When I was a wee pup around the age of 6 or 7, I began to crave off the wall humor almost as much as I daydreamed about being Gene Simmons and making out with girls. Waaaaaaaaay back then, before Al Gore had invented the internet *ahem*, you couldn't just go look something up or check your email to get a good laugh. I always ended up hanging out in my bedroom for hours on end like a little mountain man to draw pictures, listen to records, play with the tape recorder and create my own comedy to amuse myself. You know, now that I think of it things haven't changed much, it's just nowadays I have to pay for my bedroom, there's other rooms attached to it that are mine as well, and I have to go to work to pay for it all.
I would always struggle to stay awake for Carson and then Letterman to air and hope against hope that someone funny would be on. And there was always good 'ol Saturday Night Live which was like crack for me, but that was only once a week. Fridays was another great show, but all too short lived.
One day pops came home with a newfangled device called a Video Cassette Recorder. It was the most amazing thing I'd seen since he'd brought home our first microwave ("lookit that, you can make a hot dog in 45 seconds!")
He removed the VCR from the box and took the Styrofoam braces off the sides. It weighed about 300 pounds and was the size of a small car. I can still smell that new VCR smell to this day.. Occasionally I smell an alarm clock or TV remote that has that same nice smell to it. Yeah, I like to sniff home electronics (new TV or stereo remote controls in particular). It might sound weird, but try it sometime. It’s really quite invigorating.
I digress. Let’s get back to the VCR. Which by the way was a top loader and had a "remote", which was a small calculator with a 50 foot long cord hanging out of it that you had to plug into the face of the VCR. There was a 1 second lag whenever you pressed a button on it telling the VCR to do something. It was the best thing EVER. I was amazed that I could watch Star Wars and then watch it again without buying another ticket. And boy, did I, along with The Jerk. Over. And over. And OVER. AND OVER. (insert Pee Wee Herman here hysterically yelling "aaand knitting! aaaaaand knitting!! ANND KNITTING!!")
One morning I walked into the living room and Dad was konked out on the couch watching a movie with "the Willy Wonka guy" in it. It was weird, because Willy Wonka was in a prison and with a very funny dude who I later learned was Richard Pryor. I was laughing my arse off and caught the last 15 minutes of the movie. Pops was still sleeping, so I rewound it and watched it from the start and was instantly in love with Stir Crazy.
At that point, Richard Pryor was the funniest guy I had seen since Steve Martin. After Stir Crazy, I immediately needed more Richard Pryor input. Next time we went to Astro Video to return Stir Crazy, I checked every last movie box for his face in hopes of watching more of his tomfoolery and thankfully found Silver Streak (another awesome Pryor/Gene Wilder movie) and The Toy. And one of my other all time favorites to this day, Brewster's Millions. He was a fuckin' goofball and I took in every second of it hoping I would grow up someday to be a funny black dude like him. Turns out that I do in fact tan quite well in the summer, but that's about as far as I ever got in that department. Thankfully I eventually saw the light in C. Thomas Howell's captivating performance in Soul Man and realized that I just needed to deal with and appreciate what I was born with.
So anyways.. I learned over the weekend that Richard Pryor checked out of life on this planet due to a heart attack. Major bummer. It's weird how memories come back when someone famous you grew up watching dies - when I read that in the paper I could smell the old TV remote again and instantly thought of watching the end Stir Crazy that Saturday morning while Pops was sawing logs.
Weird thing is I've never watched Pryor's standup comedy. That's pretty much like saying "OOoooh I love Wings, but never really listened to the Beatles before!" But mebbe it's time to track some of that stuff down and see the other side of Richard Pryor that I never saw as a kid.. there's that famous story of how he was so hopped up on goofballs once that he set himself on fire and almost died. And what did he do? Came back and worked the story into his standup routine. If he could pull that off, yeah, that’s pretty fuckin’ funny if you axsk me.
Rest In Peas, Richard Pryor! Thanks for all of the laughs. I will watch Brewsters Millions tonight in your honor. That's a much easier tribute than what I originally was thinking about doing.. but I figure I'll save the setting myself on fire bit for a more apropos moment, such as the next time they get my order wrong at Mac-Donalds.
