The Michigan Daily-Wednesday, May 16, 1979-Page 7 'IN CONCER T': Pryor's By OWEN GLEIBERMAN Most of us like to believe our culture has moved several steps beyond the - pint where someone like Lenny Bruce could be branded obscene for saying "cocksucker" in public. After all, the movie Lenny offered a veritable Jesus Bruce to the audience of unassuming young; people swear freely in college classrooms, those former havens of stalwart traditionalism; and Richard Pryor-Live in Concert,a90-minute record of a single appearance the comedian gave earlier this year in Long Beach, California, is playing at theatres across the country. Yes, in the last fifteen years or so, American culture has found a lot of room for Pryor, someone who, in a nut- shell, says whatever the hell is on his mind. But how much of that is accep- tance, and how much is merely toleran- ce, walking hand-in-hand with the fact that he's become such an attractively bankable commodity? L ENNY BRUCE, socially high- minded as he was, often had nothing more on his mind than shocking the hell out of people. One can even see that as socially redeeming; after the fabulously dreary fifties, a little shock therapy was probably in order. But Pryor isn't Bruce, and that's why it's a goddamned shame that he's "accep- ted" asa dirty comic. How far have we come if we let someone like Pryor say anything he wants, only to snicker behind his back at how deliriously obscene he is? A few restraint utterly lacking years ago, Pryor might have snorted that the only thing he wanted to do was make some bread. But his material in the film (roughly equivalent to his recently-released two-record LP Wan- ted) is a deliberate attempt to speak to a larger audience than ever before; only a die-hard cynic would believe that money was the only thing lurking behind that change. It's clear that Pryor wants to com- municate. Like Woody Allen in Manhat- tan, he tries to cut through the shit of modern life for a moment and remind us of what goes on beneath the myths and lifestyles of contemporary America. I await the day Pryor isn't hyped as some underhanded foul- mouthed Black Panther (the signs out- side the theater that "warn" innocent bystanders about the "vulgar" language inside don't help matters). Anyone who cares about relations between the sexes or between blacks and whites, about contemporary American life, or the state of American comedy, owes it to himself to see Richard Pryor-Live in Concert. Along, with Woody Allen, Pryor is, quite sim- ply, one of the two comic geniuses at work in America today. YOU KNOW HOW George Carlin tells those slice-of-life anecdotes on The Tonight Show about the common quirks of everyday life (example: "Ever tasted a hot dog you ate three days ago?"), Well, Richard Pryor does pret- ty much the same thing. Only his jokes are about fucking and going to the bathroom and rapists and having heart attacks and how much he despises the way American has treated its black people-in short, about a lot of things that exist in real life but that Carlin, Martin Mull, Joan Rivers, Johnny Car- son, Steve Martin, and even Lily Tomlin (not to mention someone like David Brenner) manage to avoid like the plague. Watching a Pryor routine-watching him joke about how women sometimes don't have orgasms or how he shot his car full of holes to stop his wife from leaving him-becomes progressively more exhilarating. And suddenly, you realize everything comedy can be, and you ask "yourself why you haven't demanded that feeling from other comics. Pryor's filmed monologue flows with astounding fluidity. Through invisibly smooth transitions he slides from jokes about mouth-to-mouth resucitation to giving urine on demand at a hospital to John Wayne telling Death to "get the fuck out of here" to black funerals to cocaine to how his grandmother whipped him to a pulp when he was a boy. His act depends on delivery more than that of virtually any comic I've seen. I wan- ted to write down part of his routine to print in this review, but gave up after 20 minutes. Pryor's impression of a child trying ineptly to lie his way out of an obvious- offense is pointless without those innocent wide eyes and caught-in- the-act falsetto. And it's worth the ad- mission to see him do a stuttering Chinaman. THE MOST hard-hitting material (to me, anyway) is his devastatingly accurate impressions of whites; these must be seen and heard to be believed. "Uh, I believe those were our seats," Pryor minces in a meekly choked-off delivery, mimicking a white man who's returned from intermission to find his seat occupied by an imperious black. Only the voice isn't merely realistic; there is so much undisguised venom in the way his caricature picks out the white's befuddled lack of cool that it makes a "statement" worthy of Malcolm X at his most furiously in- spired. Like Lenny Bruce, Pryor says what most of us are thinking, but what just ain't kosher to say, even, perhaps, to those we trust most. And, more than Bruce, Pryor is the comic of a thousand voices. His specialty is personifying inanimate objects, animals, and parts of the body. When his ribs are crumpled in a boxing match and they tell him to fall down, his legs bark up, "You want us to fall, man? You gonna make us look bad because you can't take it?" In a brilliant enactment of the heart at- tack he suffered last year, he simultaneously becomes Pryor the vic- tim, his offending heart, an angel-phone operator that'a a dead-ringer for Tomlin's Ernestine, and Pryor the comic, surveying and commenting on the insane proceedings. PEOPLE WHO HOLD up Lenny Bruce as a comic Messiah make the mistake of turning the point of his social criticism into Gospel; Bruce wasn't profound-only profoundly truthful. Beautifully baroque By NANCY RUCKER The Barococo Ensemble treated a small crowd to a delightful afternoon of Baroque and Rococo music last Sunday in the Union's Pendleton Room. The talented six-member group, which specializes in music of the 17th and 18th centuries, includes Michele Derr, soprano; Deanna Boylan, mezzo-soprano; Evelyn Avsharian and Rebecca Chudacoff, violinists; Carol Bundra, cello; and Ginger Rogers, harpsichord. Professor Ellwood Derr, the group's musical director, also plays the harpsichord. With the opening chords of Arcangelo Corelli's Trio Sonata in A Major, the Gothic style Pendleton Room comes to seem transformed into a royal Baroque chamber. The two violinists, cellist, and harpsichordist exhibited perfect ensemble; each player listened intently to match her tone, style, shythm and balance with those of the other three. In the two movements of the Corelli Sonata, Fantasy and Jig, playful variations are exchanged bet- ween the instruments-one presents the theme, the next answers. Two Scarlatti operatic excerpts followed the Corelli work. Mezzo-soprano Deanna Boylan was confident and her pitch was precise. Her facial ex- pressions corresponded nicely to the characters' emotions as expressed in the music, rendering the foreign lyrics more easily understandable. Michele Derr, on the other hand, appeared nervous and occasionally slip- ped out of tune on high passages. Henry Purcell's "Golden" Sonata No. 9 further exemplified the Baroque and Rococo styles with gay ornamentation, improvisation, and powerful tensions in the violins and continuo. Three excerpts from the composer's operas were also performed. The ensemble's final selections, all by G. F. Handel, included the Trio- Sonata in G Minor, and two operatic duets and arias. Sunday's concert was the Barococo Ensemble's last of the season. Although this way my first exposure to the group as a whole, I have heard two of its members, Rebecca Chudacoff and Carol Bundra, concertmistress and first cellist respectively of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra. Ann Ar- bor is fortunate to have such a fine group of musicians. The Ensemble promises to bring further enjoyment of stylistically accurate vocal and in- strumentalBaroque and Rococo music. Pryor before the press What makes Pryor's performance so rich is that his insights are com- municated with a depth of humor and hatred that wont be reduced to empty abstractions. Twice, he drops his humorous guns to make a social statement: he says of rapists, "That's some vile shit, to go and take somebody's humanity like that," and in a routine about dogs, slips in the pointed aside that "animals don't have no racism." Both moments are trite as Trinidad. Rather than telling us about life, a Pryor routine makes us feel it in our bones, makes us laugh with the recognition of our collective reality. The message of Pryor's racial humor isn't that whites harbor some disgusting attitudes towards blacks (although that's implicit); he acts out how each group copes-blacks more by a nothing-to-lose will for survival, and whites not so much by themselves, as by the protective insulation of their dominant position in society. And the bottom line isn't contempt, but compassion. When Pryor gets down to universal nitty-gritty like the fear. behind the Macho myth, he hasn't forgotten racism; he's merely tran- scended it. That's the mark of-a comic who knows both the powers and the limits of anger. It's the mark of someone who's played the show biz game by his own rules-and won. The Ann Arbor Flm d speraf ve presents t Aud A WEDNESDAY, MAY 16 A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Stanely Kubrick, 1971) 7& 9:15-AUD A A bit of the in-out-in-out and the old ultra-violence. Very horrorshow, this nightmare vision of the not-too-distant future is perhaps Kubrick's best work. Best Picture, Best Director, New York film Critics Award. "A tour deforce of extraordinary images, music, words and feelings . . . dazzles the senses and the mind."-N.Y. TIMES. Stars MALCOLM McDOWELL, PATRICK MAGEE.