Friends & Fellow Twainiacs,
Here is today's NY Times coverage of the first Mark Twain Award at the
Kennedy Center last night. It seems designed as a citation for standup
comics, alas. Not that Pryor doesn't deserve it, but I always think of SLC as
a writer first rather than a humorist, and certainly not a standup comic.
Kathy O'Connell
Hartford Advocate
October 22, 1998
Laughs Mix With Pathos at Richard Pryor Tribute
By IRVIN MOLOTSKY
[W] ASHINGTON -- A laughing group of comedians and
actors who have been inspired in their work by
Richard Pryor gathered on Tuesday night at the Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts to pay tribute to him.
Robin Williams brought all the loose ends together when
he recalled the Mark Twain observation that sorrow is a
greater source of humor than happiness.
But the laughter far outweighed the sorrow. The
performers' acts served to remind the audience that
Pryor, whose health problems include multiple sclerosis,
was a pioneer among comics in creating characters who
spoke in the true voice of the streets, obscenities and
all.
Many of the words heard during the tribute were probably
coming from a Kennedy Center stage for the first time,
and many cannot be repeated here. But the Comedy Central
cable channel taped the event for showing on Jan. 20.
The event was to honor Pryor as the first recipient of
the Kennedy Center's award for humor, the Mark Twain
Prize. Pryor sat in a box, but he was so weak that he
could not rise to acknowledge the loud applause from the
audience in the center's concert hall.
"I'm glad to see you up there," said one of the
entertainers, Morgan Freeman, who echoed another
hallowed Twain remark by adding, "Reports of your death
were greatly exaggerated."
At a party after the show, Pryor, 58, was unable to rise
from his wheelchair and was barely able to say, in a low
moan, "Thank you," when James Johnson, the chairman of
the Kennedy Center, gave him the award.
"Like Mark Twain, you made us laugh and also think,"
Johnson said.
Williams said at the party that Pryor had been alert to
the tributes paid him. "He lights up," Williams said.
"You can see it."
In his own appearance at the concert hall, Williams came
onstage, saying he was scalping tickets to the hugely
popular van Gogh show at the National Gallery of Art.
"I've got two tickets to van Gogh," he said. "Check it
out. Two tickets. Two hundred bucks and you'll see 'The
Potato Eaters.' " He refused to take a check.
When his turn came, Freeman recalled yet another Twain
observation, that he would rather see a taxidermist
coming toward him than a tax collector. "The taxidermist
isn't going to take more than your skin," Freeman said.
The comedian Damon Wayans said in his routine that he
had drawn inspiration from Pryor, to a point. "I wanted
to be just like him," Wayans said, "except for the drug
habit, the failed marriages and the guns."
Whoopi Goldberg also cited Twain in her remarks, saying:
"Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a
member of Congress. Oops, I repeat myself."
The comedian Chris Rock said that Pryor had come on the
scene "between the two great plagues, disco and AIDS."
Another comic, Richard Belzer, recalled one of his worst
stage experiences, having to follow Pryor's act at the
Improv in Manhattan. "It's like having to paint a
picture next to one by da Vinci," he said.
The comedian and social activist Dick Gregory was on
hand, not as a performer, but as a friend of Pryor's.
"It must have thrilled him to be there and look down on
it," Gregory said. "It had to do a lot for him, to see
that, to feel that."
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
|
