2. In the days of Arthur Kunstler Black Rage would have been an arguable explanation for the asymmetrical warfare launched against the notoriously corrupt LAPD.
I don't say this often and if you ask me about it tomorrow, I may say something different but I dare say comedian Louis C. K. is approaching Richard Pryor levels of genius. There is a lot that can be said about the use of the word genius but that is a conversation for another day. For me aside from his vernacular genius
his amazing emotional bravery
and his physical comedy gifts
what I realize is the heart of Pryor's appeal is his insight that what links us all together are the fucked up things of social existence. Unlike Bill Cosby who forged an early Civil Rights comedic persona on the bourgeois commonality of Black people and white people (child rearing, living in the suburbs, marriage, etc), Richard Pryor understood, that those qualities were lies and it was the fucked up, angry, awkward, dangerous and inconsolable yet hopeful sides of us that holds us in common.
That for me is where Louis CK lives. Whether it is the homoeroticism of homophobia
the mysteries of sex
or a confrontation with race
whatever the issue, Louis CK is unafraid of putting himself at the center of that surgery. Louis CK may be the bravest man in entertainment. Anyone that can make Abe Lincoln fresh and different after 160-odd years of solemnity is fastwalking it to genius town.
