ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT, NOV. 18, 1983
By Steve Newton
Richard Pryor fans with only five bucks in their pocket for entertainment this week would be well advised to shell it out on Pryor’s new album Here and Now rather than the movie from which it’s culled.
Not that the movie isn’t funny, but given the choice I’d take the album. It contains the funniest jokes from the movie and condenses them to within about an hour.
There’s the opening selection, “Here and Now”, in which Pryor convinces two late-comers to take seats up front and then tells them “See, you sat in the right seat, ’cause when the show don’t be funny, I take my dick out and piss.”
On “Motherland” he talks about the lions in Africa. “We saw two women lions kill a water buffalo, and the male lion come to eat and chased them away. We went to take a picture, and he didn’t like it. He bent down and picked the water buffalo up by its nuts, threw it over his head, turned his ass to us, you know, sorta like, ‘Take a picture of that‘.”
If you can put up with Pryor’s consistently crude language, Here and Now is good for plenty of laughs. And his alter-ego, Mudbone, puts in an appearance as well. Could quite possibly be the comedy album of ’83.