Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(10)
It’s like being ghosted, I suppose, where, deprived of all social cues, I have no relational gauge for my own behavior. I ransack my mind for what I could have done, could have said. I stop trusting what I see, what I hear. My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.
* Eunice Cho” is not the therapist’s real name.
STAND UP
SNOW FELL, SHAGGING THE TREES white and draping the streets with soft noiseless drifts until the whole city seemed erased. The industrial heater in our loft roared like a jet engine so that my husband and I could barely hear each other. During that year when I was depressed, I barely talked anyway. I spent most of my days crumpled in bed or on the couch. I was a blip on a cardiogram. I barely slept, barely ate, let alone wrote. Takeout collected in the fridge, molding into pastures of black sea urchins. Sometimes I checked email. I clicked onto Paperless Post. The envelope opened itself; the card presented itself; I closed my laptop.
My husband suggested we watch Richard Pryor’s Live in Concert, which I’d never seen before. Since we didn’t have a TV, he projected the movie against the blank wall facing our couch. Pryor appeared in our home, seven feet tall, larger than life, lancing our darkened room with light. Over the course of his eighty-minute act, sweat blooms under his armpits and drenches his red silk shirt as he impersonates a man having a heart attack or his tiny pet monkey scrambling over his head to fuck his ear. I only sweat when I’m nervous, and when I’m nervous no antiperspirant will protect me, so I avoid wearing light colors when I have to teach or perform in some way. But Pryor dares to wear silk, which is so unbreathable it exposes his sweat like ink on blotting paper.
But before his antic performances, Pryor strides onstage. He watches all the white people settle into their seats like he’s watching zoo animals. He says, “This is the fun part when white people come back and find out that black people stole their seats.” In a nasally “white” voice, he asks, “Weren’t we sitting here? We were sitting right here!” Switching to a “black” voice, he answers: “Well, you ain’t sitting here now, motherfucker.”
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In his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud divides jokes into two categories: non-tendentious and tendentious. The non-tendentious joke is benign and innocuous, like riddles told to children. The tendentious joke is aggressive or obscene or both, rooting out what we repress in our subconscious. When African American entertainers in the forties told tall tales for laughs backstage, they called these backstage jokes lies. Lies were tendentious, told on street corners, in pool halls and barbershops, away from the prim company of whites. Pryor told lies—by spinning stories, ranting, boasting, and impersonating everything from a bowling pin to an orgasming hillbilly. And by telling lies, Pryor was more honest about race than most poems and novels I was reading at the time.
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Pryor blowtorched the beige from my eyes. I didn’t know he was not just a comedian but also an artist and a revolutionary. He got rid of the punchline to prove that stand-up could be anything, which is what geniuses do: they blow up mothballed conventions in their chosen genre and show you how a song, or a poem, or a sculpture, can take any form.
After my depression eventually lifted, I became obsessed with transcribing all of Pryor’s audio and filmed performances. I realized that Pryor on the page is not exactly funny. Without the hilarity of his delivery, Pryor’s words hit hard and blunt, as if the solvent of his humor has evaporated and left only the salt of his anger. Part of that effect is due to his constant use of expletives, such as his notorious use of the n-word, which punctuates every sentence. On the page, his monologues are stark, sobering; a scathing confessional that innocence, for instance, is a privilege black people don’t get to experience: “I was a kid until I was eight. Then I became a Negro.”
As critics noted, Pryor’s brilliance lies not only in his clever phrasing but in how he embodies his monologues. He is an ensemble of one, incandescent in his talent for channeling anyone and tapping into the wild range of human emotions. I am most mesmerized by his face. If Pryor’s words wound, his face reveals his woundedness. Pryor tells a story about how his sex-crazed monkeys died and he is grieving in his backyard, when the neighbor’s German shepherd jumps over the fence to console him. Mind you, Pryor is impersonating a dog, but Pryor conjures all the pain of humanity through his inconsolable eyes.
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Like most writers and artists, Richard Pryor began his career trying to be someone else. He wanted to be Bill Cosby and went on shows like Ed Sullivan, telling clean, wholesome jokes that appealed to a white audience. He felt like a fraud. Pryor was invited to Vegas to perform at the famous Aladdin Hotel. He came onstage and there, in the spotlight, gazing out into a packed audience of white celebrities like Dean Martin, he had an epiphany: his “mama,” who was his grandmother, wouldn’t be welcome in this room. Pryor was raised by his paternal grandmother, Marie Carter, the formidable madam of three brothels in his hometown of Peoria, Illinois. His mother, Gertrude Thomas, was a sex worker in his grandmother’s brothel before she left Pryor in his grandmother’s care. In his stand-up, Pryor speaks frankly about his lonely childhood in the brothel: “I remember tricks would go through our neighborhood and that’s how I met white people. They’d come and say, ‘Hello, is your mother home? I’d like a blowjob.’?”