Why I Love Grad School
My Film and Lit class was so freakin' awesome tonight. We watched Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip for this week, and spent some time talking about performativity and signifyin(g) and the evolution of the African American comic identity, and then spent most of the class talking about Pryor specifically and his gender and racial performance and how it changed over time. It was a great academic discussion in a class that doesn't always have the most fluid conversations, despite the interesting material, because it has so few members. And I love Richard Pryor and always have; I think he's hilarious, and some of his more problematic (read: sexist or homophobic) material is made not just palatable but fascinating for me by how he engages with the norms of gender and sexuality. (For instance, one thing we talked about a lot was a bit from a '71 performance, a homophobic piece in which he nonetheless confesses to engaging in gay sex acts and accuses the shocked audience of doing the same.)
What made the class so awesome, though, and so different from so many of my previous academic experiences, is that it soon became clear that there was going to be no effort from the professor or anyone else to soften or clean up the language Pryor uses in his act, regardless of whether or not we were actually quoting from the "text". Now, I'm not an undergrad who thinks it's just the funniest thing ever when a professor swears; it's not that unusual, and sometimes it's necessary. But I don't think I've ever been in a class, even with my beloved Bryan Phillips back at Grand Valley, whom I once called a "fucking asshole" during class, where the word "motherfucker" was dropped by anyone in any context. Or the word "come," in the dirty sense. Or the phrase "sucked a dick." And none of that derailed the very cerebral conversation we were having at all. It was fantastic.