[Richard Pryor] is at his best in the recently released "concert" film, Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip. Although the witless pop comedies he's held together single-handedly through the past decade [(Arthur Hiller's Silver Streak, Michael Schultz's Greased Lightning, Herbert Ross's California Suite, Sidney Poitier's Stir Crazy)] draw upon his talents in a parsimonious way, he seems to me unquestionably the most gifted and inventive comic working today….

Pryor's work in Live on the Sunset Strip represents a fusion of his unrestrained abilities as a writer …, stand-up comic, and actor of increasing range and versaility—and it is both unexpectedly moving and wildly funny. (p. 52)

The funny stuff, almost seamlessly stitched together in this performance, runs a thematic range from sex to money, success, lawyers, marriage, prisons, courage, racism, the search for roots, Africa, caged and uncaged animals, cultural relativism, and Pryor's recent, notorious self-immolating "accident." What...