In memoriam: Pryor, McCarthy

I’m not quite old enough to have heard Richard Pryor on his first, early 1970s comedy albums. I first became familiar with him in the 1976 movie Silver Streak. But, after that, I was hooked.

With Pryor, whether talking about “niggers,” or using other “seven-letter word” language, he wasn’t talking blue, or at least, he wasn’t talking blue just to go blue. He had a legitimate reason for everything. And he was good.

His influence extended beyond just black comedians, too. As The Dallas Morning News noted in its editorial, Robin Williams must be seen as tracing his comedy bloodline back to Pryor. And, through him, perhaps Jim Carrey.

While his blackness was an essential element of much of his comedy, much else in his routine went outside of racial issues — or outside of sexual issues, for that matter. While Pryor was a black comedian, he should also be seen as a comedian who happened to be black.

As an atheist, I can’t say that he’s “in a better place” now. He’s gone; rent a movie or comedy routine of his and remember.

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“Clean Gene.” A nickname with quaint reekings of a bygone era.

As an Iraq war proponent from the time the Bush Administration started proposing it in 2002, McCarthy is an intellectual and political hero of mine.

But, what good did Eugene McCarthy really do? It took more than seven years from his “Children’s Crusade” knocking LBJ off the ballot for us to finally get our last troops out of Vietnam. If LBJ had been, somehow, re-elected himself, he probably would have said, “The hell with being called soft on Communism, I know this isn’t right,” and gotten the best deal we could and in quicker time. I don’t doubt that Lyndon never would have expanded the war to Cambodia, either.

So, arguably, McCarthy may have made things worse. (But, it’s not so likely that LBJ could have beaten Nixon. On the other hand, that campaign would have been a paranoia-fest for the ages.)

However, idealism isn’t necessarily about making things better or worse. It’s about being right or wrong.

Unfortunately, McCarthy spoiled his image in later years. Whether it was being the Harold Stassen of the last third of the 20th century, or endorsing Reagan in 1980, he seemed to move beyond idiosyncratic, past contrarian, and into full-blown obstrepiousness.

Nonetheless, his inner light — and perhaps his inner demon, or daimon — guided him on.

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And, has it really been 25 years since John Lennon was killed? Wow. I was a senior in high school.