How Richard Pryor Changed the Way Comedy Sees Police Brutality – The New York Times

Police brutality has a surprisingly long history in comedy.

An officer swinging a nightstick was one of the most common images in early comic strips and Charlie Chaplin was always running from the police, dodging clubs and bullets. Those cops were generally portrayed as clownish bullies, and their violence, divorced from any racial context, played as a kind of shtick. When they swung their clubs, you never really felt the blow.

More than anyone else, Richard Pryor changed that.

He wasnt the first stand-up to take aim at racist policing. The pioneering political comic Dick Gregory, in his 1961 debut album, In Living Black & White, quipped: In Chicago, we have enough cops. Its just a matter of getting them on our side.

In the next decade, Richard Pryor, a student of both Chaplin and Gregory, applied a biting, more visceral perspective while making analysis of racist policing a hallmark of his. His albums and specials in that era laid the foundation for modern stand-up, and nowhere is that more true than in sets about police brutality. Some comics have broached the topic without bringing personal experience to the subject. But others, especially African-American stand-ups, have consistently examined the pain, costs and arguments around biased law enforcement in a way that has been rare in Hollywood.

Pryor once said he was raised to hate the cops, and his comedy was alive to the hurt and humiliations of everyday police abuse. He didnt just say the police beat up black people. They degraded them. His cops werent the bumbling fools of silent films. They were dangerous. And two decades before Ice Cube rapped about black police showing out for the white cops, Pryors set piece about I Spy cops a reference to the TV show starring Bill Cosby and Robert Culp as an interracial team of intelligence agents described black partners of white officers earning their stripes by harassing black civilians. About jail, he joked: You go down looking for justice, thats what youll find. Just us.

In his breakthrough 1974 album, Pryor wondered why persistent police brutality didnt make black people go mad. Then, using his masterful dramatic powers, he invited his audience to imagine a man who works hard during the week rewarding himself with a night out and getting dressed up, only to be pulled over because of a robbery in the neighborhood. Dramatizing the violation of the pat down, Pryor considers the impact, imitating the deflated man, who abruptly ends the evening to go home and beat your kids. That gut punch quiets the crowd, before Pryor adds: You have to take it out on somebody.

In contrast with the amiable treatment white people receive from a friendly cop who lives in their neighborhood, Pryor demonstrated how black people must make a show of being nonthreatening when stopped. Enunciating every word slowly at a volume and tension that performs compliance, he did an impression of what was required: I. Am Reaching. Into. My. Pocket. For. My License.

That record sold more than one million copies and was so popular that after one show, Detroit officers told Pryor they heard the line repeated from an African-American man they stopped.

Many jokes in the past few decades owe a debt to that four-minute bit. For instance, in his recent special, Michael Che says, My brother is a cop. I only see him over Thanksgiving and even then, Im like: Im. Reaching. For. The. Potatoes.

In Dave Chappelles classic debut special, Killing Them Softly, he also does a bit contrasting the difference between black and white people when stopped by the police that echoes Pryor, even down to some of the language of the cops. Chappelle, however, digs deeper into white privilege. Describing a time he was stopped with a white friend, he sounds flabbergasted when his pal immediately confessed to the cop that he was stoned and asked for directions. A black man would never dream of talking to the police high, he says. Thats a waste of weed.

Roy Wood Jr. also has a sharp bit about the lengths black people must go to appear nonthreatening to the police: He says hes going to start wearing a cap and gown. In recent years, that note of resignation had crept into comedy about this issue, as performers look at, for instance, how ordinary the killings of black men and women at the hands of police have become. In 2015, Jerrod Carmichael made a fake ad for Funny or Die about smartphones marketed to black families: The devices were designed to film police violence. (For a limited time, each member of the plan gets a special brutality-proof case for free.) Chris Rock began his latest Netflix special with this line: You would think the cops would occasionally kill a white kid just to make it look good.

Long before television and movie portraits of the police were being re-examined by critics and artists in the wake of the recent Black Lives Matter protests, Seaton Smith had a sharp, understated bit on Conan about his love for TV cops who follow their own rules. Now Im like, mmmm, follow the rules. In 2018, Wyatt Cenac dedicated an entire season of his HBO show Problem Areas to issues of policing, which has now been put online for free. He examined with nuance many of the reform ideas that were once seen as marginal but have now moved toward the mainstream, like the abolition of the police.

When Pryor joked about police brutality in the mid-1970s, he was speaking to a white audience that he assumed would be skeptical. His premise was that they didnt see what was going on in his community. But in stand-up, that perspective shifted, particularly after the police beating of Rodney King and the subsequent protests in the 1990s. By 2000, Dave Chappelle was saying that police brutality was common knowledge among white people, before needling them for once being skeptical. Didnt you think it was a little suspicious that every black person the police find has crack sprinkled on them?

Still, police abuses have become such a common subject in comedy that it can feel as if weve returned to the days of the Keystone Kops, when aggressive law enforcement was just another trope. In his new stand-up special Out to Lunch, shot before the recent protests, Mark Normand says that the news has been so disturbing that he looks to the little things, like those Fun Facts inside the cap of a Snapple bottle. He gives an example: Polar bears used to be brown, but through evolution they turned white, because police were shooting them.

Comics are doing work on police brutality with more gravity even if the pandemic has limited their ability to work on material. Some of the most powerful statements on social media have been from comics like Jon Laster, who turned his Instagram page into a collection of shattering testimonials from black people about interactions with the police.

As often happens, Dave Chappelle set the pace with a set he performed near his home in Ohio and released last week. At one point, he expressed anger at the CNN host Don Lemon, who had asked why celebrities had not spoken out. Exasperated, Chappelle asked if Lemon had ever seen his work? He had a point.

Over the past few decades, Chappelle has repeatedly made comedy from the pain of police brutality, but what stood out about his recent set was how his typically grave tone didnt pivot to a joke, how often he let his unfiltered outrage sit there. Just as Hannah Gadsby stopped offering punch lines in Nanette, Chappelle went long stretches without jokes, producing a kind of stand-up tragedy. When he asked what the police officer whose knee was on the neck of George Floyd could be thinking, he spoke with a righteous anger that comedy could not address. There are limits to what a joke can do.

What makes Chappelle such a master storyteller is how he telescopes broad swaths of history through his personal narrative in a way that lets you know the past haunts the present. Such continuity tells its own sad story. Look at stand-up comedy and youll find more than 60 years of jokes about police brutality. Whats not funny is how little theyve changed.

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How Richard Pryor Changed the Way Comedy Sees Police Brutality - The New York Times