![]() “‘I’ll have to put you on hold,’” Pryor says, creating a complete character for this seven-word impression. His prayer is blocked by an indifferent angel. “Can I speak to God right away, please?” Pryor pleads at 23:49. And he has, along with ten seconds of uproarious laughs. He relinquishes his ability to check in with the audience, relying on faith that he has earned their attention. ![]() Pryor fully commits: He lies down on his back, closes his eyes, and writhes in pain. “The way the heart punctuates the apex of the attack with the word ‘Pork!’ is brilliant,” Oswalt says. Don’t kill me, don’t kill me.” By 23:03 he is down on one knee, literally begging for his life.Īt 23:09 Pryor reveals his heart’s motivation: the punishment his diet has inflicted upon it. “I won’t breathe,” he whimpers, and then, without stopping to breathe himself, he says, “Shut the fuck up” as his heart, and then, still without a pause, back in his own voice, “Okay. At 22:55, he alternates his heart’s lines with his own voice in rapid-fire dialogue, all while balling his fist up violently to simulate each beat of a frantic cardiac arrest. Few stand-ups have ever used more of themselves physically for a bit than he does here. But in “Heart Attacks,” Pryor shames us all. Yet even though our own body is all we have up there, many of us employ precious little of it in our acts. It was called performing “in one”: The comic is a self-contained show. Stand-up exists because vaudeville producers required performers who could entertain without musicians, costumes, or props - acts that could fit in the tiny area in front of the curtain if need be and occupy the audience’s attention while the crew changed scenery behind them. When he starts speaking from the point of view of his heart, with its own menacing voice telling him at 22:48, “Don’t breathe,” the audience is riveted. Someone yells something, a reminder that stand-up requires concentration equal to live theater, with no “fourth wall” shielding the performer from audience interaction. His initial worried facial expressions elicit uncomfortable giggles from the audience. Pryor begins the “Heart Attacks” bit by saying, “Had a little pain in my heart there.” It is unclear if he is joking. It’s no wonder he tried to silence it with flames.” ![]() As Patton Oswalt puts it, “Pryor - like Proust and Dickinson, and probably Janis Joplin and Edgar Allan Poe - was all-access, every nerve ending wired to receive everything the world was broadcasting. His ability to observe and present people as they really were was almost superhuman. It’s like he had a compulsion to absorb the world around him, in all its splendor and sickness, and show it back to itself. In contrast, Rodney Dangerfield laid bare his insecurities in character, with a wink, his shortcomings exaggerated into absurdity. “Eddie Murphy’s comedy and comedic persona … presented him as the self-assured, invulnerable over-dog whom the joke was rarely on.” Red Foxx projected a similar confidence. Live in Concert introduced this new visceral comedy to the nation just like Monterey Pop had given millions their first dose of psychedelic rock.Īccording to comedian Dwayne Kennedy, Pryor was unique in that his “comedic style and sensibility were vulnerable and self-deprecating,” which was rare for Black comedians at the time. Los Angeles’s Comedy Store, where Pryor pioneered his uncensored style, was only seven years old in 1979, and there was nowhere else like it. Saying them anyway cost Lenny Bruce his career a decade earlier. My emotions were safe in Pryor’s hands.ĭue to a thicket of state and municipal laws based on standards of a bygone age, many of the words in Live in Concert would have been illegal to say onstage just a few years before the film’s release. I got this gig because I can write from a stand-up’s point of view, but I am unfortunately just as knowledgeable about how it feels to collapse on a sidewalk clutching my chest as I am about how it feels to joke about it. Perhaps I had subconsciously avoided it, because I was born with a congenital heart defect. I had not seen “Heart Attacks” since high school. Another comic, after redeeming several drink tickets, asked him, “Is stand-up art?” Gould replied that if any bit qualified, it was Richard Pryor’s “Heart Attacks,” from 1979’s Live in Concert. ![]() I once did a bar show with comedian Dana Gould.
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