I’ve been collecting jokes lately. Old ones, mostly – the kind that used to arrive by email forward, back when that was a thing – and the collecting has taught me something uncomfortable: writing funny on purpose is brutally hard. I can find funny. I can file funny. Producing it from a blank page is another job entirely.

So I did what you do when you can’t do the thing. I studied the person who could.

Richard Pryor set himself on fire in June of 1980. Freebasing cocaine, third-degree burns over half his body, six weeks in a hospital, a coin flip whether he’d live. Within two years he was on a stage in front of thousands of people, telling it:

“Usually when I go to bed, I have milk and cookies. And one night I had some low-fat milk and some pasteurized, and I mixed them together. And I dipped my cookie and the shit blew up.”

That’s from Live on the Sunset Strip, 1982. Watch the audience in that film and you can see them doing two things at once – laughing, and checking whether they’re allowed to. He’d almost died. Everyone in the room knew it. And he’d chosen to frame the worst night of his life as a bedtime snack that went wrong.

That’s the move I keep coming back to. Not the profanity, not the persona – the frame. He takes the biggest possible event and describes it with the smallest possible furniture. Milk. Cookies. A dipped cookie. The gap between what happened and how he tells it is where the laugh lives, and the gap only works because both ends of it are true. He really did almost die. And surviving really does shrink things down to milk and cookies eventually, if you live long enough to tell it.

The second thing he knew: your point of view survives even when nothing else does.

Same special, describing the aftermath:

“I woke up in an ambulance. And it wasn’t nothing but white people staring at me. I said, ‘Ain’t this a bitch. I done died and wound up in the wrong mutha-f’ing heaven.’”

Half-dead in an ambulance, and the observer in him is still on duty, still filing his report on America from the gurney. The bit isn’t about the fire at all. It’s about a Black man realizing that even his afterlife might be segregated, and finding that funnier than the burns. He didn’t stop being who he was because the circumstances got serious. The circumstances got serious and he pointed the same lens at them.

He’d been doing this long before the fire. In Live in Concert – 1979, the one comedians still call the best stand-up film ever made – he tells the story of the night his marriage ended, when he took a gun and shot his own car so his wife couldn’t leave in it. He walks the audience through his own logic like a man giving a deposition, completely sincere, completely unhinged, and the room comes apart. Divorce, rage, a firearm – nothing in the ingredients is funny. The honesty is funny. He extends himself no mercy and asks for none.

Which I think is the actual lesson, and the reason writing funny is so hard. The material isn’t the problem. Everybody has a fire, a divorce, an ambulance moment, scaled to their own life. The problem is that the material is exactly the stuff we’ve already decided to keep private, and comedy runs on the opposite decision. Pryor’s genius wasn’t that funnier things happened to him. Considerably worse things happened to him. His genius was refusing to protect himself from his own story – and then doing the craftsman’s work of finding the milk and cookies to carry it.

I don’t have that kind of nerve yet. But I know what the exercise is now: take the story you’d rather not tell, and look for the smallest piece of furniture in it.

The bits quoted above are from Richard Pryor’s Live on the Sunset Strip (1982); the car story is told in Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979). Both are worth your evening – they belong to him and his estate, and no summary does them justice.