From the first few moments after he took the stage in his 1982 concert film, “Live on the Sunset Strip,” Pryor wasted no time cutting to the chase with the line, “I wanna talk about something and I hope no one gets offended. I wanna talk about fucking.”

Pryor’s command of comedy, as shown in this film, incorporated observations like his riffs on sex in the beginning of “Sunset Strip,” storytelling like his tales of visiting Africa for the first time, and extended monologues on the various obsessions that can plague the mind of a truly gifted comedian.

“Sunset Strip” caught Pryor just on the tipping point of where the demons that fed his humor started to catch up with him; the performance here was his first time back on stage after severely burning himself in an infamous mishap involving freebasing cocaine. The cumulative toll of his misadventures made him vulnerable to the multiple sclerosis he developed that pulled him out of the spotlight for the last decade of his life.

On that cusp, Pryor showed his vulnerability recounting his recuperation, as he thinks a bath will be no big deal despite severely burnt skin -- until he finally tries to sit in a bath. “Don’t wash a motherfucking thing,” he reacts. “Not a finger, not a toe…”

You feel for him as he goes on to recount, self-deprecatingly, that he’s heard all the jokes about him -- as he lights a match and skips it along, asking “What’s this?” and answering himself, “Richard Pryor running away.” Most of all he could recognize his own faults and laugh at himself for them.