R.I.P. Richard Pryor

On Saturday, December 10, Richard Pryor passed away at age 65. The comic legend had battled multiple sclerosis for nearly two decades before succumbing to a heart attack. Though disease had silenced Pryor’s voice years ago, his influence can still be heard in a generation of performers that followed him. As Damon Wayans once put it, “Any comic who ain’t stole from Richard ain’t funny.”

Richard Pryor had faced uphill battles from the beginning. He grew up poor in Peoria, Illinois, where he was raised in a brothel by his grandmother. Odd jobs and scrapes with authority offered little hint of the show business future Richard dreamed about, until a supervisor at a local recreation center noticed and nurtured his comedic gifts. After a brief stint in the Army, Richard began doing stand-up at Midwest clubs, eventually making it to New York City. By the mid-1960s, he’d begun appearing frequently on television, and soon became a headliner in Las Vegas casinos. It was a fairly traditional trajectory for comedians – Bill Cosby had recently trod a similar path, breaking the color barrier in the process. But Vegas felt stifling to Pryor, who walked off stage at The Aladdin in mid-routine in 1969.

Richard headed for Berkeley, seeking his voice in the hotbed of American radicalism. He emerged a couple of years later with a revolutionary style of comedy balancing Lenny Bruce-style outrage with an honesty and humanism that was uniquely his own. Rather than storm the stage, Pryor lurked behind the scenes for a while, working in television as a writer for series like Sanford And Son and such variety performers as Flip Wilson and Lily Tomlin (whose Lily special brought Richard an Emmy Award). For the movies, he cowrote Mel Brooks’ breakout success Blazing Saddles, and took a small but prestigious role in Lady Sings The Blues.

By 1974, the world was finally ready for Richard Pryor. His album That Nigger’s Crazy became a sensation, earning a Best Comedy Recording Grammy and eventually going gold. The following year’s Is It Something I Said? and 1976’s Bicentennial Nigger followed suit. A string of successful films (most notably Silver Streak and Stir Crazy, both teaming him with Gene Wilder) and his own TV series made Richard the biggest comedian on the planet for the rest of the decade. But the success masked inner turmoil and heavy drug addiction. It came to a head on June 9, 1980 when the comic was nearly burned to death; according to Pryor at the time, he’d caught fire while freebasing cocaine.

That notorious incident brought an end to the furious pace of film and television appearances for a while, but Richard soon returned -- with a renewed emphasis on stand-up. In clubs and concert films like Live On The Sunset Strip viewers got the real, unadulterated Richard Pryor. It wasn’t simply that epithets could fly more freely in that environment (in fact after a consciousness-raising 1979 trip to Kenya, Richard had banished a favorite, “nigger,” from his vocabulary); stand-up afforded Pryor a venue for self-exploration. Cocaine, a string of divorces, gunplay, tax troubles, and other dirty laundry all got a public washing. Though a later book (Pryor Convictions And Other Life Sentences) and film (Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling) were both billed as autobiographical, there was really no line between the man’s life and his comedy. That’s why it still rings of truth, and why Richard Pryor will be remembered.