[Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip] has a sprinkling of high spots—the animal imitations, a scene with the Mafia—but the direct confrontation of Pryor and audience encourages sentimentalities in him, both of heart-tug and profanity. Also, it puts a double load on him, of performing and being the whole show as well. I don't mean that he improvises everything in these shows; he uses some of his standard bits. But the selections, the relative lengths of bits, the pacing, all make demands on him that he has to keep in mind while he's also performing, with no help from anyone else.

Many cultures have developed genius clowns who do much more than make their audiences laugh, they remind and chide and reassure and rive—Karl Valentin in Brecht's Bavaria, for instance, Dario Fo in terrorized Italy today. In his own style, vastly empowered by film...