Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him Read Online Free PDF

knockout. I saved that one for the last. That ended it.
    Black Panther Party minister of justice H. Rap Brown recalled how he and his friends played the dozens for recreation “the way white folks play Scrabble.”
    In many ways, though, the Dozens is a mean game because what you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words . . . It was a bad scene for the dude that was getting humiliated . . . It was like they were humiliated because they were born Black and then they turned around and got humiliated by their own people, which was really all they had left. But that’s the way it is. Those that feel most humiliated humiliate others.
    Playing the dozens—aka mother-rhyming—has been known to turn deadly. Most often, though, in the words of British author and blues scholar Paul Oliver, young men play the dozens to “work off their excesses of spirits in a harmless and cheerfully pornographic blues-singing competition.”
    Black humor as practiced in the community or after-hours clubs seldom, if ever, concerned itself with mainstream or non-black existence, either in imitation of it or in reaction to it. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it, these performances carried “an invisible racial warning sticker: For domestic consumption only—export strictly prohibited. . . . You don’t want white people to see this kind of spectacle; you want them to see the noble dramas of August Wilson, where the injuries and injustices perpetuated by the white man are never far from our consciousness.”
    Factor in Richard’s observation that “white folks get upset when they see us laughing—‘Wha’d’ya think they’re doing, Martha? Are they laughing at us?’ ” and it’s likely that the one aspect of black humor whites would find most disconcerting (were we privy to hear it) is how largely absent they are. Gates, again, describes a production making the rounds of the Chitlin’ Circuit as recently as 1997: “The subject of racism—or, for that matter, white people—simply never arises.” What black humor concerns itself with most are the immediate problems and pleasures of everyday life: love, jealousy, sex, death, rivalries, tall tales, intoxication, and food—the same territory covered in the blues and other black music, which, praise be to popular recordings, we have in abundance.
    Although the blues has its origins in the music of West Africa, it is unique to the United States. The music entered the United States by the port of New Orleans, then migrated upriver to spawn—mutating, crossbreeding, and adapting to regional conditions as it spread out through the tributaries. All manner of love songs, folk legends, feats of derring-do, murder ballads, conjure tales, ghost stories, courtly European balladry, and blues got passed down and passed around, openly consorting and cross-pollinating with each other.
    It was similar to the way the scattered stories and figures that make up The Iliad and The Odyssey had been recited, embellished, and bowdlerized by generation upon generation of Ageans before someone like Homer came along with the wit to see what it could be, gathered up all the strands, wound them together, shook them up in his sorcerer’s hat, and pulled out those epic twin pillars of world literature.
    So it was with Richard. In the truest Homeric tradition, he soaked up everything around him and, by virtue of wise blood or mother wit, made of it something new. And if it now seems as though that new thing had been there all along, waiting for someone game enough to grab hold and take it for a ride, either to see where it would go or how long one could hang on, that’s because it was.
    All of which is just to say, as Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale observed in ascribing the forces that gave rise to the movement, “It was already going on.” And, as Robert Fitzgerald wrote in the postscript to his translation of Homer’s Odyssey, “Our poet came late and had supremely gifted