“There was a world of junkies and winos, pool hustlers and prostitutes, women and family screaming inside my head, trying to be heard,” Pryor remembered. And then one night in Las Vegas, things changed forever. To audiences, he seemed a Bill Cosby satellite-one reason why he continually found work, but also why star status eluded him.
It was the opening chapter of a long saga.Įarly on, Pryor patterned himself after the reigning black comic, speaking politely, telling middle-class jokes, doing impressions of businessmen and tourists. The next night was the same, and the next, and I rocked him each time.” Pryor began to calm himself with multiple shots of scotch, then got ready for the next performance with lines of cocaine. I couldn’t bear to watch him shiver, so I put my arms around him there in the dark and rocked him like a baby until he calmed down. “Opening night,” she remembered, “Richard shook like he had malaria, he was so nervous. Cool, a pose that fooled quite a few people, but not Simone. In New York City, he found work as the opening act for Nina Simone, Richie Havens, and Bob Dylan. Encouraged, he pushed on to bigger venues. Between numbers, he would tell jokes and wow audiences. Pryor landed a gig singing in a Peoria nightclub. I got up, ran to my grandmother, and slipped in the dog poop. A little dog wandered by and poo-pooed in our yard. I wasn’t much taller than my daddy’s shin when I found I could break people up. By this time, an idea had come to him: he could always make people laugh-soldiers, fellow workers, family members. He was drafted in 1960 but attacked another GI of higher rank and wound up discharged after 13 months, many of them spent in the stockade.
In addition to daily bullying, he was twice sexually molested, once by a john at the bordello, another time by a member of his church.Ī high school dropout at 14, Richard spent the next six years doing odd jobs, from truck driver to janitor to untutored drummer in a pickup band. He was small, thin, and shy-the classic grade-school victim.
Apart from Leroy’s brutality and Gertrude and Marie’s professional activities (Richard once saw his mother in bed with Peoria’s white mayor), the bright kid suffered from a slew of other miseries. It was too late he had become unmanageable. From that point on, Marie raised him-or tried to. His mother seemed to love him, yet when Richard was ten she ran off. The boy grew up in an atmosphere of moral confusion: prostitution was the family’s source of income, yet he attended a predominantly white Catholic school. His father, Leroy, was a boxer turned pimp who paid little attention to his son except to intimidate him when he stepped out of line. Richard’s grandmother, Marie Carter, was a madam, her daughter Gertrude (his mother) a hooker. “If they worked at all, they were probably employed at one of the nearby slaughterhouses. “Black folks didn’t have it so good in Peoria,” he recalled.
Pryor grew up in Peoria, Illinois, in the forties and fifties. He was a savage, equal-opportunity satirist he targeted white racism, his fellow African-Americans, and-finally and most severely-himself. He was always himself, yet could populate the stage with a cast of characters ranging from a pack of dogs to a bewildered black alcoholic to a Mafia thug. His vocabulary was down and dirty, but his work had a surprising elegance. He was conscious of his minority status but refused to take the route of special pleading. On his way to fame and self-destruction, Pryor became the funniest man in America by creating a new kind of comedy-a hilarious, heartbreaking, and conflicted view of life seen from the underside. Yet he is modest enough, and wise enough, to warn his colleagues: “You should not even get onstage and attempt to be funny unless you realize you’re never going to be as funny as Richard Pryor.” One, Chris Rock, has every right to boast about his accomplishments.
Other African-American comedians preceded him, and since his death in 2004, a handful of young black performers have earned more money and entertained larger audiences. Playwright Neil Simon called him “the most brilliant comic in America.” For humorist Lily Tomlin, he was “a gifted, raging, soaring, plummeting, deeply human man with the tender boy inside-the greatest pioneering comic artist of the last three generations.” Critic Pauline Kael dubbed him “a master of lyrical obscenity the only great poet satirist among our comics.” They weren’t exaggerating.