Laugh

By sheer coincidence, comedians were on my mind a few days before Richard Pryor passed away.

It was last Wednesday night while I was busy studying for final exams. I hate doing anything in complete silence, so I decided to rent a whole stack of DVDs that I could have playing in the background. Obviously I wasn’t paying real attention to these movies as they played, but the one movie out of the bunch that distracted me from working out math equations was a documentary about Jerry Seinfeld, called Comedian. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at his effort behind putting together a successful act after retiring all of his old material. One thing I found fascinating about the documentary was Jerry’s rapport with his fellow colleagues and friends such as Colin Quinn, Ray Romano, and Garry Shandling. It’s one of the most beautiful things in the world to me when you see two brilliant comedians having conversations with each other, matching wits, each comedian trying to one-up the other for bigger laughs and giggles.

For about 90 minutes I ignored my math textbook and just sat and enjoyed the insights to Jerry’s genius as he developed jokes and bounced them off of his friends. Near the end of the documentary, Jerry met with Bill Cosby and talked to him for the first time in his life and nearly keeled over in intense admiration. And I nearly did too.

And I began to think: if I wasn’t so damn good at math, I would totally love to be a stand-up comedian.

Everyone that is close to me knows that I have a special affinity for comedians. It started two summers ago when I spent a couple months in the birthplace of stand-up comedy: New York City. During this time I was really becoming interested in one day becoming a novelist, and the reason I connected with comedians so well was not so much their ability to make me laugh, but their uncanny knack for observation and finding irony — two things I find invaluable to being an effective writer. I would go to Caroline’s Comedy Club every other weekend and laugh my ass off with friends for a few hours, then I would go back to my hotel room thinking about and analyzing what made their act so good. All this, so that I would become a better writer.

And in the process, I discovered how much profound respect I had for these people.

In fact, I hope to marry a comedian one day. Sarah Silverman, if you ever get tired of Jimmy Kimmel’s fat ass or just think he’s been hanging out with Adam Corolla way too much lately, well baby, give me a call.

What makes comedians so special is not just their rare type of intelligence, but their capacity for love. These are the people that most likely had horrible, painful childhoods, but instead of letting life get the best of them, they stood up tall and laughed their way out of it. And if that wasn’t enough, these people decided to share that laughter with others. I strongly believe that people who desire to make others laugh have something very special in their hearts.

So just imagine what kind of special things were in the heart of Richard Pryor, considered by many to be the greatest comedian of all time. Even with a multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 1986, even when his failing health confined him to a wheel chair, even when he burnt most of his body while freebasing cocaine, Richard still couldn’t stop himself from coming out onto the stage to make people laugh and magically turning his pain into joy.

I read in an article that Richard’s wife said that he died smiling. Maybe he was giggling deep inside, preparing some new original material for his comedy routine for the God he was about to meet.