Richard Pryor Kept Trying to Tell Us Something About His Life

Released in 1986, ‘Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling’ found the comic attempting to tell his personal history. It was one entry in an ongoing autobiography written in public.

In Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling, Richard Pryor wastes no time eliminating the distance between himself and the film’s protagonist, a successful stand-up comic and movie star named Jo Jo Dancer. Pryor’s sole effort as a director, apart from the concert film Richard Pryor… Here and Now, the 1986 film opens with Dancer talking to a dealer then dropping to his hands and knees in search of any remaining flecks of cocaine embedded in the carpet. After smashing the items on a nearby table, he declares himself through with drugs. Then the discovery of a small bag of coke in a jacket pocket changes his mind. After Dancer retrieves what remains of a glass pipe from the fireplace, the film smash cuts to a hospital, where the badly burned comic is hurried down the hallway on a gurney. His chances of surviving don’t look good.

If there’s one thing everyone knew about Richard Pryor in 1986, it’s that he nearly died after setting himself on fire while freebasing, so Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling, which has just been re-released as part of the Criterion Collection, gets right to it. But that opening is also kind of a trick. According to Pryor, the freebasing story that everyone knew wasn’t the real story. When not joking about a mishap involving milk and cookies—“one night I had that low-fat milk, and that pasteurized shit…” begins an explanation heard on Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip—Pryor would describe the incident as a suicide attempt in which he poured high-proof liquor on himself and set himself ablaze on purpose. The liquor could shift in the telling—sometimes it’s rum, sometimes cognac—but other details remained consistent. The Bic lighter failed on the first two flicks, then succeeded all too well.

It takes only one attempt for the lighter to work, but when Jo Jo Dancer circles back to that late in the film, this is the version it depicts in chilling detail. That doesn’t, however, mean that the film should be mistaken as an attempt to set the record straight. Sometimes moving, sometimes frustrating, and often confusing as it jumps from one episode in Dancer’s life to another, Jo Jo Dancer selectively draws from Pryor’s past to create a biopic wrapped in a protective layer of fiction. It’s honest and unflattering but only up to a point. It’s also just one chapter in a larger autobiographical project filled with candor and contradictions.