Richard Pryor: Live in Concert

A contemporary review of 1979's Richard Pryor: Live In Concert could not have foreseen the staying power of this historic performance. Decades later, our viewing experience is heightened by our awareness of Pryor's later misfortunes, and the disappointing resurrection of old hatreds by demagogues determined to exploit America's racial divide.

Pryor's transformative performance gives a tantalizing glimpse of a more harmonious America, one that could have been but did not come to pass. People on both sides remain unable to overcome their self-identification first by race, and then a long way lower down the list, by shared citizenship. Through a series of spot-on skits that reveal our culture-centric absurdities, Pryor effectively communicated our shared humanity. He showed us what might have been.

Today's viewer of this classic will detect the transformation of the mixed and initially apprehensive audience into a unified body, brought together by laughter not at Pryor's illustrations of the other side's haplessness, but of their own.

By so convincingly showing us what might have been, today's viewers now realize that Pryor was not merely the Black comedian whose career followed Cosby's unctuous panderings and pre-dated Eddy Murphy's wisecracks. He was on a different plane entirely, a visionary who like Lenny Bruce who forced us to acknowledge the self-diminishment of our lives that is the consequence of giving in to our fears.

Now considered by many to be the greatest stand-up performance ever captured on film, the venue, lilly-white Long Beach CA, provided just the right atmosphere for Pryor to drive home his humor to a near-equally mixed audience by race.

At the beginning, the viewer can sense a subtle unease among the audience, perhaps brought on by concern that Pryor's central theme, about how strange it is to be Black in America, could lead to a bad vibe in the room and even animosity.

Pryor picks up on this the moment he walks onstage. Through a spontaneous improvisation of a white man requesting his reserved seat be vacated by the Black man occupying it, Pryor's impersonation of both characters proves to be a metaphor for the chasm that exists between the races, affecting even the most mundane interactions. Disarmed and intrigued, the audience now understands that this night will be about the comedy of being human, about foolish is their behavior when people play into their respective stereotypes, meaning that ultimately the joke is on them.

By expressing the triumph of shared humanity over the damage done through obsessive self-identification with "our people," Pryor's humor illuminates the folly of prejudice through biting insight and some brilliant physical comedy. Viewers of the film were provided moments of audience reaction, and as it turned out, people laughed loudest when Pryor delivered a spot-on depiction of THEIR race's stereotypes. By the end of his never- flagging 70-minute performance, he had brought together those hundreds of people who at the beginning seemed so far apart. Pryor delivered a performance for the ages, one from which we still can learn - and laugh.

I am 34 year old and i was 6 years old when this concert was filmed in 1979,i saw it as a little boy and countless times until this day,i am so lucky to have been born in Richards Generation to have had the opportunity to witness this man come on stage with all of his imperfections and personal problems and share it with me and the rest of the world in a way where it makes us laugh.

Thinking about the loss of Richard Pryor makes me want to cry because i feel like he was someone i knew personally,thats the effect Richard Pryor had on everyone that watched him pro-form on stage,he broke the color line,even thought he is clearly a African American man,Richard Pryor made people of other races so comfortable listening to jokes revolving around race and social status.

I know there are other comedians that are great in their own right but the truth be told,Richard Pryor is and will always be regarded as the Best comedian that ever lived and this concert is the performance that proves that very fact.

RIP Richard,thank you for the laughs and joy and now the sadness you brought us all,we will never ever forget you....

I can't express how dazzlingly brilliant this routine is. The jokes, the faces, the mime, the banter, ad-libs - everything amazes. This is the 'Citizen Kane' of routines and many comedians since have taken inspiration from it including Eddie Murphy (esp.) Chris Rock and Eddie Izzard.

Yes it is profane, but if you are stupid enough to watch a Pryor stand- up without being prepared for extreme 'vulgarity' then frankly you deserve to be offended. The language, although extreme isn't that shocking (even the now dreaded 'N' word) because it is all part of Pryor's 'jive' and would be poorer without it.

Watch this and see a master at the top of his game.

Genius! I remember seeing this years ago and being knocked flat with laughter. It is and remains a classic in the comedy concert film genre. Richard Pryor is the King of Comedy and all he needs is a mike, a stage, and an audience to give one of the great comedy performances ever recorded in the history of celluloid.

But this isn't just stand-up comedy. This is theater. Richard Pryor is a badass one man theater troupe. This flick is ground breaking in the fact that is has influenced so many comics and will continue to do so. His name is Richard Pryor. Hear him roar!

Richard Pryor is without a doubt one of the best stand-up performers to ever grab a mike, because he breaks the performance wall, and just has a conversation with the audience, which is rare for a comic to do. He talks to the audience, and involves them in the show, and the things he talks about on stage are not really jokes, but his retelling of certain life events that he has had, and you get the feeling that you would be hearing the same thing if you were just sitting alone with him in a room, and that is what makes his comedy so good, that conversational quality. No other comic that I can think of has done that with such a level of success that Pryor did...he was a real natural.

As far as profanity goes, Pryor doesn't use it to shock, he just talks that way naturally, and so the cursing doesn't stick out that much. Still, if you're easily offended by such language, then avoid it, but you are only robbing yourself of seeing a legend working his magic.