Richard, Respect & Reagans
So I watched this tribute to Richard Pryor Comedy Central’s running, “I Ain’t Dead Yet, &(%^#$$&#&#$!”. There can be no question that Pryor is a genuine American classic, as important in his time as Bob Hope was in his. I always thought Jon Stewart summed it up nicely in a George Carlin special when he identified Carlin as one of the comedians’ “Holy Trinity. Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin. The rest of us are just congregation.” Feeling the way i do, I’m always happy when one of Pryor’s concert films turns up on pay cable, and always a little grateful that they exist, that we have that record of Pryor in his prime. He deserves tribute or no comedian does. But to pay that tribute by intercutting censored clips from his films (concerts mostly, plus Stir Crazy) with younger comedians parroting his act? Would you pay tribute to Aretha Franklin by cutting out every other beat of “Respect” and splicing it to an R. Kelly performance? The very act of censoring Richard Pryor out of his rhythms is more obscene than any shit, fuck or motherfucker.
Speaking of censorship, I also caught some of the last hour of the Reagans miniseries on Showtime. I’d want to see more of it to say for sure, but it sure looks like another one of those cases where knee-jerk censorship puts more of a spotlight on a thing or person than it actually warrants. If all those friends of Ronnie and Nancy who found this film so impossible to tolerate had shut the fuck up it would have aired, probably to lousy reviews and only slightly better ratings, and been forgotten by next week’s Queer Eye. Instead they showed us something about themselves they’d probably rather not have revealed and drew attention to the very things they wished to cover up.
Which in my experience is the way it is with censorship and repression from the White House to the message board of your choice: Respectful disagreement or, at worst, ignoring someone if you don’t like what they’re saying or how they’re saying it makes fires–and flamewars–go out. Censorship or supression fuels them.
