FAREWELL RICHARD PRYOR

From Democracy Now:

Well, he had been very successful. He had been on -- in the early ’60s, he was on TV, he was on the Tonight Show, he was on Ed Sullivan Show, and so forth. He was playing the Catskills. He had made one movie, and he was on his way to fortune and fame. And his handlers were saying the way to do that is to continue doing the kind of comedy that Bill Cosby did, because Cosby was the most accepted black comic around at that time.

But Pryor often said that he had to be himself, that success wasn't enough, and that there were voices crying out inside him that he had to let out. And it came to a head, I think, at the Aladdin Hotel around 1969, where he walked off the stage and apparently shouted some profanities at the predominantly Italian and reportedly Mafia-based crowd that was in the audience, and was asked to leave Las Vegas after that and never to come back, and also disappeared for a couple of years. He moved from California to Berkeley, started hanging out with some of the militant black writers of that period, Ishmael Reed, Cecil Brown, Al Young, people like that. He started to read African American history and became much more aware of his own history, his own background.

He also started to incorporate those people that he had known as a child, because he grew up in an area of Illinois where there were storytellers around. There were drunks, there were winos, there were pimps that he grew up with. He started to bring those characters to the forefront of his comedy. And when he came back, it was an amazing change. I think Bill Cosby said that ‘Richard Pryor returned, and he killed the Cosby in his act. It was the most astonishing transformation that I had ever seen.’ And I think it truly was. No one expected it. The writers -- those writers -- I knew them at that time. I was working at The New York Times Book Review, and those people were friends of mine. But they told me that Pryor, at that time, simply became a different person opinion, and he was freer. He was able to deliver his comedy in a much freer, open manner. And he was much funnier, obviously, because that's when he made an impact. He could have gone on and been another Cosby if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He chose not to do that.

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Of course, I never knew that earlier, careful comedian; the Richard Pryor I knew was the latter, edgier, more dangerous guy. It's hard to say what kind of effect he had on my own childhood formulations of the American black-white dynamic. There seemed overall, relative to the 60s, to be a massive explosion of assertive and dignified African-American media images taking place when I first started paying attention as a kid in the 70s. Who can say whether the Roots mini-series, or The Wiz, or cool black guys playing congas on Sesame Street, or the Jeffersons had the most effect on me? I do know that Pryor was definitely in the mix. I suspect that his total straightforwardness, his dedication to telling the truth, his virtual omnipresence as an HBO staple, and his absolute hilarity made his influence on me the greatest.

Here is a bit from my earliest memory of him on Saturday Night Live in 1975 when I was seven:

Chevy Chase: OK, word association. I'll say a word, and you tell me the first word that comes into your mind. Car.

Richard Pryor: Truck

Chevy Chase: House

Richard Pryor: Home

Chevy Chase: White

Richard Pryor: Black

Chevy Chase: Tar Baby

Richard Pryor: Cracker

Chevy Chase: Spear Chucker

Richard Pryor: Honky!

Chevy Chase: LAWN JOCKEY

Richard Pryor: HONKY HONKY!

(pause)

Chevy Chase: Nigger

Richard Pryor: DEAD HONKY!

Chevy Chase: Congratulations, you got the job!

Farewell Richard Pryor. Your comedy was truly Real Art.



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