For Pryor, Cosby became the template for his early success as a comedian. It was just the first example of Pryor’s ability to follow the money trail — a trait that undermined him throughout his career — as he became little more than “Cosby, Jr.” when booked on television programs like The Tonight Show and The Merv Griffin Show (Griffin takes great credit for helping to launch Pryor’s career).
But for all of those Black performers who sought to make themselves palatable to whites, there were other examples of folk, who poet and Miles Davis biographer Quincy Troupe describes as “unreconstructed”; folk who never sought to remix Blackness for white comfort or consumption. While such “unreconstructed-ness” is largely a myth — we all capitulate at one time or another to the so-called “white gaze” in one form of another to gain access to institutions we deem important to our well-being — it helped create mythic icons, which became synonymous with not dancing the dance of racial acceptance. Miles Davis is the most visible example of this.
Pryor put “little Cosby” to rest in the late 1960s — dramatically walking off stage muttering “what am I doing here?”; he may have done so because of those memories of the Black underground in Peoria. Pryor reemerged in 1971 from a self-imposed period of isolation, hanging out in Berkeley, reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, listening to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, and reflecting on his youth in Peoria. Pryor returned as a social commentator, using his talents to speak to the realities of race in America and class within Black America.
In his autobiography, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences (Pantheon, 1997), the comedian says “There was a world of junkies and winos, pool hustlers and prostitutes, women and family screaming inside my head, trying to be heard.” The voices that Pryor heard in his head — the “niggers” in his head — were the same “niggers” that both the Civil Rights guard and the Black Power elite had a vested interest in killing-off (think about the Last Poets’ “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution”). Pryor knew better; he had long known better. Those “niggers” were the salt of the earth, and he suggested as much during the 1973 concert documentary Wattstax, where he describes “niggers” as the “best of people who were slaves.”
In a collection of ground-breaking and award winning albums throughout the 1970s, including That Nigger’s Crazy (1974) and Bicentennial Nigger (1976), Pryor brought his “niggers” to life — and these were “niggers” unreconstructed with no allegiance to looking good for the race or for the cause.
