If Only This Comedian Could Dish It Right Back Watching the parade of comedy heavyweights and cultural heroes assembled for the biographical documentary "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic," my mind wandered to the roast of Pryor by the cast of his 1977 NBC television show. The unedited version is on YouTube. As you watch him being flayed by the largely unknown group that included future stars like Tim Reid, Robin Williams, Marsha Warfield, Sandra Bernhard and John Witherspoon - as usual, Pryor was ahead of the times - you can't wait for him to get to the microphone and take revenge. When he does, he ad-libs a 13-minute rejoinder that's as cruel and foul (and homophobic) as you might fear and as coruscatingly funny as you could hope. In Marina Zenovich's workmanlike "Omit the Logic," which played at the Tribeca Film Festival and has its television premiere on Friday on Showtime, Pryor doesn't get to talk back. It's too bad, because as Mr. Williams, Lily Tomlin, Bob Newhart, Whoopi Goldberg, Mel Brooks, Jesse Jackson, Quincy Jones and others pay respectful, sometimes unctuous tribute to Pryor's comic genius, you'd like him to have the last word. It would make things a whole lot livelier. Luckily, for the viewer and for Ms. Zenovich, some of Pryor's associates provide a language and a perspective closer to his own. Describing his friend's tough childhood, the writer David Banks says of several of Pryor's male relatives: "I'm talking about, not no play pimps. Real pimps. Them guys would pimp a Barbie doll. The stuntman, bodyguard and adviser Rashon Khan recalls the moment when Pryor, just before he set himself on fire in 1980, watched film of a self-immolating Vietnamese monk and said admiringly, "He didn't even flinch." Ms. Zenovich also benefits, as you might expect, from clips of Pryor at work, though not that many could be shoehorned into the documentary's 84 minutes. There are some familiar moments from the concert films, including the great heart attack routine in "Richard Pryor: Live in Concert," but she wisely emphasizes less well-known material. Scenes of Pryor as a young, physically commanding Bill Cosby imitator in the early 1960s are revelatory; so are clips of talk-show appearances with Johnny Carson and Dinah Shore in which he calmly discusses his use of a certain racial epithet in a way that would be unthinkable on television today. "Omit the Logic" (the title comes from a line by Mr. Banks: "Sometimes to understand Richard, you had to first omit logic") is the second presentation in Showtime's "Sho Closeup" documentary series, the latest front in the channel's war with HBO for pay-cable supremacy. Ms. Zenovich has been on both sides of the battle: her best known film, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," played on HBO in 2009. She begins "Omit the Logic" with a segment on Pryor's near death in the self-inflicted cocaine-related fire in 1980 before proceeding with a chronological account of his life and career. This sets a tragic tone for his rise-and-fall showbiz-excess story, and the opening has some of the moodiness and texture that characterized "Wanted and Desired." As the Pryor film progresses, however, it turns into a well-executed version of a straightforward, VH1-style biopic. The depth of feeling Ms. Zenovich brought to the story of Polanksi isn't as evident in "Omit the Logic," a project she didn't originate. The film's inevitable compressions, made worse by the amount of empty, self-congratulatory celebrity blathering, mean that every Pryor fan will have omissions to complain about. But the best strategy is probably to sit back and enjoy what's there - if nothing else, Ms. Zenovich has saved us the trouble of hunting around the Internet. Pryor's unassailable strength of mind is present in every moment, no more so than in a brief clip from his later years. Frail, in a wheelchair because of the multiple sclerosis that would lead to his death in 2005, he describes a conversation with his penis, which, he announces, has died. It looked at me like I was crazy. I said, "What's wrong with you?" It said, "It's not me, it's you." " Like all of his comedy, it's actually completely logical. Richard Pryor Omit the Logic Showtime, Friday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time. Directed by Marina Zenovich; written by P. G. Morgan, Chris A. Peterson and Ms. Zenovich; Roy Ackerman and Jennifer Pryor, executive producers.