Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love: How Tricksters Through History Have Changed the World

Comedian Richard Pryor narrated the George Floyd murder in 1979, forty years before it occurred. A murder no one is laughing about. Yet when Pryor tells the story in very raw terms, and with his comic talent, the audience laughs. As a time-traveling trickster, Pryor is preparing the audience, lubricating their psychic joints—spiritually, psychologically, politically—in a foreshadowing today’s reckoning. It can be checked out on Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979).

People and cultures draw ...