Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling: Songs of Innocence and Experience

Richard Pryor was and remains a great American artist. No other country could have produced this protean creator, a comedian who became a writer and actor who became a director, and, for the lucky few, a teacher who taught artists in all those genres that telling the truth was itself an art—and that, even if you didn’t follow his unique blend of social commentary, humor, anguish, and colloquial brilliance, you must learn to speak in a language that says more than you ever thought yourself capable of expressing.

He was also one of the last of the great artist-martyrs, a man who saw no separation between his body and the world that battered it, licked it, coddled it, and at times ignored his genius entirely because its existence was too much, a great overwhelming gift I first experienced on record. That was in the mid-1970s, when his masterpiece album, That Nigger’s Crazy (1974), was out, a time when it was practically forbidden to listen to Pryor, he was so outrageous, all that smut and diamonds buried in shit. Divorce, drugs, sex—it was all there in his stop-and-start, sometimes outraged voice when he told stories about his beginnings in Peoria, Illinois. His early days on the comedy circuit, when he more or less imitated Bill Cosby. Then his revelation after walking out on a gig in Vegas—a real tux-and-black-tie gig—before moving up north, to the Bay Area, where he met Black activists with powerful voices, Huey Newton and the like, in charge of their own narratives, while also listening to the voices they heard in the street. Putting his ear close to the ground, Pryor found his language: rough and tender, true to life, and scared about what could happen to his body in a world where shooting ranges always had black targets.

And even though That Nigger’s Crazy blew the top of my head off, I couldn’t entirely accept what he had to say. I listened to the record over and over again at my sister’s house when I babysat, laughing so hard because I somehow knew that everything he said was true. I was not an adult male, and Pryor was speaking out of that experience. But I could hear, as clear as a bell, the anguish. It was becoming clear what the world had in store for me. Pryor knew—I could tell by the depth of his feeling, his observations—that the joke was on guys like us, even though we knew those Othering guys were the joke.

Although I understood that Pryor was telling the truth—his best work reveals his beautiful heart (his greatest portrayals that he didn’t write himself are the tender junkie in “Juke and Opal,” a sketch from Lily Tomlin’s 1973 TV special Lily, and the worker in Paul Schrader’s 1978 film Blue Collar)—I couldn’t face, at times, what he was saying about being an American, about being a male, a Black male, because who wants to be a citizen in a world that does to its citizens what we do to ours? Richard Pryor taught me that you could use that—use this wretchedness and twisted ethos—to your advantage, in your art, as long as you were honest, and told the truth about how the world affected you, and why.

In a way, 1986’s Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, Pryor’s only directorial effort for the big screen, is a testament to lived experience and how it can be alchemized as art. Pryor uses the raw stuff of his life to come to terms with, or should I say reckon with, all that has gone into his being able to make the film we are watching.

Shot by John Alonzo, who did such extraordinary work on Chinatown, Jo Jo Dancer has a similar claustrophobic feel: Pryor wants us to feel Jo Jo’s anguish, and the laughs too. Jo Jo is a nervous character, and it’s his jumpiness that is part of the humor of the picture, as well as his sense of loss. What does Jo Jo lose during the course of his relatively young life? Many, many things. It’s poignant to see Jo Jo’s acclaim counterbalanced by his feeling bereft, and there is a sweetness to the shots of Jo Jo’s mother, played so beautifully, minimally, by Diahnne Abbott, that can only happen when your heart has been broken by love. Indeed, Jo Jo Dancer is one of the more heartsick movies I have ever seen, and it makes me miss all that Pryor was not able to do in this life because of his life, but also entirely grateful for what he was able to leave behind.

But to praise him in conventional critical language is to risk being the kind of somewhat self-conscious, maybe a little pompous guy Pryor lampooned in his comedy routines—a stuffed shirt, a not-with-it person. Because even though Pryor himself didn’t write criticism, he was one of the best social, and otherwise, critics we’ve ever had, a man who made language in his own image: fractured, alive, incapable of putting down a false note. Which is not to say he wasn’t sentimental. Jo Jo Dancer is not free of sentimentality. But what life is? We knew so much about Pryor by the time he got to this, his 8½-inspired work, that even if he didn’t sentimentalize his past, we would have. All those hours of looking at that extraordinary face and body before Jo Jo, when Pryor was learning how to tell stories in a pin spot. We were always on his side because no one else ever seemed to be: not old girlfriends, not the cops who hassled him, not his own father, never the world. We wanted to hold him close because he was the loneliest, funniest performer ever, skinny and amazed when love showed up at all.

The memories in Jo Jo Dancer slip and slide through Pryor—through the viewer—like Eros. Which is how memory works. But when we first meet Jo Jo, his body is in trouble. When the film opens, Jo Jo is a big star. But he’s an addict. His soul is no longer his own. He’s on top of the world as a performer, but lives, really, in the lower depths of his soul. He makes a call to a drug dealer. He sets up a part, all the while spouting a lot of bullshit—saying he’s off drugs, all the things addicts say and want to believe. He throws his works in the fireplace, screams at himself for messing up, for being a junkie, and then decides to do coke one last time.

The rest we know from what we saw in real life, on TV. And in newspapers. His self-immolation. The hideous life-threatening burns over nearly all of his body. The film then asks: Will Jo Jo live or die? His alter ego separates from his charred form, and looks down on him—on himself—and says, “Jo Jo, what have you done to us this time?” Then it’s the Jo Jo who’s free of his body who looks back, floats over a past that’s defined, more often than not, by women.

Jo Jo’s early days are defined by the business of bodies. His grandmother (Carmen McRae) runs a whorehouse in Ohio, where his mother (Abbott) works. And one gets the sense, watching this largely female universe of kimonos, dressing-table mirrors, lipstick, and curls, that we are in a kind of show-business world—a world of artifice and truth and self-presentation for the sell. Pryor shoots these scenes—which are among the best in the movie—from a child’s point of view, emotionally speaking. His camera tracks the women he longs for—Mother as the embodiment of commodification? Of love?—with a kind of wonder: Who are these irreplaceable Others whom men treat so badly? What does Jo Jo’s manhood mean in a world where men are chumps or pimps, users?

Does Jo Jo become a performer like his grandmother and mother, selling his body for the delectation of an audience, as a way of identifying with these women? The film shows us the sleazy underbelly of nightclubs and the like when Jo Jo is first starting out, and when you watch those scenes, you can’t help but think Jo Jo is living in a kind of whorehouse again, and maybe for always.

A salient feature of Jo Jo’s character—like Pryor’s—is his innocence. No matter how many times he’s been hurt, Jo Jo holds on to it valiantly and foolishly throughout the film. Will the world ever measure up to its purity? Jo Jo lives in the possibility of kindness; that is, he seeks to find his own tenderness mirrored in the world at large and in the world of show business especially. And as he moves through that world of parties and false tribute, you want to pull Jo Jo back, sit him down, and tell him about the industry, and how being a pure artist in a transactional world can really mess you up. The weird thing is that the hurt Jo Jo experiences in that world feels almost inevitable, like it was his fate to be martyred by commerce. Because he doesn’t know how to handle it, really. No one taught him how to protect himself.

Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling: Songs of Innocence and Experience

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