In Kurt Vonnegut’s Paris Review interview, he calls his books “mosaics of jokes.” (The PR interview, published in 1977, is itself a kind of mosaic; it draws from four different interviews conducted over the course of a decade.) I thought about Vonnegut’s phrase after reading Fran Ross’s Oreo last week. Ross fills her pages with jokes and puns, all of which contribute to a glittering pattern: a work of art, a mosaic. Plus, that other meaning of “mosaic” (capitalized) floats around the margins: “of or related to Moses.” Among Ross’s many interests: Jewish identity. So the phrase fits.
In yesterday’s post, I focused on Ross’s resemblances to Thomas Pynchon. If we expand the discussion to include Vonnegut, we might note that all three writers display an interest in song lyrics, advertising, and improbable coincidences. We might say that Vonnegut’s short chapters (with titles that often serve as joke setups or punch lines) find an analogue in Ross’s many subsections (complete with deadpan subheadings). And we might go on in this fashion—but, of course, it would become a bit predictable.
And what I love about Ross is how utterly unpredictable she is. It makes sense that she wound up writing (briefly) for Richard Pryor’s 1977 NBC variety series. The Richard Pryor Show lasted only four episodes; like Oreo, it was a work ahead of its time. In Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him, David and Joe Henry call one of the show’s sketches, “A Pet Head,” “perhaps the strangest, most subversive thing ever aired on network TV.” (Amazingly, the series ran opposite Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. “Schlemiel! Schlimazel!” Would you like to feel even worse about guns? Watch this sketch.)
I don’t want to overstate Ross’s contribution to the series; she doesn’t get a writing credit on any of the four episodes. (She did write an ESSENCE cover story on Pryor a year or so after the show ended.) But in thinking about Ross and Vonnegut, my mind wandered to standup comedy. And I landed on this idea: The Vonnegut Reading Experience offers, in an expected and satisfying way, droll entertainment and useful outrage. So Vonnegut’s George Carlin. And the Ross Reading Experience offers—well, you can’t be sure. All those switches, those jokes from nowhere. So she’s Pryor.
I promised news. A Pryor biopic, long in the works, has finally been green-lighted. Lee Daniels will direct; Mike Epps will play Pryor; Eddie Murphy will play Pryor’s father. And Oprah Winfrey will play Pryor’s brothel-owning grandmother. On most days, I don’t believe in an afterlife*, but what the hell: Let’s imagine that the movie turns out well, and that Pryor and Ross watch it, and that they laugh it up, really laugh it up, somewhere.
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* In A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut writes: “And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, ‘Kurt is up in heaven now.’ That’s my favorite joke.”