Richard Pryor

Comedian and actor

• Born: December 1, 1940
• Birthplace: Peoria, Illinois
• Died: December 10, 2005
• Place of death: Encino, California

Drawing on the emotional pain of his childhood and his discontent with racial inequality in American society, Pryor used stand-up comedy to raise the social consciousness of his audiences. In doing so, he redefined the medium of stand-up comedy for a generation of comics, both black and white.

Early Life

Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III was born and raised in the slums of Peoria, Illinois, where his mother was a prostitute at a brothel run by his grandmother. His father, a retired boxer and failed bartender, was his mother’s pimp. His mother abandoned the family when Pryor was ten, and he was raised by his grandmother. Years later, Pryor acknowledged that he was physically abused by his father and sexually molested twice, once by a stranger at the brothel when he was six, then by a Roman Catholic priest during catechism lessons several years later.

Small in stature, shy, and smart, Pryor was the target of frequent bullying in school and sought the easy escape of a local movie theater. Upon discovering that he could avoid beatings by making the bullies laugh, he became the class clown. Pryor gravitated to the local community theater. At age fourteen, however, his formal education ended. According to conflicting reports, either he was expelled from school for fighting or he dropped out because he was unable to stand the regimen and routine. That began a six-year stretch in which Pryor absorbed life on the streets. He worked odd jobs as a meatpacker, hotel shoe shiner, janitor, and drummer at nightclubs. He enlisted in the Army in 1958. In and out of military prison for most of his thirteen-month enlistment, he was jailed briefly after taking part in an attack on a white soldier who laughed too loudly during a showing of the film Imitation of Life (1959), a melodrama that sympathetically depicted a black woman trying to “pass” as white.

Largely on dares from buddies during his time in the Army, Pryor performed improvisational comedy routines. He knew that he could make people laugh. By 1963, he was in New York working in small comedy clubs, playing piano and telling jokes during breaks. He quickly discovered that his true talent was comedy—mild, often wry observations about New York City life. His role model was Bill Cosby. With impeccable timing and delivery, Pryor won invitations to appear on major network variety shows and soon was headlining in Las Vegas. It was there, in the late 1960’s (reports vary, but September, 1967, is the most likely date), in the middle of a routine at the posh Aladdin Hotel, that Pryor had a stunning moment of realization: There he was, a black man whose mother had been a prostitute and his father a pimp, playing to a sold-out audience of rich whites, a position that had nothing to do with who he really was. Pryor stormed off the stage.

Life’s Work

Pryor moved to the radical environment of Berkeley, California, and spent the next several years reinventing his stage act. He drew on his own experiences of life on the streets and addressed subjects considered taboo by mainstream comedy audiences: drug use, sex, and—most pointedly—bigotry. For additional shock value, he introduced obscenities into his routines, at times using the most vulgar expressions with a lyrical elegance that gave his stage shows the explosive, edgy feel of jazz riffs. Most controversially, Pryor began using the word “nigger,” arguing later that he did so to coopt a word that white America had used for more than a century to degrade African Americans. After a deeply spiritual pilgrimage to Kenya in 1979, however, Pryor never used the word on stage again.

Pryor introduced a variety of vividly realized characters drawn from his own street experiences—pimps, homeless people, alcohol and drug addicts—each a vehicle for Pryor’s portrayal of the frustration of black America and his savage critique of the complacency and hypocrisy of white America. He became a storyteller, a performance artist creating characters through voices, facial expressions, and body movements. Although some nightclubs banned the controversial comedian, many welcomed him, and Pryor quickly became a dominant presence in the Los Angeles stand-up scene, appealing to African American audiences and to liberal whites sympathetic to the Civil Rights movement of the previous decade. Pryor’s recordings from the mid-1970’s, most notably That Nigger’s Crazy (1974), became instant classics; he won Grammys for Best Comedy Album in 1974, 1975, 1976, 1981, and 1982.

Pryor wrote for television, providing material for the groundbreaking variety show hosted by black comedian Flip Wilson, The Flip Wilson Show, and for the first sitcom about African Americans, Norman Lear’s Sanford and Son. Pryor also moved into film, acting in more than fifty films, including notable roles in Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and two comedies with Gene Wilder, Silver Streak (1976) and Stir Crazy (1980). Although his acting work never captured the manic energy of his stage performances, by the early 1980’s he was the highest paid black actor in Hollywood. He earned upward of four million dollars to play a reluctant villain in Superman III (1983), nearly twice what Christopher Reeve made playing the title role. Perhaps his finest filmed works, however, were documentaries that captured his stage shows, particularly 1979’s Richard Pryor: Live in Concert. A foray into television in 1977 did not succeed, as NBC’s short-lived Richard Pryor Show was canceled after only five episodes, the network censors unwilling to accommodate Pryor’s no-holds barred style.

Despite suffering a heart attack in 1978, Pryor maintained a high-profile lifestyle. He was married seven times (to five different women), he used drugs, and he drank excessively in what he later described as a self-destructive downward spiral. In 1980, while freebasing cocaine at his home, he set himself on fire. He suffered third-degree burns over more than half of his body and nearly died. During two months of rehabilitation, Pryor committed himself to a new lifestyle. He also used the near-death experience as material for stand-up routines that began to reflect his increasingly introspective sensibility. These later performances unsettled audiences expecting the verbal firepower and edgy satire of Pryor’s earlier work.

One morning in 1986, Pryor discovered he could not control the shaking in his left hand. Within weeks, he received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that affects the central nervous system. Soon after, Pryor suffered a near-fatal heart attack and underwent a series of heart surgeries. Over the next decade, he attempted to continue his stage work even as he weakened (in his final shows, Pryor performed from an easy chair). As the comedian’s career waned, his role in the evolution of stand-up comedy became evident: A generation of comedians influenced by his work established themselves, notably Bernie Mac, Eddie Murphy,Dave Chappelle, the Wayans brothers, andChris Rock. In 1997, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) awarded Pryor its prestigious Lifetime Achievement Image Award. In 1998, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts presented Pryor with the inaugural Mark Twain Prize for American Humor for a lifetime of pointed satire that sought to address the most pressing social issues of his era.

Just months before his death at age sixty-five from cardiac arrest, Pryor was honored by the cable network Comedy Central as the greatest stand-up comedian of all time. Months after his death, in recognition of his groundbreaking comedy recordings, Pryor was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Significance

Provocative, edgy, and profane, Pryor reinvented stand-up comedy and in the process became the dominant African American entertainer of his generation. He found in the immediacy of live performance a powerful strategy for getting people, both black and white, to confront through laughter the ugly realities of racism in the difficult years following the Civil Rights movement. In addition, by drawing on his own failures (such as stormy marriages, drug use, and alcoholism) for material, Pryor created an intimacy with his audience that is rare in comedy. Using obscenities with flair and finding in them the hard snap of the street, pacing his delivery with care, and always asserting in the end the need for dignity and respect, Pryor brought to stand-up comedy a sense of satire that elevated his performances to the level of art and made Pryor himself one of the most trenchant and most listened-to observers of post-Vietnam American culture.

Bibliography

Haskins, James. Richard Pryor, A Man and His Madness: A Biography. New York: Beaufort Books, 1984. A useful look at Pryor’s formative years, particularly his childhood abuse and his tempestuous years in the Army, and his evolution in stand-up comedy. Includes helpful reviews of Pryor’s stand-up style. Index.

McCluskey, Audrey Thomas. Richard Pryor: The Life and Legacy of a “Crazy” Black Man. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Set of twenty essays on the implications of Pryor’s comedy. Reads Pryor’s stage performance as a kind of jazz performance and centers on the specific contention that Pryor is best seen as a jazz artist immersed in personal tragedies, who sought in his art fabulous and extravagant escape.

Pryor, Richard, and Todd Gold. Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Revolver Books, 2005. A wide-ranging recollection that serves as a kind of autobiography, reveals the pain of Pryor’s childhood, and discusses his revelatory trip to Kenya as well as his stormy private life.

Williams, John A., and Dennis A. Williams. If I Stop, I’ll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2006. Discusses Pryor’s comic sensibility but is ultimately interested in why his comedic brilliance never translated into film success. Examines larger questions of African American opportunities in Hollywood. Illustrated.