In 1982, Richard Pryor performed a stand-up concert film called Live on the Sunset Strip. It is generally considered one of the greatest stand-up performances ever recorded.
Pryor had nearly died the previous year. He had set himself on fire freebasing cocaine. He came back to the stage and talked about it — and about everything else.
This is one section. Read it.
I went to Africa. And I saw — for the first time in my life — that I was not a n*****. You know what I mean? I was not. And I said: 'That's a lie that we've been told.' And I had to go somewhere else to find that out.
I walked around — I was in Kenya, in Zimbabwe, and I didn't see no n*****s. I saw Black people everywhere. Beautiful, Black people. And I said: 'I'll never say that word again.' Because it — it means nothing. It was a word invented to make us feel bad. And I decided I wasn't going to let it.
Pryor was performing in front of a largely white Hollywood audience. He was telling them something about what their country had done to him — and doing it in a way that made them laugh, and then stop laughing, and then laugh again.
Comedy has historically been one of the few spaces where certain things could be said — about power, about race, about violence — that could not be said in other registers. The court jester. The satirist. The stand-up comedian.
But comedy also has a cost. When the audience laughs, what are they laughing at? With? And does it matter?
Pryor is not making the audience comfortable. He is making them uncomfortable and then releasing the discomfort through laughter. But the discomfort was real. The history was real. The laughter doesn't undo any of it. It just makes it briefly speakable.
That's what comedy knows. Not how to make things okay. How to make the unspeakable briefly, terrifyingly visible — and then let the audience breathe.
Is there something you can only say as a joke?
Why does it need the joke?