement between the abstract and the empirical.”Footnote ²⁹ Noise is an epistemological rupture. Because all sounds are earthbound—which is to say, social, in some function—they signify and inscribe the world and the human’s place in it. The introduction of noise renders that world abstract. As a result, the experience of noise is an abject one: the borders between what we know and what we do not understand coalesce into a state of confusion. Stand-up comedy, especially in the postwar tumult of the 1960s and 1970s, had a controversial relationship with a very particular kind of noise: profanity, or cursing.

Scholars of language Kate E. Brown and Howard I. Kushner argue that curse words, especially in Richard Pryor’s stand-up comedy, fall under the linguistic category of malediction, a necessarily relational mode of linguistic transgression.Footnote ³⁰ Malediction is an eruptive voicing: the performance of the self becomes ruptured from the discourse of civilization. Brown and Kushner argue that curse words comprise a linguistic alienation from language as a cohesive system. In this way, malediction in performance can invoke a kind of Derridean absent-present in the form of the speech act that gestures toward a world or being outside of the confinements of speech at the same time as it must include, in order to register at all, the elements it seeks to contest. Coprolalia—uncontrolled transgressive speech—is more about introducing alienation to speech, whereas malediction is more about using or exposing alienation in order to make a point about the constructed, and thereby empty, ontology of language as a method for signification and sociality. In this way, malediction embodies and exceeds the speech act as well as voids it. Malediction harnesses the means of representation that are at one’s disposal in order to critique and define the limits of representation

How are curse words liminal? How does Pryor’s voicing render his performance tactics into a kind of grotesque poetics? As Brown and Kushner write:

For instance, Pryor wields the discursivity of “Black bitches who love pussy”—the long history of debasement, violence, and erasure of these women—as a signification or structure of knowledge historicized to the extent as to exist only as citation. In this context, the words themselves become purely abject noise. This noise is exposed in the audience's response, especially the women audience members highlighted by Jeanne Córdova in The Lesbian Tide.

I contend that the concept of “poetics” discussed here relates to, and in fact metonymizes, the performance’s ruptural politics. Blackness and queerness in and through the noise blast a cacophony that blares out, ultimately, in the simultaneous imbrication (à la Johnson’s analysis) and incommensurability of the two categories. Profanity is the aspect that transforms Pryor’s performance not only from comedy—where the performer’s intention is, supposedly, to first and foremost elicit a laugh—but to the revelation of stand-up comedy as capable of linguistic, and even ontological, deconstruction. This is because curse words inaugurate discourse; they grant the content in which they make audible a particular context—one simultaneously abject yet unbearably significant.Footnote ³²

Pryor uses curse words as exclamations, modifiers, and descriptive nouns. He uses them so frequently that they might seem like merely speech habits; “motherfucker” is just a synonym for “guy,” for example.Footnote ³³ And, at the Hollywood Bowl, that aspect does linger: Pryor’s speech patterns do in a sense come across as casual and habitual. For example, at one point, he complains: “And I say, well, here I am on the motherfucking stage ’cause when the last niggas was out here kicking ass and jumpin’ ’cross shit you motherfuckers say, ‘well, that’s alright.’”

The impersonation in the last phrase is of a bored, rich, white guy. The audience makes dissenting, clamorous noise. A little laughter. Pryor continues: “And then the white people came out and do some ballet and shit and they played that kind of music that y’all conditioned to/y’all say: ‘Heeey. Them’s some bad motherfuckers.’” Here, Pryor does the same voice as before, but with a mock-impressed, even dimmer inflection. Because of the metatheatricality of his subject matter—specifically, here, where Pryor calls attention to the unequal treatment of white and Black performers—it becomes clear that Pryor thinks deeply about the words he uses. The metatheatricality here also speaks to the way malediction functions as a point of revelation of linguistic and subjective ontology. When Pryor impersonates a white person’s reaction to the performers onstage, he at once embodies a stereotypical white guy and maintains his status as the arbiter of discourse, the one in control of this performance. This twofold task is accomplished by his characteristic profanity—specifically, here, “motherfuckers”—in the impersonating voice of the subject he critiques.

Transgressive abjection combined with the significance of the summoned object of scrutiny—the proverbial white guy in the audience—is crucial to the ruptural politics of this performance, especially as a sonic rupture from normative linguistic signification. Pryor, after a wheezing, angry laugh, speaks in to the microphone, “all the white people go, ‘excuse me, I don’t give a damn.’” His impersonating voice is high and staccato. “‘The show is over.’” Another mirthless chuckle from Pryor. But then, in almost a heel turn from the charming and harmless mocking of white discourse, he turns vituperative: “I hope the police catch you motherfuckers suckin’ dicks and shoot yo ass accident’ly.” The audience objects, a whorl of angry combative noise. Here, hate speech emerges once more as Pryor’s signature anarchic artistry. Pryor’s hate speech both speaks against dominant ideology and recreates it. Richard Schechner notes that this “reduce, reuse, and recycle” tendency of transgressive performance can lead to conservatism, despite the historical avant-garde and some midcentury avant-garde practitioners explicitly advocating for active disruption of the status quo as “a revolutionary cathartic as prelude to a new world order.”Footnote ³⁴ The same can be said for stand-up comedy; for, as a mass media art form, stand-up comics are always already in a relationship to prior and contemporaneous performance by necessity. Who wants to tell jokes someone has already told?

This conservatism is a byproduct of midcentury stand-up comedy’s status as a necessarily postmodern art form. Stand-up comedy is postmodern because, as Philip Auslander notes, it “currently occupies an ambiguous position on a smooth cultural continuum with two other performance modes also chiefly supported by the same audience: performance art and rock music.”Footnote ³⁵ The postmodern condition is fundamentally a condition of repetition, a deconstructive apparatus and ideology that undoes the arbitrary distinctions between art forms, genres, and even historical lineages, revealing the mass imbrication of all discursive categories. As a result, stand-up comedy in general can't not be, at least in part, conservative—which is to say, simultaneously static as well as recapitulating—at its very foundation.

As a result of this inevitable tethering to a dominant system of power and communication, the role of impersonation in stand-up becomes an interesting point of resistance and/or recapitulation of the status quo. Generally, when stand-up comics do impersonations, the goal is not to portray an entirely realistic version of whomever it is they impersonate. In other words, the goal is not exactly verisimilitude, or mimesis. This is part of the reason, perhaps, that comic impersonations are sometimes called “impressions”; they perform an elemental or reductive version of a given subject or object. Pryor’s impersonations—of white people, specifically, with this rigid and awkward phrasing—are always performed with the particular power dynamic that is Pryor’s critical perspective in his given performance space. Pryor uses his own language of profanity but vocalizes it in a pastiche of white banal speech habits. He dissects and analyzes these performative acts of whiteness in order to interrogate and draw out the discursive and tangible violences that make up the world; in addition, he wields them to his own ends. Pryor breaks down the behaviors and social mores of white people into a series of affected behaviors. By deliberately taking on a tacit, nominally unquestioned system of signification, one with enormous influence on American society and politics—white men’s anger, white men’s curse words—Pryor cites but does not embody that which he critiques. He impersonates, without ever losing the Pryor persona.

More about Wilbur

I turn back to Wilbur here, because, as a kind of case study for Pryor’s performance of malediction, this specter provides a dense nexus of desire, humor, and hate. Pryor reminisces:

There is a slight punch on the “c” sound of “come” and the “qu” sound of “quick”—for emphasis. Form mirrors content. He continues, the room scared mostly silent, with some caustic rumbling and high diminutive gasps framing the passion erupting from his mid-tenor voice:

Pryor’s speech zigs and zags, the blast of sound a whirlwind of names and places and worries. Through cacophonous rupture, he exposes the violent sense of urgency that always already makes up Black and queer lives in Los Angeles in 1977. Saul quotes San Francisco Chronicle journalist John Wasserman:

This “cartoon” description is apt. In popular cartoons, the performing object is voiced into being, the tincture and timbre of the voice articulating and signifying a character in performance. Also, like the Looney Tunes Road Runner speeding through conjured space, so fast he both makes and becomes a trail of dust, Pryor’s performance that night showed someone disappearing. That disappearance is audible.

At the end of his performance—and before the show’s director Ron Fields rushed onstage to apologize, and a blustering Aaron Russo, the event organizer and manager for headliner Bette Midler, also apologized in an apparent state of shock and embarrassment—Pryor invites the audience to “kiss my happy, rich, Black ass.” As he speaks, Pryor contorts his body so as to physically present said “ass” to the audience. He leans into the sibilant “ss” sound of the word “assss.” The enunciation marks a synecdoche of the fusion of form and content at the heart of the performance’s epistemological ruptural politics: the sound of the word on his tongue presents the inextricability of sound with meaning, expresses the connection between word and body. The fusion is made audible by Pryor’s transgressive sonic techniques, of expository language and intonation, critical invective, and malediction in performance.

This fusion of performance techniques corresponds to the fusion of different responses to Pryor that night. In the aftermath of the event, Jet magazine reported that Bette Midler, the closing act, “tried to recapture the angered audience with this opening invitation: ‘Is there anyone here tonight who wants to kiss this rich white a--?’” The audience responded with rapturous applause. She then added, “‘But, whatever he did I still love him.’”Footnote ³⁷ Midler, who arrived late, missed Pryor’s set, but had gotten word of its general impression upon the audience and showrunners before stepping onstage.

From the evening’s beginning to its end, the “Star-Spangled Night for Rights” was a series of performances as responses to ambivalence. However, the coverage of Pryor’s performance that evening was largely one-note. In this article, rather than rehearsing the dominant journalistic perspective toward Pryor’s set as merely—or only—the slurred rants of a coked-up, drunk maniac, I hope that my approach sheds light on his relationship to a theatre of transgression and radical Black artistry. By the same turn, this approach reveals the crucial sonicity of Pryor’s artistry, and how this sonicity manifests as the ruptural epistemological politics of Blackness and queerness—as discourses and modes of subjectivity—exploding through and against one another that September night in 1977 at the Hollywood Bowl. Ultimately, this rupture reveals the mutual reliance of both categories, and illuminates how transgressive sonic performance as an aesthetic condition gives rise to this realization. Sound prefigures language here, and maybe the potency of this entanglement can serve as a synecdoche for stand-up itself, as a genre.