![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/richard_pryor_st.jpg\")
Comedy albums are unique in the album world. Unlike music, for most listeners, they\u2019re a one-and-done affair. You may well have bought Robin Williams\u2019 Reality: What a Concept<\/i> when it was released in 1979, but if you\u2019re like me, you listened, enjoyed, and then moved on, rarely taking it off the shelf for another spin.<\/p>\n
(At this point in writing the review, I had to pause, amble over to my vinyl collection and confirm that, yes indeed, at some point I did sell, donate or otherwise divest myself of that LP. It\u2019s no longer in my collection, and I can\u2019t say that I\u2019ve missed it.)<\/p>\n
There are exceptions. Bob Newhart\u2019s run of very early 1960s LPs have worn exceedingly well. Cringingly dated homophobia aside, the same is true of a great deal of George Carlin\u2019s material. For listeners of a certain sort (a sort that includes this writer) Firesign Theatre\u2019s albums continue to pay bizarre dividends. And more recently, Davis Sedaris\u2019 audiobooks are a scream<\/i>; a personal favorite is his holiday tale, \u201cSix to Eight Black Men.\u201d I nearly drove off the road, laughing so hard at that one. I laugh now, just thinking of it.<\/p>\n
Which, finally, brings us to the body of work of Richard Pryor. Long before he was a household name, Pryor had started releasing albums of his edgy standup comedy. Though his breakthrough albums That Ni**er\u2019s Crazy<\/i> (1974, reissued in \u201876) and Bicentennial Ni**er<\/i> (1976, natch) gained widespread attention and acclaim, he had already made nearly a half dozen other albums, most of those for Laff Records, a comedy label that specifically targeted a Black audience.<\/p>\n
To give a bit of context, Laff also released records by Redd Foxx, LaWanda \u201cAunt Esther\u201d Page, Swamp Dogg<\/a> and Blowfly<\/a>; a representative \u2013 and resolutely NSFW \u2013 collection is the 2015 set Black & Blue<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n Pryor\u2019s humor is often on-target taking sharp aim at racism and approaching weighty topics in a way that highlights their absurdity. But a half century-plus later, it\u2019s difficult (for this listener, anyway) to listen to Pryor\u2019s early standup and experience it in anything like the spirit in which it was made. It\u2019s simply too removed from its original context. My suspicion is that listeners with \u2013 shall we say \u2013 a different set of life experiences might be more likely to \u201cget\u201d his humor of that period.<\/p>\n Pryor\u2019s pacing and delivery is more relaxed than what current-day listeners might expect. None of the manic rapid-fire delivery that Robin Williams would popularize; instead, his pacing is similar to Carlin\u2019s, albeit with a very different perspective. The longer routines (\u201cPrison Play\u201d and \u201cT.V. Panel Show\u201d from the debut album) take awhile to get going, and the punchline\/payoffs at the ends are something short of remarkable.<\/p>\n Regardless, these albums document the early work of Richard Pryor, his standup from a time when he was still developing and sharpening his approach. Perhaps more important as historical documents than comedy experiences, they\u2019re both worthwhile listening. Will they remain in your collection a decade from now? Perhaps. Perhaps not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Comedy albums are unique in the album world. Unlike music, for most listeners, they\u2019re a one-and-done affair. You may well have bought Robin Williams\u2019 Reality: What a Concept when it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20901,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,64,65],"tags":[1622,4505],"class_list":["post-20899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comedy","category-reissue","category-review","tag-omnivore-recordings","tag-richard-pryor","cat-18-id","cat-64-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20899"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32292,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20899\/revisions\/32292"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/richard_pryor_craps.jpg\")
And it\u2019s from that period that a pair of new expanded reissues come, courtesy of the fine archivists at Omnivore Recordings. The self-titled Richard Pryor<\/i> is a live set dating from 1968, and Craps (After Hours)<\/i> was originally released in 1971. Both are newly reissued with bonus material, Richard Pryor features an entire second disc of material that \u2013 the liner notes tell us \u2013 was too incendiary for release in \u201868.<\/p>\n