Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling

“Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, written and directed by Richard Pryor. If you’re looking for a double feature, I’d strongly suggest pairing it with the Bob Fosse movie All That Jazz. These are two sides of my favorite coins, my favorite genre... Now, I wouldn’t say that this is a perfect film. But it is. It is a perfect film. I’m not sure if you know about the incident that the brilliant Richard Pryor went through, but, well, he made a Fosse-esque extravaganza of it.”

“So I’ve never seen Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, a Richard Pryor film. And so I’m definitely taking this because, obviously, what a gift of a man and a performer he was. And I can’t wait to see it.”

“This is Jo Dancer, a film by Richard Pryor. And the weird thing about this is that it might not have been the most successful or the most critically acclaimed, for someone who was such a big star, but the way that he views the world is really, really close to the way that my parents and the people around me in my community viewed the world, as kind of a nihilistic, cynical thing, but still looking for light and hope and understanding of who you are.”

“I do not know this one. Let me read this one real quick. One of the greatest comedians of all time Richard Pryor gets raw and real in this brutally funny and lacerating self-portrait, Following the Notorious incident in which he caught on fire while high on cocaine, nearly losing his life. Well, sign me up, hook, line, and sinker. I mean, I've been doing stand-up comedy for 17 years and I don't think there's a comedian who has not been inspired by Richard Pryor.”

“The only other auto-biopic I can think of is Richard Pryor made Jo Dancer. He’s the architect of modern comedy and he was so brilliant and vulnerable and tortured and he had a really tough life. But he had an amazing, prolific… We’re all his kids. So I love both these movies. These guys were both tortured geniuses.”