Stanley Crouch on Pryor

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on December 12th, 2005

From “Pryor’s Flawed Legacy” by Stanley Crouch, New York Daily News:

What is so unfortunate is that the heaviest of Pryor’s gifts was largely ignored by so many of those who praised the man when he was alive and are now in the middle of deifying him.

The pathos and the frailty of the human soul alone in the world or insecure or looking for something of meaning in a chaotic environment was a bit too deep for all of the simpleminded clowns like Andrew Dice Clay or those who thought that mere ethnicity was enough to define one as funny, like the painfully square work of Paul Rodriguez.

Ouch! One of the more nuanced “appreciations” of Pryor we’ve read. Crouch’s NYDN bio says he is “co-founder of the department known as Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 1993, he received both the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a MacArthur Foundation grant. He is now working on a biography of Charlie Parker.” Read the rest here.

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