Pryor, Richard 1940–
Richard Pryor 1940–
Comedian, actor, writer
In the 1970s and 1980s Richard Pryor was one of America’s top comedians, an actor, writer, and stand-up artist whose irreverent albums sold in the millions. Pryor mined both personal and social tragedy for his comic material and peppered his appearances with outrageous language and adult humor. Even at the peak of his popularity, however, he suffered the dire consequences of drug and alcohol abuse–a heart attack, a suicide attempt, and the onset of multiple sclerosis. Since the early 1990s, he has lived a reclusive life in his Bel Air home, reportedly unable to walk and rarely seeing any but a small cadre of friends.
One of Pryor’s ex-wives, Jennifer Lee, told Premiere magazine: “Richard’s so isolated from the human race. When you’re with him now, you feel a kind of solitude you don’t even feel when you’re by yourself.” Pryor’s is indeed the tragic story of a talented personality who took a path of self-destruction, a comic who could draw laughs from his own misfortunes but who was powerless to change his habits until the damage had been done. Premiere correspondent David Handelman theorized: “Like many celebrities, Pryor turned to drugs in part out of insecurity about his fame. But he had the added guilt trip of being perhaps the most successful black man in a country of disenfranchised blacks.”
Pryor was not the first African American comedian to succeed as a stand-up comic. He followed in the footsteps of Bill Cosby and Dick Gregory, among others. He became unique-and a pioneer in his own right-when he created a bold new comedy of character, turning African American life into humorous performance art without softening either the message or its delivery. He could glide effortlessly from portraying an elderly wino to mimicking a cheetah poised to bag a gazelle. With an astounding repertoire of accents and body lingo, Pryor often played a predator one moment and a victim the next. His was a comedy forged from life’s tragic moments.
Pryor’s audience included a number of comics who have since risen to fame. “I just dreamed about being like Richard Pryor,” Keenen Ivory Wayans told Premiere. “Pryor started it all. He’s Yoda. If Pryor had not come along, there would not be an Eddie Murphy or a Keenen Ivory Wayans or a Damon Wayans or an Arsenio Hall-or even a [white comedian like] Sam Kinison, for that matter. He made the blueprint for the progressive
At a Glance…
Born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor, December 1, 1940, in Peoria, IL; son of LeRoy and Gertrude (Thomas) Pryor; married and divorced five times; children: Renee, Richard, Jr., Rain, Elizabeth. Military service: U.S. Army, 1958–60.
Career: Comedian, actor, and writer. Has appeared in over forty films, including Lady Sings the Blues, 1972; Uptown Saturday Night, 1974; Silver Streak, 1976; Bingo Long and the Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, 1976; Blue Collar, 1978; The Wiz, 1978; Richard Pryor Live in Concert, 1979; Stir Crazy, 1980; Bustin’ Loose, 1981 ; Live on Sunset Strip, 1982; Some Kind of Hero, 1982; The Toy, 1982; Superman III, 1983; Brewster’s Millions, 1985; Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, 1985; See No Evil, Hear No Evil, 1989; Harlem Nights, 1989; and Another You, 1991. Guest and host of numerous television shows, including The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live. Star of The Richard Pryor Show, 1977. Author or co-author of screenplays, including Blazing Saddles, 1974; Car Wash, 1976; Silver Streak, 1976; Blue Collar, 1978; Stir Crazy, 1980; and Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, 1985.
Selected awards: Emmy Award, 1973, for Lily; Writers Guild Award and American Academy of Humor Award, both 1974, for Blazing Saddles; five Grammy awards for best comedy albums; Emmy Award nomination and Image Award nomination for Chicago Hope, 1996; Hall of Fame Award, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1996; recipient of the first Mark Twain Prize, 1998.
Addresses: Agent—c\o Tri-Star Pictures, 3400 Riverside Dr., Burbank, CA 91505.
thinking of black comedians, unlocked that irreverent style.”
A Tragic Background
Bill Cosby told People magazine: “For Richard, the line between comedy and tragedy is as fine as you can paint it.” Given Pryor’s background, it is not surprising that he entwined comedy and tragedy so brilliantly. He was born in Peoria, Illinois, in December, 1940, to an unwed mother. He has always claimed that he was raised in his grandmother’s brothel, where his mother worked as a prostitute. His parents, LeRoy and Gertrude Pryor, married when he was three, but the union did not last. Ultimately he chose to live with his grandmother, who was not shy about administering beatings.
At the height of his fame, Pryor declared that he had no bitterness about his unconventional upbringing. He revealed to People that his mother “wasn’t very strong, but she tried. At least she didn’t flush me down the toilet, like some.” He added: “The biggest moment of my life was when my grandmother was with “the Mike Douglas Show.” On the other hand,” Pryor’s former bodyguard and spiritual adviser Rashon Khan told Premiere that Pryor was sometimes sexually abused in his childhood environment and was often “exposed to a lot of crazy stuff.” Khan suggested that these childhood traumas helped set the stage for Pryor’s drug abuse even before he became established in his career. “The problem that Richard was having with Richard was what happened when he was a kid,” Khan said. “It created a void so big, it didn’t matter how famous he got.”
In school, Pryor was often in trouble with the authorities. His one positive experience came when he was eleven. One of his teachers, Juliette Whittaker, cast him in a community theater performance and then let him entertain his classmates with his antics. Years later, Pryor gave Whittaker the Emmy Award he earned writing comedy for a Lily Tomlin special.
Pryor was expelled from high school after striking a teacher. He never returned. Instead, he sought work in a packing house and then, in 1958, joined the army. He spent his two-year hitch in West Germany, once again clashing with his superiors. Pryor returned home to Peoria in 1960, married the first of his five wives, and fathered his second child, Richard Pryor, Jr. His first child, daughter Renee, was born three years earlier.
Early Career Moves
The owner of a popular African American nightclub in Peoria gave Pryor his first professional opportunity. By the early 1960s the comedian was performing on a circuit that included East St. Louis, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh. Then, in 1963, Pryor decided to move to New York City. He settled briefly in Greenwich Village, where he performed an act with strong similarities to Bill Cosby’s. Pryor told People: “I’ll never forget going up to Harlem and seeing all those black people. Jesus, just knowing there were that many of us made me feel better.”
Pryor broke into television in New York City in 1964 when he appeared on a series called On Broadway Tonight. Other offers followed, including a couple from The Ed Sullivan Show and the Merv Griffin Show. Pryor pulled up stakes and moved to Los Angeles, where he supported himself with bit parts in movies such as The Green Berets, starring John Wayne, and Wild in the Streets, a teen-exploitation film. He also continued to play to live audiences, especially in Las Vegas showrooms. “In his early days there was a lot of Bill Cosby in Richard’s act,” Cosby himself noted in People. “Then one evening I was in the audience when Richard took on a whole new persona-his own, in front of me and everyone else. Richard killed the Bill Cosby in his act, made people hate it. Then he worked on them, doing pure Richard Pryor, and it was the most astonishing metamorphosis I have ever seen. He was magnificent.”
Fame Brought Its Own Troubles
By the late 1960s Pryor was already indulging in one hundred dollars worth of cocaine a day. While his new, more personal act found followers, it also alienated the management in Las Vegas. Pryor clashed with landlords and hotel clerks, was audited by the Internal Revenue Service for nonpayment of taxes between 1967 and 1970, and was sued for battery by one of his wives. He disappeared into the counterculture community in Berkeley, California, and did not work for several years. Then he resurfaced in 1972 with a new stand-up act and a supporting role in the film Lady Sings the Blues, a drama for which he earned an Academy Award nomination.
Pryor also contributed his writing talents to other comics. He wrote bits for The Flip Wilson Show and Sanford and Son and helped Mel Brooks to write the classic Western film comedy Blazing Saddles. In 1973 he earned an Emmy Award for the special Lily, starring Lily Tomlin. That provocative show also proved a vehicle for Pryor, when he teamed with Tomlin for a skit about a raggedy black wino and a prim, “tasteful lady.”
In 1976, Pryor wrote and starred in Bingo Long and the Traveling All Stars and Motor Kings. He made a bigger splash, however, in the film Silver Streak, a mixture of comedy and suspense that centers on a murderous train ride. Even though he had only a supporting role in this 1976 release starring Gene Wilder, Pryor earned the bulk of the critics’ attention. The film grossed $30 million at the box office, and it opened new venues for the versatile Pryor.
Lonely at the Top
Pryor was at the height of his form as a live comedian by the late 1980s. He had earned Grammy Awards for the 1974 album That Nigger’s Crazy and the 1976 work Bicentennial Nigger. Both of the albums went platinum in sales. In all, Pryor earned five Grammy Awards for best comedy album, but the 1979 movie Richard Pryor Live in Concert remains his “indisputable moment of glory,” to quote Handelman. In the New York Times Magazine, James McPherson claimed that Pryor was creating a whole new style in American comedy, a style born more of the theater than of traditional humor. The characters, McPherson wrote, “are winos, junkies, whores, street fighters, blue-collar drunks, pool hustlers--all the failures who are an embarrassment to the black middle class and stereotypes in the minds of most whites. The black middle class fears the glorification of those images and most whites fear them in general. Pryor talks like them; he imitates their styles.… He enters into his people and allows whatever is comic in them, whatever is human, to evolve out of what they say and how they look into a total scene. It is part of Richard Pryor’s genius that, through the selective use of facial expressions, gestures, … speech and movements, he can create a scene that is comic and at the same time recognizable as profoundly human.”
Some of those “profoundly human” comedy scenes were based on unhappy events in Pryor’s life. He had a serious heart attack in 1978 and underwent yet another divorce after a violent episode on New Year’s Eve that culminated in his riddling his wife’s car with bullets. These two grave incidents are given the full comic treatment in Richard Pryor Live in Concert. At a point in the act, Pryor “becomes” his heart itself during the attack, with asides from other parts of his body. He also “becomes” his ex-wife’s car under attack.
The theme would be recreated two years later after an even more dangerous event. By 1980 Pryor was free-basing cocaine, using volatile ether to help light the drug for smoking. No one is clear about exactly what happened on June 9,1980. At first, Pryor claimed the fire was started during the freebasing process. Later, he stated that he poured rum on himself and set himself on fire. At any rate, he nearly burned himself to death, suffering severe injuries to half his body. Early reports told of his untimely death, but he survived and underwent an anguishing rehabilitation.
The healing process did not speak to his addiction, however. He took painkillers in the hospital and returned to freebasing when he was released. Nevertheless, he began to see the fatal consequences of drug use, and this attitude is evident in his final concert movie, Live on Sunset Strip. The film contains the well-known Pryor routine about his accident, his drug use, and his stay in the hospital. New York magazine contributor David Denby called Live on Sunset Strip “a perfect entertainment.” The critic added: “Richard Pryor works directly with the life around him, and he digs deeper into fear and lust and anger and pain than many of the novelists and playwrights now taken seriously. Like any great actor, he dramatizes emotion with his whole body, but his mind is so quick and his moods so volatile, he’s light-years ahead of any actor delivering a text. Working from deep inside his own experience and understanding of what a human being is and is capable of, he can shake you to your roots.”
A Second Chance
Live on Sunset Strip was released in 1982. The following year Pryor made concerted efforts to clear his system of drugs and alcohol. He joined a rehabilitation program and worked with other addicts to overcome his problems. He also tackled a project that was daring indeed--he co-wrote, directed, and starred in the 1985 film Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. A thinly veiled autobiography, Jo Jo Dancer stars Pryor as a comedian who relives his life immediately following a near fatal accident. Critics praised the intentions of the movie-especially the fact that Pryor hired African American workers for every aspect of the production--but the film was not a hit. Detroit Free Press critic Catherine Rambeau, for instance, cited the work for its “honorable premise,” but faulted it for a “lack of focus.”
Los Angeles Times reviewer Peter Rainer speculated that, as far as movies in general are concerned, Pryor “seems to have taken a wrong turn.” A number of Pryor’s movies did brisk business at the box office, but in Rainer’s words, they led Pryor “into creative oblivion.” Films such as The Toy, Brewster’s Millions, Stir Crazy, and Bustin’ Loose show a Pryor who “is resignedly bland.… Anything malign or threatening has been bleached out,” to quote Rainer. Pryor’s ex-wife Jennifer Lee told Premiere: “Don’t bother looking for a pattern to Richard’s movies.… He’s lazy, he took the money, he doesn’t care.”
Fans Remained Loyal
Others held greater respect for Pryor, however. Eddie Murphy asked Pryor to co-star in the 1989 movie Harlem Nights and a huge comedy concert in Pryor’s honor. Commenting in Premiere on the restrictive social atmosphere that existed during Pryor’s rise to fame, comedienne Lily Tomlin expressed astonishment over his ability to achieve anything at all. “Richard lost jobs, was blackballed and everything else,” Tomlin said, “because people thought he was too hard to deal with or incorrigible or out of control. Now people’s careers are built on drug use or rehab. And I can’t imagine anything happening to Eddie Murphy like what’s happened to Richard. Richard paid the price for using language on the stage, … and Eddie has been celebrated for it. And I don’t think Eddie would ever be conflicted the way Richard was about playing [Las] Vegas, playing white clubs with white managers and taking white money. It was a different consciousness.”
The pioneer of that change in consciousness is now in retirement. Pryor was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that attacks the central nervous system, in 1986. He has also experienced further heart trouble, and has had triple bypass surgery. Although he is still sharp mentally, multiple sclerosis has robbed Pryor of his ability to speak clearly and he is confined to a wheelchair. Pryor’s physical limitations and frail, gaunt appearance are a great source of frustration for him. One of Pryor’s closest friends, Paul Mooney, told the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, “He [Pryor] has always been the life of the party. He does not like people seeing him like this, and he does not like being like this.” In an ironic twist, multiple sclerosis may have actually extended Pryor’s life. Jennifer Lee remarked to the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, “I think he is grateful, in a strange way, that this sickness is extending his life. We are always joking about it. I mean, where do you think he would be now if he were able to get into his car and take off? He’d probably be off getting into more trouble.”
In 1998, Pryor received the first Mark Twain Prize in celebration of American humor in a ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Over 2,000 guests, including Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Morgan Freeman, Richard Belzer, Tim Allen, and Damon Wayans, attended the ceremony. The ceremony featured video clips of some of Pryor’s most famous comedic moments interspersed with comments and tributes from comedians and actors who were influenced by Pryor. Although he was unable to rise from his chair, Pryor graciously accepted the award with a whispered “Thank you.” In a written statement that was quoted in Jet, Pryor wrote: “I feel great about accepting this prize. It is nice to be regarded on par with a great white man-now that’s funny. Seriously, though, two things people throughout history have had in common are hatred and humor. I am proud that, like Mark Twain, I have been able to use humor to lessen people’s hatred!”
Pryor’s ill health does not detract from the body of work he has left behind, though-a half dozen million-selling albums, two classic concert videos, several creditable dramatic performances, and-of course–the daring live routines with their uncensored social and psychological commentary. Progressive contributor Michael H. Seitz noted that Pryor grounded his comedy “on human feelings, often the most intimate sort.” Handelman concluded : “Even though his best work had nothing to do with one-liners, Pryor is unquestionably still the most important and influential stand-up comedian of the past 25 years. Using raw street language, he [turned] black American life into breathtaking one-man theater, his rubbery face, multioctave voice, and lithe body physicalizing every situation.” As Damon Wayans told Jet, “If [a comedian] hasn’t copied from Richard Pryor, then you’re probably not funny. Like Michael Jordan has defined the game of basketball, Richard Pryor has defined stand up comedy.”
Selected discography
That Nigger’s Crazy, Reprise, 1974.
Bicentennial Nigger, Warner Bros., 1976.
Live on Sunset Strip, Warner Bros., 1982.
Greatest Hits, Warner Bros.
Is It Something I Said?, Reprise.
Wanted, Warner Bros.
Sources
Books
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 26, Gale, 1983.
Contemporary Theater, Film, and Television, Volume 3, Gale, 1986.
Periodicals
Commonweal, May 7, 1982.
Detroit Free Press, May 2, 1986.
Ebony, July 1986.
Entertainment Weekly, October 11, 1991.
Film Comment, July-August 1982.
Jet, November 9, 1998.
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, January 15, 1999.
Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1986; November 24, 1989.
New York, March 29, 1982.
New York Times, January 9, 1977; May 2, 1986; May 18, 1986.
New York Times Magazine, April 27, 1975.
People, March 13, 1978.
Philadelphia Inquirer, January 26, 1992.
Premiere, June 1991; January 1992.
Progressive, June 1982.
—Anne Janette Johnson and David G. Oblender
Pryor, Richard 1940–
Richard Pryor 1940–
Comedian, actor, writer
In the 1970s and 1980s Richard Pryor was one of America’s top comedians, an actor, writer, and stand-up artist whose irreverent albums sold in the millions. Pryor mined both personal and social tragedy for his comic material and peppered his appearances with outrageous language and adult humor. Even at the peak of his popularity, however, he suffered the dire consequences of drug and alcohol abuse—a heart attack, a suicide attempt, and the onset of multiple sclerosis. Since the early 1990s, he has lived a reclusive life in his Bel Air home, reportedly almost unable to walk and rarely seeing any but a small cadre of friends.
One of Pryor’s ex-wives, Jennifer Lee, told Premiere magazine: “Richard’s so isolated from the human race. When you’re with him now, you feel a kind of solitude you don’t even feel when you’re by yourself.” Pryor’s is indeed the tragic story of a talented personality who took a path of self-destruction, a comic who could draw laughs from his own misfortunes but who was powerless to change his habits until the damage had been done. Premiere correspondent David Handelman theorized: “Like many celebrities, Pryor turned to drugs in part out of insecurity about his fame. But he had the added guilt trip of being perhaps the most successful black man in a country of disenfranchised blacks.”
Pryor was not the first black comedian to succeed as a stand-up comic. He followed in the footsteps of Bill Cosby and Dick Gregory, among others. He became unique—and a pioneer in his own right—when he created a bold new comedy of character, turning black American life into humorous performance art without softening either the message or its delivery. He could glide effortlessly from portraying an elderly wino to mimicking a cheetah poised to bag a gazelle. With an astounding repertoire of accents and body lingo, Pryor often played a predator one moment and a victim the next. His was a comedy forged from life’s tragic moments.
Pryor’s audience included a number of comics who have since risen to fame. “I just dreamed about being like Richard Pryor,” Keenen Ivory Wayans told Premiere. “Pryor started it all. He’s Yoda. If Pryor had not come along, there would not be an Eddie Murphy or a Keenen Ivory Wayans or a Damon Wayans or an Arsenio Hall—or even a [white comedian like] Sam Kinison, for that matter.
At a Glance…
Born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor, December 1, 1940, in Peoria, IL; son of LeRoy and Gertrude (Thomas) Pryor; married and divorced five times; children: Renee, Richard, Jr., Rain, Elizabeth. Military service: U.S. Army, 1958-60.
Comedian, actor, and writer. Has appeared in over forty films, including Lady Sings the Blues, 1972; Silver Streak, 1976; Blue Collar, 1978; Richard Pryor Live in Concert, 1979; Stir Crazy, 1980; Live on Sunset Strip, 1982; Some Kind of Hero, 1982; The Toy, 1982; Brewster’s Millions, 1985; JoJo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, 1985; See No Evil, Hear No Evil, 1989; Harlem Nights, 1989; and Another You, 1990. Guest and host of numerous television shows, including The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live. Star of The Richard Pryor Show, 1977. Author or co-author of screenplays, including Blazing Saddles, 1974; Car Wash, 1976; Silver Streak, 1976; Blue Collar, 1978; Stir Crazy, 1980; and Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, 1985.
Selected awards: Emmy Award, 1973, for Lily; Writers Guild Award and American Academy of Humor Award, both 1974, for Blazing Saddles; five Grammy awards for best comedy albums; four certified gold comedy albums; one platinum album.
Addresses: c/o Tri-Star Pictures, 3400 Riverside Dr., Burbank, CA 91505.
He made the blueprint for the progressive thinking of black comedians, unlocked that irreverent style.”
Bill Cosby told People magazine: “For Richard, the line between comedy and tragedy is as fine as you can paint it.” Given Pryor’s background, it is not surprising that he entwined comedy and tragedy so brilliantly. He was born in Peoria, Illinois, in December, 1940, to an unwed mother. He has always claimed that he was raised in his grandmother’s brothel, where his mother worked as a prostitute. His parents, LeRoy and Gertrude Pryor, married when he was three, but the union did not last. Ultimately he chose to live with his grandmother, who was not shy about administering beatings.
At the height of his fame, Pryor declared that he had no bitterness about his unconventional upbringing. He revealed to People that his mother “wasn’t very strong, but she tried. At least she didn’t flush me down the toilet, like some.” He added: “The biggest moment of my life was when my grandmother was with me on the Mike Douglas Show.” On the other hand, Pryor’s former bodyguard and spiritual adviser Rashon Khan told Premiere that Pryor was sometimes sexually abused in his childhood environment and was often “exposed to a lot of crazy stuff.” Khan suggested that these childhood traumas helped set the stage for Pryor’s drug abuse even before he became established in his career. “The problem that Richard was having with Richard was what happened when he was a kid,” Khan said. “It created a void so big, it didn’t matter how famous he got.”
In school Pryor was often in trouble with the authorities. His one positive experience came when he was eleven. One of his teachers, Juliette Whittaker, cast him in a community theater performance and then let him entertain his classmates with his antics. Years later, Pryor gave Whittaker the Emmy Award he earned writing comedy for a Lily Tomlin special.
Pryor was expelled from high school after striking a teacher. He never returned. Instead he sought work in a packing house and then, in 1958, joined the army. He spent his two-year hitch in West Germany, once again clashing with his superiors. Pryor returned home to Peoria in 1960, married the first of his five wives, and fathered his second child, Richard Pryor, Jr. His first child, daughter Renee, was born three years earlier.
Early Career Moves
The owner of a popular black nightclub in Peoria gave Pryor his first professional opportunity. By the early 1960s the comedian was performing on a circuit that included East St. Louis, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh. Then, in 1963, Pryor decided to move to New York City. He settled briefly in Greenwich Village, where he performed an act with strong similarities to Bill Cosby’s. Pryor told People: “I’ll never forget going up to Harlem and seeing all those black people. Jesus, just knowing there were that many of us made me feel better.”
Pryor broke into television in New York City in 1964 when he appeared on a series called On Broadway Tonight. Other offers followed, including a couple from The Ed Sullivan Show and the Merv Griffin Show. Pryor pulled up stakes and moved to Los Angeles, where he supported himself with bit parts in movies such as The Green Berets, starring John Wayne, and Wild in the Streets, a teen-exploitation film. He also continued to play to live audiences, especially in Las Vegas showrooms. “In his early days there was a lot of Bill Cosby in Richard’s act,” Cosby himself noted in People. “Then one evening I was in the audience when Richard took on a whole new persona—his own, in front of me and everyone else. Richard killed the Bill Cosby in his act, made people hate it. Then he worked on them, doing pure Richard Pryor, and it was the most astonishing metamorphosis I have ever seen. He was magnificent.”
Fame Brought Its Own Troubles
By the late 1960s Pryor was already indulging in one hundred dollars worth of cocaine a day. While his new, more personal act found followers, it also alienated the management in Las Vegas. Pryor clashed with landlords and hotel clerks, was audited by the Internal Revenue Service for nonpayment of taxes between 1967 and 1970, and was sued for battery by one of his wives. He disappeared into the counterculture community in Berkeley, California, and did not work for several years. Then he resurfaced in 1972 with a new stand-up act and a supporting role in the film Lady Sings the Blues, a drama for which he earned an Academy Award nomination.
Pryor also contributed his writing talents to other comics. He wrote bits for The Flip Wilson Show and Sanford and Son and helped Mel Brooks to write the classic Western film comedy Blazing Saddles. In 1973 he earned an Emmy Award for the special Lily, starring Lily Tomlin. That provocative show also proved a vehicle for Pryor, when he teamed with Tomlin for a skit about a raggedy black wino and a prim, “tasteful lady.”
In 1976 Pryor wrote and starred in Bingo Long and the Traveling All Stars and Motor Kings. He made a bigger splash, however, in the film Silver Streak, a mixture of comedy and suspense that centers on a murderous train ride. Even though he had only a supporting role in this 1976 release starring Gene Wilder, Pryor earned the bulk of the critics’ attention. The film grossed $30 million at the box office, and it opened new venues for the versatile Pryor.
Lonely at the Top
Pryor was at the height of his form as a live comedian by the late 1980s. He had earned Grammy Awards for the 1974 album That Nigger’s Crazy and the 1976 work Bicentennial Nigger. Both of the albums went platinum in sales. In all, Pryor earned five Grammy Awards for best comedy album, but the 1979 movie Richard Pryor Live in Concert remains his “indisputable moment of glory,” to quote Handelman. In the New York Times Magazine, James McPherson claimed that Pryor was creating a whole new style in American comedy, a style born more of the theater than of traditional humor. The characters, McPherson wrote, “are winos, junkies, whores, street fighters, blue-collar drunks, pool hustlers—all the failures who are an embarrassment to the black middle class and stereotypes in the minds of most whites. The black middle class fears the glorification of those images and most whites fear them in general. Pryor talks like them; he imitates their styles…. He enters into his people and allows whatever is comic in them, whatever is human, to evolve out of what they say and how they look into a total scene. It is part of Richard Pryor’s genius that, through the selective use of facial expressions, gestures,…speech and movements, he can create a scene that is comic and at the same time recognizable as profoundly human.”
Some of those “profoundly human” comedy scenes were based on unhappy events in Pryor’s life. He had a serious heart attack in 1978 and underwent yet another divorce after a violent episode on New Year’s Eve that culminated in his riddling his wife’s car with bullets. These two grave incidents are given the full comic treatment in Richard Pryor Live in Concert. At a point in the act, Pryor “becomes” his heart itself during the attack, with asides from other parts of his body. He also “becomes” his ex-wife’s car under attack.
The theme would be recreated two years later after an even more dangerous event. By 1980 Pryor was freebasing cocaine, using volatile ether to help light the drug for smoking. No one is clear about exactly what happened on June 9, 1980. At first Pryor claimed the fire was started during the freebasing process. Later he stated that he poured rum on himself and set himself on fire. At any rate, he nearly burned himself to death, suffering severe injuries to half his body. Early reports told of his untimely death, but he survived and underwent an anguishing rehabilitation.
The healing process did not speak to his addiction, however. He took painkillers in the hospital and returned to freebasing when he was released. Nevertheless, he began to see the fatal consequences of drug use, and this attitude is evident in his final concert movie, Live on Sunset Strip. The film contains the well-known Pryor routine about his accident, his drug use, and his stay in the hospital. New York magazine contributor David Denby called Live on Sunset Strip “a perfect entertainment.” The critic added: “Richard Pryor works directly with the life around him, and he digs deeper into fear and lust and anger and pain than many of the novelists and playwrights now taken seriously. Like any great actor, he dramatizes emotion with his whole body, but his mind is so quick and his moods so volatile, he’s light-years ahead of any actor delivering a text. Working from deep inside his own experience and understanding of what a human being is and is capable of, he can shake you to your roots.”
A Second Chance
Live on Sunset Strip was released in 1982. The following year Pryor made concerted efforts to clear his system of drugs and alcohol. He joined a rehabilitation program and worked with other addicts to overcome his problems. He also tackled a project that was daring indeed—he co-wrote, directed, and starred in the 1985 film Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. A thinly veiled autobiography, Jo Jo Dancer stars Pryor as a comedian who relives his life immediately following a near fatal accident. Critics praised the intentions of the movie—especially the fact that Pryor hired black workers for every aspect of the production—but the film was not a hit. Detroit Free Press critic Catherine Rambeau, for instance, cited the work for its “honorable premise,” but faulted it for a “lack of focus.”
Los Angeles Times reviewer Peter Rainer speculated that, as far as movies in general are concerned, Pryor “seems to have taken a wrong turn.” A number of Pryor’s movies did brisk business at the box office, but in Rainer’s words, they led Pryor “into creative oblivion.” Films such as The Toy, Brewster’s Millions, Stir Crazy, and Bustin’ Loose show a Pryor who “is resignedly bland…. Anything malign or threatening has been bleached out,” to quote Rainer. Pryor’s ex-wife Jennifer Lee told Premiere: “Don’t bother looking for a pattern to Richard’s movies…. He’s lazy, he took the money, he doesn’t care.”
Fans Remained Loyal
Others held greater respect for Pryor, however. Eddie Murphy asked Pryor to co-star in the 1989 movie Harlem Nights and more recently organized a huge comedy concert in Pryor’s honor. Commenting in Premiere on the restrictive social atmosphere that existed during Pryor’s rise to fame, comedienne Lily Tomlin expressed astonishment over his ability to achieve anything at all. “Richard lost jobs, was blackballed and everything else,” Tomlin said, “because people thought he was too hard to deal with or incorrigible or out of control. Now people’s careers are built on drug use or rehab. And I can’t imagine anything happening to Eddie Murphy like what’s happened to Richard. Richard paid the price for using language on the stage,… and Eddie has been celebrated for it. And I don’t think Eddie would ever be conflicted the way Richard was about playing [Las] Vegas, playing white clubs with white managers and taking white money. It was a different consciousness.”
The pioneer of that change in consciousness is now in virtual retirement. Doctors diagnosed Pryor as having multiple sclerosis in 1986, and his later movies show him to be thin, frail, and weak. Pryor’s ill health has been compounded by further heart trouble—he has had triple bypass surgery and is often confined to a wheelchair. His most frequent visitors are his four children, his ex-wife Lee, and Jan Gaye, widow of singer Marvin Gaye.
Pryor’s current ill health does not detract from the body of work he has left behind, though—a half dozen million-selling albums, two classic concert videos, several creditable dramatic performances, and—of course—the daring live routines with their uncensored social and psychological commentary. Progressive contributor Michael H. Seitz noted that Pryor grounded his comedy “on human feelings, often the most intimate sort.” Handelman concluded: “Even though his best work had nothing to do with one-liners, Pryor is unquestionably still the most important and influential stand-up comedian of the past 25 years. Using raw street language, he [turned] black American life into breathtaking one-man theater, his rubbery face, multioctave voice, and lithe body physicalizing every situation.”
Selected discography
That Nigger’s Crazy, Reprise, 1974.
Bicentennial Nigger, Warner Bros., 1976.
Live on Sunset Strip, Warner Bros., 1982.
Greatest Hits, Warner Bros.
Is It Something I Said?, Reprise.
Wanted, Warner Bros.
Sources
Books
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 26, Gale, 1983.
Contemporary Theater, Film, and Television, Volume 3, Gale, 1986.
Williams, John A., and Dennis A. Williams, If I Stop I’ll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor, Thunder’s Mouth, 1991.
Periodicals
Commonweal, May 7, 1982.
Detroit Free Press, May 2, 1986.
Ebony, July 1986.
Entertainment Weekly, October 11, 1991.
Film Comment, July-August 1982.
Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1986; November 24, 1989.
New York, March 29, 1982.
New York Times, January 9, 1977; May 2, 1986; May 18, 1986.
New York Times Magazine, April 27, 1975.
People, March 13, 1978.
Philadelphia Inquirer, January 26, 1992.
Premiere, June 1991; January 1992.
Progressive, June 1982.
—Anne Janette Johnson
Pryor, Richard
Richard Pryor
1940–2005
Comedian, actor, screenwriter
Richard Pryor transcended the turmoil of his personal life to become one of the greatest comedians and performers in the history of American entertainment. Although he achieved great fame, success, and wealth, Pryor challenged conventions and generated controversy with his daring use of language and subject matter considered off-limits for the general public. Pryor also suffered the consequences of several difficult marriages and divorces, dangerous lifestyle choices, and debilitating illness in his final years.
Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor was born on December 1, 1940, in Peoria, Illinois. His mother, Gertrude Thomas, was a local prostitute, and his father LeRoy Pryor Jr. (also known as Buck Carter) was a bartender, boxer, and veteran of World War II. Although his parents' relationship was far from typical and often violent, they understood the realities of their situation, eventually divorced, and moved on to other relationships. Pryor continued to have intermittent contact with his parents for the remainder of their lives.
Pryor had a traumatic childhood, being raised primarily by his grandmother and legal guardian Marie Carter, who was the madam of a local brothel on North Washington Street. Along with three other children, he experienced and witnessed the seamy lifestyles and poverty of that environment, and continued to be influenced by these factors and situations. In his 1995 autobiography Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences, Pryor said that he "lived in a neighborhood with a lot of whorehouses. Not many candy stores or banks. Liquor stores and whorehouses." Despite the lifestyles of his immediate family, his grandmother tried to instill some discipline and values in the young Pryor by insisting he go to a local church.
Pryor was raped at the age of six by a teenaged neighbor, molested by a Catholic priest during catechism, and watched his mother perform sexual acts with the town mayor. Despite this abuse, he earned high marks at a Catholic grade school until he was expelled at age ten when his family's occupations were discovered, and his mother abandoned him. Attending movies at the local theater became a way to escape the harsh realities of his life, even though he could only sit in the seats designated for African Americans. He fantasized that he was in the movies he was watching and developed an ambition to become an entertainer himself.
Chronology
- 1940
- Born in Peoria, Illinois on December 1
- 1958
- Leaves Peoria to join U.S. Army
- 1960
- Returns to Peoria to work as local comedian
- 1963
- Moves to New York seeking greater career opportunities
- 1964
- Makes first national television appearance as comedian on the On Broadway Tonight program with Rudy Vallee
- 1967
- Lands first movie role in The Busy Body
- 1969
- Suffers a nervous breakdown during a show in Las Vegas
- 1970
- Moves to northern California and takes a break from show business
- 1971
- Returns to New York
- 1972
- Showcases dramatic ability in Lady Sings the Blues, a film on the life of Billie Holiday
- 1974
- Collaborates with Mel Brooks on the screenplay for Blazing Saddles; receives a Writers' Guild Award and the American Academy of Humor Award for his contributions
- 1974–76
- Wins three consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album
- 1977
- Stars in first leading film role in Greased Lightning; suffers first heart attack
- 1980
- Suffers severe burns after drug-related accident; endures a series of skin graft operations and grueling physical therapy; later establishes the Richard Pryor Burn Foundation to assist other burn victims
- 1983
- Receives highest fee ever for black actor in single film, for Superman III
- 1986
- Discovers symptoms of multiple sclerosis and other health problems
- 1990
- Suffers second heart attack
- 1992
- Performs new material before a sold-out audience at the Circle Star Theater near San Francisco, his first live concert appearance in almost six years; awarded the American Comedy Awards Lifetime Achievement Honor
- 1995
- Publishes his autobiography, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences
- 1996
- Inducted into the NAACP Hall of Fame
- 1997
- Makes final film appearance in Lost Highway
- 1998
- Becomes the first recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor
- 2005
- Dies at home in Encino, California on December 10
Begins Performing Career on Local Stage
At age twelve, Pryor was cast in a local production of the classic children's tale Rumpelstiltskin by Juliette Whittaker, who was a supervisor at the Carver Commu-nity Center, a Peoria public recreation facility. Whittaker was so impressed by his performance and comic talent that she sought talent shows and other venues to showcase his ability and potential, and she continued to influence Pryor in the development of his career. In junior high school he was known for telling jokes and entertaining his teachers as well as classmates, but he did not do as well academically as he had in elementary school.
After being expelled from school for a petty offense at age fourteen, Pryor worked an assortment of odd jobs, including shining shoes, attending to billiard halls, and meat packing. Despite his young age, he also worked as a janitor in a local strip club, tried his hand at playing drums, and did some truck driving, with limited success. Pryor became a father for the first time, with the birth of his daughter, Renee, in 1957.
Joins Military, Returns, and Continues Performing
From 1958 to 1960 Pryor served in the U.S. Army, stationed at one point in Idar-Oberstein, West Germany. He was involved in an altercation in which he came to the assistance of another black soldier in a bar fight with a white soldier, but avoided being jailed for his actions. Pryor returned to Peoria when he was discharged from the army, and shortly afterward he began working at Harold's Club, trying to sing and play piano, and quickly discovered that the audience preferred his jokes over his musical efforts. In 1960 he married Patricia Price, but this union ended the following year. His first son, Richard Jr., was also born in 1961.
Pryor experienced his first taste of professional success and drugs, including marijuana and amphetamines, when he began working beyond Peoria as a comic act in nightclubs throughout the Midwest and parts of Canada. Inspired by other black comedians, such as Bill Cosby, Dick Gregory, and Redd Foxx, who had received recognition for their talent beyond the African American community, Pryor moved to New York in 1963 and began to attract national attention.
In New York, Pryor became part of the downtown Greenwich Village entertainment scene, sharing stages with musicians such as Bob Dylan and Richie Havens and being influenced by other working comedians such as Woody Allen, Flip Wilson, George Carlin, and Joan Rivers. He also worked uptown at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem, long known as a proving ground for black entertainers. At this point, he patterned his performances after other comedians, which made his acts quite different from the radical approach he came to be known for later, a style which was already being used with mixed success by the controversial comedian Lenny Bruce.
Pryor's private life continued to be tumultuous: he began using cocaine while dating a prostitute, one of his various and numerous sexual liaisons. Despite the erratic unpredictability of his behavior off-stage, Pryor's talent on stage opened the door for his first national television appearance, on August 31, 1964. After his performance as part of the On Broadway Tonight program with Rudy Vallee, Pryor worked on other shows such as the Kraft Summer Music Hall, and made the first of numerous appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and The Merv Griffin Show.
Unfortunately, Pryor's success provided more money for his addictions, philandering, and other personal excesses. Nevertheless, his talent continued to keep him in demand, and by 1967 Pryor was working in Las Vegas venues such as the Flamingo Hotel, where he opened for singer/actor Bobby Darin. The same year Pryor landed his first movie role, a small part in The Busy Body, a film starring comedy legend Sid Caesar. Pryor also fathered another daughter, Elizabeth, married for the second time to Shelly Bonus, and received word that his mother had died before the year ended.
In 1968 he appeared in another film, Wild in the Streets, and began making comedy album recordings, in which he exercised the freedom to use profanity in graphic, yet funny and honest descriptions of his life and the lifestyles of others. The long-playing (LP) record format enabled Pryor to go far beyond the acceptable fare and limited time frames of most of his television, film, and Las Vegas stage performances, which were as frustrating as they were lucrative. His father also passed away during the year, leaving his grandmother as his closest relative.
The following year, Pryor suffered a nervous breakdown and walked off the stage during a show in Las Vegas. His second marriage also ended during 1969, and he fathered another daughter, Rain, who would eventually follow her father into the entertainment business.
Develops Other Aspects of Talent
Pryor moved to northern California in 1970, continued his drug use and erratic behavior, but also gained new insight while taking a break from big-time show business. While living in the Berkeley area near San Francisco, he came in contact with several African American intellectuals and activists such as Ishmael Reed, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Claude Brown, and Al Young. Pryor also read the writings of Malcolm X and listened to message music such as Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On album. As a result, Pryor began to add an edge of biting political and social commentary to his comedic use of profanity while working in small Bay Area clubs. He was unafraid to use explosive racial epithets, before all types of audiences, in an effort to minimize their negative impact and turn them into terms of pride and defiance.
In 1971 he returned to New York, first to Harlem and the Apollo, then to the Improv comedy nightclub to present his new concepts as performance material for his first comedy film, Live and Smokin', and his second record album, Craps (After Hours). His new focus extended into comedy writing for himself and other artists, and collaborating with another comedy legend, Mel Brooks, on the screenplay for Blazing Saddles, about a black sheriff in the Old West. The studio refused to cast Pryor in the lead role, but the film was still a hit with Cleavon Little as the sheriff.
Pryor demonstrated yet another facet of his talent with his critically acclaimed dramatic performance in Lady Sings the Blues, a 1972 film based on the life of jazz singer Billie Holiday, starring Diana Ross and produced by Berry Gordy of Motown Records fame. His role as Piano Man, a drug-addicted musician, proved to viewers that there was much more to Pryor's ability than his gift for comedy.
Pryor also wrote for television shows such as Sanford and Son, starring Redd Foxx, and the Flip Wilson Show, and helped his fellow black comedians as they found great success in the early 1970s. His work as a writer as well as a performer on two 1973 TV specials featuring comedienne Lily Tomlin led to a Writers' Guild Award, and he shared a 1974 Emmy Award for outstanding variety program writing with Tomlin and eleven other contributors. Remembering his Peoria roots, Pryor gave his Emmy to Juliette Whittaker and the Carver Center. Pryor won another Writers' Guild Award and the American Academy of Humor Award in 1974 for his contributions to the Blazing Saddles screenplay.
During that year Pryor also teamed with Academy Award winner Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Bill Cosby in the cast of another successful comedy film, Uptown Saturday Night. The film was a departure for Poitier and Belafonte, better known for more serious performances, yet the presence of Pryor and Cosby brought balance and guaranteed laughter during production and in the finished product viewed by the public.
Recognized as Comedian and Actor
By the middle of the 1970s, Pryor had become a household name and was considered by many "the funniest man alive." He won Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album three years straight (1974 to 1976), while also accomplishing the amazing feat of five gold (500,000) and two platinum (1 million) copies sold among his nearly two dozen recordings. Pryor's achievements took on additional significance in that his recordings did not feature music, just the man using a microphone in a studio or in front of a live audience.
Pryor also hired David Franklin, an African American attorney based in Atlanta, to provide legal counsel and serve as his agent in negotiating contracts and other business aspects of his career. Franklin helped Pryor through his numerous legal entanglements resulting from his personal as well as professional activities and assisted in his transition to superstar status in the entertainment world, but their business relationship became more strained in future years.
Makes Impact in Television and Film
In television, Pryor contributed to the early success of Saturday Night Live, the long-running NBC comedy show, appearing frequently during its first season in 1976 as a host and guest with original cast members John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Garrett Morris, and others. He also appeared in three movies that year, including teaming with Gene Wilder for the comedy film Silver Streak, which became a major hit with the viewing public. During the next year his career as a film actor also blossomed, with leading roles as pioneer African American race car driver Wendell Scott in Greased Lightning, and portraying multiple characters in Which Way Is Up?
Pryor married for the third time in 1977, to Deborah McGuire, and starred briefly in his own TV series on NBC, The Richard Pryor Show. He challenged the status quo and censors from the opening segment of the first broadcast, in which he used a body stocking and visual/camera distortion to appear nude. The series was canceled after only five shows, but Pryor remained undaunted by this setback and continued his stage, film, and recording careers with great success. One setback was his first heart attack which he experienced on November 9, 1977, while in Peoria to celebrate his grandmother's birthday.
In 1978 Pryor turned in another outstanding dramatic performance as Zeke, a Detroit auto worker, in the film Blue Collar, but overall Hollywood producers sought to restrict Pryor to supporting roles which softened his cutting-edge approach to life and humor. He continued his string of movie appearances that year, including his role as the title character in The Wiz, an African American remake of The Wizard of Oz. The production reunited Pryor with Diana Ross and also included Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, and a special appearance by the legendary Lena Horne. Despite the collection of superstar talent, the film met with mixed reviews and only moderate success.
His private life continued to reflect his hectic schedule, personal problems, and addictions, including his heavy use of cocaine. Pryor's third marriage ended that year after a dangerous and highly publicized incident in which he fired a pistol at his wife, then "killed her car" with additional shots in the course of a heated argument.
He then began dating Jennifer Lee, who was at his side in Peoria when his grandmother died in December 1978. She stayed with Pryor through his subsequent depression, drug and sexual binges, detoxification, and therapy. After a psychiatrist recommended he change his behavior and surroundings, Pryor traveled with Lee to Kenya, where he decided to stop using racial epithets after observing the country's racial diversity and harmony. Surprisingly, he received a backlash from some quarters for his decision and was accused of "going soft" because of his increasing fame, wealth, and relationship with Lee, a white woman.
Pryor's greatest film success to that point came at the end of the decade, with Richard Pryor—Live in Concert in 1979. He came to full life on screen, as he carried the filming of his stage performance with numerous skits, characterizations, and impersonations, including his classic Mudbone character, who humorously and sensitively depicted life as experienced by alcoholics, addicts, hustlers, the homeless, and other persons generally considered as undesirables.
Nearly Dies after Drug Accident
While Pryor continued to abuse drugs, alcohol, and other intoxicants, cocaine had become his primary addiction. In the course of freebasing cocaine at his California home on June 9, 1980, Pryor set fire to himself, suffering third-degree burns over half of his body. Pryor's Aunt Dee, who was visiting him, acted quickly to put out the flames, stabilized him after he ran out of his home while on fire and disoriented, and saved her nephew's life.
The accident drew international publicity, given Pryor's high visibility as an entertainer, and many thought he would not survive. Amazingly, Pryor endured a series of skin graft operations and grueling physical therapy and then turned his personal tragedy into positive action. In appreciation of the care he received from the Sherman Oaks Hospital Burn Center, he established the Richard Pryor Burn Foundation to assist other burn victims, and he did not hesitate to turn this experience into both comedy and commentary as part of his performances.
Makes More Movies and Money
The previously completed film Stir Crazy, which reunited Pryor with Gene Wilder, was released in December 1980 and earned over $100 million at the box office. Before the accident, Pryor had been working on Bustin' Loose, a film with Cicely Tyson, the noted African American actress and former Academy Award nominee. With his clout as a major Hollywood star and producer of the film, Pryor included three children from Peoria selected by Juliette Whittaker as cast members in the production and continued to generously support her private school, The Learning Tree.
After his recovery from the accident, Pryor returned to complete the film in 1981. He also wed Jennifer Lee on August 16 of that year at his home in Hawaii, but his fourth marriage ended the next year, as he returned to cocaine and other self-destructive behavior. He became paranoid about his money, among other things, and sued David Franklin for mismanagement and misappropriation of funds in 1982. Franklin did not take this challenge seriously, but the California labor commissioner ruled in Pryor's favor, ending their business relationship.
Despite his ongoing personal problems, Pryor also made what many critics and fans consider his best concert film, Richard Pryor—Live on the Sunset Strip. In his own inimitable fashion, he turned his near-death experience as well as his drug use, relationships, and other issues into hilarious comedy. This success proved to his fans and the general public, as well as to Hollywood executives, that he was not only a survivor but still "the funniest man alive" and now ready to continue his career. During that year he also directed himself in the movie Richard Pryor—Here and Now, and co-starred with legendary comedian Jackie Gleason in The Toy. While on a live performance tour, Pryor began yet another relationship, with twenty-year-old Flynn BeLaine, after meeting her in Washington, D.C.
Continues Film Career and Excessive Lifestyle
Pryor continued to be frequently cast in films during the rest of the 1980s, but his performances lacked the edge of his best earlier work. Poor scripts and parts were also a factor, but Pryor could still manage to make a film do well at the box office by his very presence. For the 1983 movie Superman III, he commanded a fee of $4 million, to that point the highest amount ever earned by a black actor for a single film. His appearance as a comic villain was disappointing, yet he made $1 million more than Christopher Reeve, the star of the film.
During the same year Pryor secured a $40 million deal with Columbia Pictures and established his own company, Indigo Productions, to develop entertainment projects showcasing his talents as an actor, producer, director, and writer. He hired former football star and actor Jim Brown to run the day-to-day operations but fired him before the year ended. Many observers in the African American and film communities were disappointed, as Pryor's personal success did not translate into as many increased opportunities for other blacks in Hollywood as anticipated.
In 1984 Pryor developed a short-lived children's show for television, Pryor's Place, and received the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame Award. Around the same time as the award presentation he received news that Flynn BeLaine was pregnant with his child. Pryor became a father again, as his son Steven was born on November 16 of that year. He did not marry BeLaine at that time but still was required to provide large amounts of money in child support. Although Pryor made millions of dollars as an entertainer, he also spent millions to support his Hollywood lifestyle and its excesses, business associates, children from other marriages and relationships, and other family members, along with a variety of legal and other expenses.
Completes Film Version of Life Story
In 1986 Pryor co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, an autobiographical film which was only moderately successful. Because so much of Pryor's art was based on his life, many critics and viewers already knew much of his story, and a re-creation could not possibly top his real-life experiences. He also tried to defuse criticism of Indigo Productions by hiring a number of African Americans to work behind as well as in front of the camera, including longtime friend and collaborator Paul Mooney, but this did not have much impact on the overall employment of blacks in Hollywood.
In the summer of 1986 Pryor began experiencing symptoms of fatigue, sudden loss of muscle control, and noticeable weight loss. After extensive tests by his doctor and a visit to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, he was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis (MS). While still a serious health problem, the medical findings helped put to rest worries and rumors that Pryor had contracted AIDS in the course of his philandering and drug abuse.
Pryor tried to carry on with his life and career as in the past but began to realize his mortality with the progression of the disease. On October 10, 1986, BeLaine became his fifth wife, but in January 1987 Pryor and BeLaine divorced after less than three months of marriage. This was in part because another son, Franklin Matthew Mason Pryor, had been born as a result of Pryor's earlier affair with actress Geraldine Mason. BeLaine was also pregnant and gave birth to their daughter, Kelsey, later that year.
By 1988 a younger comedian/actor, Eddie Murphy, who had patterned much of his style on Pryor, was the new black superstar in Hollywood, and a younger generation of African American film artists emerged to challenge the mainstream film industry, including Spike Lee, John Singleton, Robert Townsend, Keenan Ivory Wayans, and others. All of these artists, and many others, acknowledged the influence of Pryor on their development. Murphy recruited Pryor and Redd Foxx to appear with him in the 1989 film Harlem Nights, but the historic on-screen meeting of three generations of black comedians provided less humor than expected.
Tries to Continue Working as Health Fails
Pryor suffered another heart attack in March 1990 and eventually underwent quadruple-bypass heart surgery in addition to living with the effects of MS. Determined not to give up, he continued doing "stand-up" comedy now sitting down at places like the Comedy Store nightclub in Los Angeles, the scene of many past triumphs. He also remarried Flynn BeLaine in April of that year, but they divorced again in 1991. By the time of his fiftieth birthday in December 1990, Pryor had appeared in over forty films, was past his prime as an entertainer and in ill health, yet he still made his best effort to continue his career.
On October 31, 1992, Pryor performed new material before a sold-out audience at the Circle Star Theater near San Francisco, his first live concert appearance in almost six years, using a walking cane for support. Encouraged by positive reviews, he tried to take his act on the road but had to cancel the tour after a few performances.
As Pryor came to grips with the end of his active performing career, he received a number of awards and recognition from peers in the entertainment industry. These included the American Comedy Awards Lifetime Achievement Honor in 1992, several all-star tributes, and retrospectives of his many career highlights.
While he maintained contact with his ex-wives and children, Jennifer Lee became his primary companion and caretaker in 1994. The following year he co-wrote and published his autobiography, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences with Todd Gold, was inducted into the NAACP Hall of Fame in 1996, and in 1997 made his final film appearance with a small role in the David Lynch film, Lost Highway. In 1998 Pryor became the first recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, presented by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Final Years
Even though his deteriorating health forced him into seclusion and the use of a wheelchair, Pryor responded to premature reports of his death through his official Internet web site. He also campaigned for animal welfare through letters and Christmas card messages and was honored by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for his efforts.
In June 2001 Pryor and Lee re-married, and she continued to manage Pryor's business affairs as well as tend to his personal and medical needs. They gained legal rights to much of Pryor's earliest comedy work on small record labels, then edited and re-issued the recordings. A 2003 television documentary featured archival footage of Pryor performances, with commentary and testimonials from a number of comedians, and in 2004 the Comedy Central cable television channel named him the best stand-up comedian of all time. The same year the first Richard Pryor Ethnic Comedy Award was presented at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, and a 2005 British poll voted him the tenth greatest comedy act ever.
On December 10, 2005, nine days after reaching age sixty-five, Pryor died of cardiac arrest at his home in Encino, California. His wife attempted to revive him without success but indicated later that his last days were peaceful, and at the end he was smiling. Black Entertain-ment Television aired a Richard Pryor special on December 19 in tribute, as his death was noted by major media outlets around the world.
Pryor's last project was another film based on his life, co-written with his last wife. The comedian/actor Mike Epps was personally selected by Pryor to portray him, and the film, when completed, was intended to add to the legacy and legend of a man who exhibited the survival of the human spirit through tragedy with comedy and creativity.
REFERENCES
Books
Bogle, Donald. Blacks in American Films and Television: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988.
Johnson, Anne Janette, and David G. Oblender. "Richard Pryor." In Contemporary Black Biography. Vol. 24. Ed. Shirelle Phelps. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, Inc., 2000.
Robbins, Fred, and David Ragan. Richard Pryor: This Cat's Got Nine Lives. New York: Delilah Books, 1982.
Smydra, David F. Jr. "Richard Pryor." In African American Lives. Eds. Henry Louis Gates and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Williams, John A., and Dennis A. Williams. If I Stop I'll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993.
Online
"An Authentic Life: Richard Pryor's Official Biography." Richard Pryor Web Site. http://www.richardpryor.com/history.cfm (Accessed 14 March 2006).
"Comedian Richard Pryor Dies at 65." Cable News Network Web Site. http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/10/pryor.obit/index.html (Accessed 14 March 2006).
Fletcher F. Moon
Pryor, Richard
Richard Pryor
1940–2005
Comedian, actor, writer
In the 1970s and 1980s Richard Pryor was one of America's top comedians, an actor, writer, and stand-up artist whose irreverent albums sold in the millions. Pryor mined both personal and social tragedy for his comic material and peppered his appearances with outrageous language and adult humor. Even at the peak of his popularity, however, he suffered the dire consequences of drug and alcohol abuse—a heart attack, a suicide attempt, and the onset of multiple sclerosis. His disease made Pryor a recluse, and from the early 1990s onward he rarely left his California mansion and saw only a small cadre of friends. Pryor's last gift to his adoring fans was a memoir that offered his trademark blend of tragedy and comedy. Pryor passed away in 2005.
One of Pryor's ex-wives, Jennifer Lee, once told Premiere magazine: "Richard's so isolated from the human race. When you're with him now, you feel a kind of solitude you don't even feel when you're by yourself." Pryor's is indeed the tragic story of a talented personality who took a path of self-destruction, a comic who could draw laughs from his own misfortunes but who was powerless to change his habits until the damage had been done. Premiere correspondent David Handelman theorized: "Like many celebrities, Pryor turned to drugs in part out of insecurity about his fame. But he had the added guilt trip of being perhaps the most successful black man in a country of disenfranchised blacks."
Pryor was not the first African-American comedian to succeed as a stand-up comic. He followed in the footsteps of Bill Cosby and Dick Gregory, among others. He became unique—and a pioneer in his own right—when he created a bold new comedy of character, turning African-American life into humorous performance art without softening either the message or its delivery. He could glide effortlessly from portraying an elderly wino to mimicking a cheetah poised to bag a gazelle. With an astounding repertoire of accents and body lingo, Pryor often played a predator one moment and a victim the next. His was a comedy forged from life's tragic moments.
Pryor's audience included a number of comics who have since risen to fame. "I just dreamed about being like Richard Pryor," Keenen Ivory Wayans told Premiere. "Pryor started it all. He's Yoda. If Pryor had not come along, there would not be an Eddie Murphy or a Keenen Ivory Wayans or a Damon Wayans or an Arsenio Hall—or even a [white comedian like] Sam Kinison, for that matter. He made the blueprint for the progressive thinking of black comedians, unlocked that irreverent style."
Bill Cosby told People magazine: "For Richard, the line between comedy and tragedy is as fine as you can paint it." Given Pryor's background, it is not surprising that he entwined comedy and tragedy so brilliantly. He was born in Peoria, Illinois, in December 1940, to an unwed mother. He had always claimed that he was raised in his grandmother's brothel, where his mother worked as a prostitute. His parents, LeRoy and Gertrude Pryor, married when he was three, but the union did not last. Ultimately he chose to live with his grandmother, who was not shy about administering beatings.
At the height of his fame, Pryor declared that he had no bitterness about his unconventional upbringing. He revealed to People that his mother "wasn't very strong, but she tried. At least she didn't flush me down the toilet, like some." He added: "The biggest moment of my life was when my grandmother was with me on the Mike Douglas Show." On the other hand, Pryor's former bodyguard and spiritual adviser Rashon Khan told Premiere that Pryor was sometimes sexually abused in his childhood environment and was "exposed to a lot of crazy stuff." Khan suggested that these childhood traumas helped set the stage for Pryor's drug abuse even before he became established in his career. "The problem that Richard was having with Richard was what happened when he was a kid," Khan said. "It created a void so big, it didn't matter how famous he got."
In school, Pryor was often in trouble with the authorities. His one positive experience came when he was eleven. One of his teachers, Juliette Whittaker, cast him in a community theater performance and then let him entertain his classmates with his antics. Years later, Pryor gave Whittaker the Emmy Award he earned writing comedy for a Lily Tomlin special.
Pryor was expelled from high school after striking a teacher. He never returned. Instead, he sought work in a packing house and then, in 1958, joined the army. He spent his two-year hitch in West Germany, once again clashing with his superiors. Pryor returned home to Peoria in 1960, married the first of his five wives, and fathered his second child, Richard Pryor, Jr. His first child, daughter Renee, was born three years earlier.
The owner of a popular African-American nightclub in Peoria gave Pryor his first professional opportunity. By the early 1960s the comedian was performing on a circuit that included East St. Louis, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh. Then, in 1963, Pryor decided to move to New York City. He settled briefly in Greenwich Village, where he performed an act with strong similarities to Bill Cosby's. Pryor told People: "I'll never forget going up to Harlem and seeing all those black people. Jesus, just knowing there were that many of us made me feel better."
Pryor broke into television in New York City in 1964 when he appeared on a series called On Broadway Tonight. Other offers followed, including a couple from The Ed Sullivan Show and the Merv Griffin Show. Pryor pulled up stakes and moved to Los Angeles, where he supported himself with bit parts in movies such as The Green Berets, starring John Wayne, and Wild in the Streets, a teen-exploitation film. He also continued to play to live audiences, especially in Las Vegas showrooms. "In his early days there was a lot of Bill Cosby in Richard's act," Cosby himself noted in People. "Then one evening I was in the audience when Richard took on a whole new persona—his own, in front of me and everyone else. Richard killed the Bill Cosby in his act, made people hate it. Then he worked on them, doing pure Richard Pryor, and it was the most astonishing metamorphosis I have ever seen. He was magnificent."
By the late 1960s Pryor was already indulging in one hundred dollars worth of cocaine a day. While his new, more personal act found followers, it also alienated the management in Las Vegas. Pryor clashed with landlords and hotel clerks, was audited by the Internal Revenue Service for nonpayment of taxes between 1967 and 1970, and was sued for battery by one of his wives. He disappeared into the counterculture community in Berkeley, California, and did not work for several years. Then he resurfaced in 1972 with a new stand-up act and a supporting role in the film Lady Sings the Blues, a drama for which he earned an Academy Award nomination.
Pryor also contributed his writing talents to other comics. He wrote bits for The Flip Wilson Show and Sanford and Son and helped Mel Brooks to write the classic Western film comedy Blazing Saddles. In 1973 he earned an Emmy Award for the special Lily, starring Lily Tomlin. That provocative show also proved a vehicle for Pryor, when he teamed with Tomlin for a skit about a raggedy black wino and a prim, "tasteful lady."
At a Glance …
Born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor, on December 1, 1940, in Peoria, IL; died of a heart attack on December 10, 2005, in Northridge, CA; son of LeRoy and Gertrude (Thomas) Pryor; married and divorced five times; seven children. Military Service: U.S. Army, 1958–60.
Career: Comedian, actor, and writer.
Selected Awards: Emmy Award, 1973, for Lily; Writers Guild Award and American Academy of Humor Award, both 1974, for Blazing Saddles; five Grammy awards for best comedy albums; Emmy Award nomination and Image Award nomination for Chicago Hope, 1996; Hall of Fame Award, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1996; recipient of the first Mark Twain Prize, 1998; MTV Lifetime Achievement Award, 2000.
In 1976, Pryor wrote and starred in Bingo Long and the Traveling All Stars and Motor Kings. He made a bigger splash, however, in the film Silver Streak, a mixture of comedy and suspense that centers on a murderous train ride. Even though he had only a supporting role in this 1976 release starring Gene Wilder, Pryor earned the bulk of the critics' attention. The film grossed $30 million at the box office, and it opened new venues for the versatile Pryor.
Pryor was at the height of his form as a live comedian by the late 1970s. He had earned Grammy Awards for the 1974 album That Nigger's Crazy and the 1976 work Bicentennial Nigger. Both of the albums went platinum in sales. In all, Pryor earned five Grammy Awards for best comedy album, but the 1979 movie Richard Pryor Live in Concert remains his "indisputable moment of glory," to quote Handelman. In the New York Times Magazine, James McPherson claimed that Pryor was creating a whole new style in American comedy, a style born more of the theater than of traditional humor. The characters, McPherson wrote, "are winos, junkies, whores, street fighters, blue-collar drunks, pool hustlers—all the failures who are an embarrassment to the black middle class and stereotypes in the minds of most whites. The black middle class fears the glorification of those images and most whites fear them in general. Pryor talks like them; he imitates their styles…. He enters into his people and allows whatever is comic in them, whatever is human, to evolve out of what they say and how they look into a total scene. It is part of Richard Pryor's genius that, through the selective use of facial expressions, gestures,… speech and movements, he can create a scene that is comic and at the same time recognizable as profoundly human."
Some of those "profoundly human" comedy scenes were based on unhappy events in Pryor's life. He had a serious heart attack in 1978 and underwent yet another divorce after a violent episode on New Year's Eve that culminated in his riddling his wife's car with bullets. These two grave incidents are given the full comic treatment in Richard Pryor Live in Concert. At a point in the act, Pryor "becomes" his heart itself during the attack, with asides from other parts of his body. He also "becomes" his ex-wife's car under attack.
The theme would be recreated two years later after an even more dangerous event. By 1980 Pryor was freebasing cocaine, using volatile ether to help light the drug for smoking. No one is clear about exactly what happened on June 9, 1980. At first, Pryor claimed the fire was started during the freebasing process. Later, he stated that he poured rum on himself and set himself on fire. At any rate, he nearly burned himself to death, suffering severe injuries to half his body. Early reports told of his untimely death, but he survived and underwent an anguishing rehabilitation.
The healing process did not speak to his addiction, however. He took painkillers in the hospital and returned to freebasing when he was released. Nevertheless, he began to see the fatal consequences of drug use, and this attitude is evident in his final concert movie, Live on Sunset Strip. The film contains the well-known Pryor routine about his accident, his drug use, and his stay in the hospital. New York magazine contributor David Denby called Live on Sunset Strip "a perfect entertainment." The critic added: "Richard Pryor works directly with the life around him, and he digs deeper into fear and lust and anger and pain than many of the novelists and playwrights now taken seriously. Like any great actor, he dramatizes emotion with his whole body, but his mind is so quick and his moods so volatile, he's light-years ahead of any actor delivering a text. Working from deep inside his own experience and understanding of what a human being is and is capable of, he can shake you to your roots."
Live on Sunset Strip was released in 1982. The following year Pryor made concerted efforts to clear his system of drugs and alcohol. He joined a rehabilitation program and worked with other addicts to overcome his problems. He also tackled a project that was daring indeed—he co-wrote, directed, and starred in the 1985 film Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. A thinly veiled autobiography, Jo Jo Dancer stars Pryor as a comedian who relives his life immediately following a near fatal accident. Critics praised the intentions of the movie—especially the fact that Pryor hired African-American workers for every aspect of the production—but the film was not a hit. Detroit Free Press critic Catherine Rambeau, for instance, cited the work for its "honorable premise," but faulted it for a "lack of focus."
Los Angeles Times reviewer Peter Rainer speculated that, as far as movies in general are concerned, Pryor "seems to have taken a wrong turn." A number of Pryor's movies did brisk business at the box office, but in Rainer's words, they led Pryor "into creative oblivion." Films such as The Toy, Brewster's Millions, Stir Crazy, and Bustin' Loose show a Pryor who "is resignedly bland…. Anything malign or threatening has been bleached out," to quote Rainer. Pryor's ex-wife Jennifer Lee told Premiere: "Don't bother looking for a pattern to Richard's movies…. He's lazy, he took the money, he doesn't care."
Others had greater respect for Pryor, however. Eddie Murphy asked Pryor to co-star in the 1989 movie Harlem Nights, and he held a huge comedy concert in Pryor's honor. Commenting in Premiere on the restrictive social atmosphere that existed during Pryor's rise to fame, comedienne Lily Tomlin expressed astonishment over his ability to achieve anything at all. "Richard lost jobs, was blackballed and everything else," Tomlin said, "because people thought he was too hard to deal with or incorrigible or out of control. Now people's careers are built on drug use or rehab. And I can't imagine anything happening to Eddie Murphy like what's happened to Richard. Richard paid the price for using language on the stage,… and Eddie has been celebrated for it. And I don't think Eddie would ever be conflicted the way Richard was about playing [Las] Vegas, playing white clubs with white managers and taking white money. It was a different consciousness."
In 1986 Pryor was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that attacks the central nervous system. The disease and his continuing heart trouble severely limited Pryor's ability to communicate and confined him to a wheelchair, and he became increasingly isolated at his mansion in the hills of California. His heart ailments finally required triple bypass surgery. Pryor's physical limitations and frail, gaunt appearance were a great source of frustration for him. One of Pryor's closest friends, Paul Mooney, told the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, "He [Pryor] has always been the life of the party. He does not like people seeing him like this, and he does not like being like this." Despite these limitations, Pryor worked with author Todd Gold to release a memoir, Pryor Convictions, that recounted both the trials and the joys of his eventful life. Though readers caught traces of Pryor's brand of humor, his print comedy failed to stand up to the incendiary nature of his live performances.
In 1998, Pryor received the first Mark Twain Prize in celebration of American humor in a ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Over 2,000 guests, including Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Morgan Freeman, Richard Belzer, Tim Allen, and Damon Wayans, attended the ceremony. The ceremony featured video clips of some of Pryor's most famous comedic moments interspersed with comments and tributes from comedians and actors who were influenced by Pryor. Although he was unable to rise from his chair, Pryor graciously accepted the award with a whispered "Thank you." In a written statement that was quoted in Jet, Pryor wrote: "I feel great about accepting this prize. It is nice to be regarded on par with a great white man—now that's funny. Seriously, though, two things people throughout history have had in common are hatred and humor. I am proud that, like Mark Twain, I have been able to use humor to lessen people's hatred!"
In the years that followed, Pryor was universally acclaimed for his contributions to American humor. Handelman noted: "Even though his best work had nothing to do with one-liners, Pryor [was] unquestionably still the most important and influential stand-up comedian of the past 25 years. Using raw street language, he [turned] black American life into breathtaking one-man theater, his rubbery face, multioctave voice, and lithe body physicalizing every situation." As Damon Wayans told Jet, "If [a comedian] hasn't copied from Richard Pryor, then you're probably not funny. Like Michael Jordan has defined the game of basketball, Richard Pryor has defined stand up comedy." Pryor finally succumbed to a heart attack on December 10, 2005, at his home in Northridge, California.
Selected works
Books
(With Todd Gold) Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences. Pantheon, 1995.
Films
Lady Sings the Blues, 1972.
Uptown Saturday Night, 1974.
Silver Streak, 1976.
Bingo Long and the Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, 1976.
Blue Collar, 1978.
The Wiz, 1978.
Richard Pryor Live in Concert, 1979.
Stir Crazy, 1980.
Bustin' Loose, 1981.
Live on Sunset Strip, 1982.
Some Kind of Hero, 1982.
The Toy, 1982.
Superman III, 1983.
Brewster's Millions, 1985.
Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, 1985.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, 1989.
Harlem Nights, 1989.
Another You, 1991.
Lost Highway, 1997.
Recordings
That Nigger's Crazy, Reprise, 1974.
Bicentennial Nigger, Warner Bros., 1976.
Greatest Hits, Warner Bros., 1977.
Wanted: Live in Concert, Warner Bros., 1979.
Live on Sunset Strip, Warner Bros., 1982.
Who Me? I'm Not Him, Polygram, 1994.
The Wizard of Comedy, Loose Cannon, 1995.
… And It's Deep, Too!: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992), Rhino, 2000.
Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years (1966–1974), Rhino, 2005.
Screenplays
Blazing Saddles, 1974.
Car Wash, 1976.
Silver Streak, 1976.
Blue Collar, 1978.
Stir Crazy, 1980.
Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, 1986.
Television
The Richard Pryor Show, 1977.
Guest and host of numerous television shows, including The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live.
Sources
Books
Haskins, James, A Man and His Madness, Beaufort Books, 1984.
Rovin, Jeff, Richard Pryor: Black and Blue, Bantam, 1984.
Williams, John A., and Dennis A. Williams, If I Stop I'll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991.
Periodicals
Commonweal, May 7, 1982.
Detroit Free Press, May 2, 1986.
Ebony, July 1986; February 1, 2006.
Entertainment Weekly, October 11, 1991; December 23, 2005.
Film Comment, July-August 1982.
Jet, November 9, 1998; December 26, 2005.
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, January 15, 1999.
Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1986; November 24, 1989.
New York, March 29, 1982.
New York Times, January 9, 1977; May 2, 1986; May 18, 1986.
New York Times Magazine, April 27, 1975.
People, March 13, 1978; December 26, 2005.
Philadelphia Inquirer, January 26, 1992.
Premiere, June 1991; January 1992.
Progressive, June 1982.
Time, December 19, 2005.
On-line
Richard Pryor, www.richardpryor.com (March 23, 2006).
Pryor, Richard
Pryor, Richard
(b. 1 December 1940 in Peoria, Illinois; d. 10 December 2005 in Los Angeles, California), award-winning comedian, actor, and writer who is widely considered the most influential comedian of his era.
Pryor was born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III in Saint Francis Hospital in Peoria, Illinois. His father, Leroy “Buck Carter” Pryor, was an itinerant vaudeville performer who met Pryor’s mother, Gertrude Thomas, while on the road in the late 1930s. They settled in Peoria and were married about three years after their son’s birth. A few years later, the embattled couple separated. Although the young Pryor, an only child, sometimes visited with his mother, she became a shadowy presence in his life. Responsibility for his upbringing was left largely to Marie Carter Pryor, his paternal grandmother, who operated a string of local bars and brothels in which both Pryor’s mother and father worked for a time.
Pryor’s childhood was at best bizarre and extreme. “Family is a mixed blessing,” he wrote in the autobiography Pryor Convictions: And Other Life Sentences (1995). “You’re glad to have one, but it’s also like receiving a life sentence for a crime you didn’t commit.” Indeed, growing up among the seamy, often violent world of hustlers, pimps, and prostitutes in Peoria’s black ghetto left an indelible mark, which influenced his turbulent personal life and his satirical view of society.
At age six Pryor was enrolled in a Catholic grammar school, but when school authorities discovered the nature of the family business, he was expelled. The clash between his disreputable family life and the conventional moral tenets of the outside world into which his grandmother attempted to introduce him, along with at least two instances of sexual abuse by adults and several racist encounters, contributed to his growing adolescent confusion and trauma. Although he was bright, the self-described “skinny little black kid” became a troublemaker and class cutup. He began using his quick wit and antic humor to amuse classmates and ingratiate himself with bigger, more violent street gang members. By age fourteen he was expelled from school because of his disruptive behavior. He never returned.
He remained in Peoria, picking up odd jobs and occasionally appearing at open-mike comedy shows. He also fathered the first of his seven children, a daughter who was born out of wedlock in 1957. Frustrated and unable to support himself, Pryor joined the army in 1958. His stint in the service ended in 1960 when he was discharged after assaulting another soldier during a brawl. Returning to Peoria that year, he took a job at a tractor company and married Patricia Price; their son was born in 1961. Settling into a “normal” life, however, was unsatisfying. Pryor was drawn to the stage. He had seen the comic Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby, the comedian he most admired and imitated, on television and was convinced that he could be as funny as they were. He soon began doing impressions and telling standard jokes at a local nightclub. After the birth of their child, he and his wife were divorced in 1961, and Pryor left Peoria to hone his craft on the Midwest black club circuit. He then moved to New York City in 1963, determined to match Cosby’s success.
Appearances in Greenwich Village cafés led to bookings in larger clubs, and in 1964 Pryor made his national television debut on Rudy Vallee’s show On Broadway Tonight. Later appearances on the The Ed Sullivan Show, The Merv Griffin Show, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and the offer of his first film role in The Busy Body (1967) prompted Variety to rave about his “healthy instinct for irreverence.” Despite the success, Pryor was unhappy with his “white bread,” Cosby-like approach to humor. He was haunted by a darker, more irreverent comic vision. “The pressure built up until I went nuts,” he later wrote. Offstage, a series of brawls, run-ins with authorities, domestic disputes, and an escalating cocaine habit reflected his inner turmoil. Pressure increased in April 1967, when Maxine Silverman (whom he did not marry) gave birth to his third child. The couple separated immediately afterward.
Pryor’s personal and professional conflicts came to a head in September 1967 during an appearance at the Las Vegas Aladdin Hotel when, disoriented and frustrated, he walked off the stage in the middle of his act. Told that he would never work in Las Vegas again, he moved to Los Angeles and, his stand-up career in near ruin, went into virtual exile. From 1968 to the early seventies, aided by the young comic and writer Paul Mooney, he wrote and tried out edgier, character-based material that reflected the ghetto voices he had heard during his childhood. Initially there was some resistance to the explicit language and sexual content. But by the time his second album—Craps (After Hours)—was released in 1971, his humor was finding an audience with young African Americans as well as some peers. “I was in the audience when Richard took on a whole new persona,” Bill Cosby said. “He worked on them, doing pure Pryor, and it was the most astonishing metamorphosis I have ever seen. He was magnificent.”
In 1967 Pryor married Shelley Bonus, and in July 1969 his fourth child was born. The marriage dissolved that same year, as the comic struggled to advance his career. By 1973, however, Pryor was again gaining recognition outside the black community. There was talk of an Oscar nomination for his performance in Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and he and Mel Brooks were collaborating on the script for Blazing Saddles (1974). Pryor was also writing for the The Flip Wilson Show and Redd Foxx’s Sanford and Son television show, and in 1974 he won an Emmy for writing contributions to Lily (1973), a Lily Tomlin television special. His third album, That Nigger’s Crazy (1974), was the first of a series of records that, although they were X-rated, won Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album of the Year. In the mid-seventies Pryor also had notable appearances on the late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live and featured roles in such films as the box-office hit Silver Streak (1976), Greased Lightning (1977), Which Way Is Up? (1977), Blue Collar (1978), and The Wiz (1978).
Pryor had emerged not only as one of the country’s most innovative comics but also as one of the film industry’s most marketable stars; his stock at Hollywood studios rocketed. He signed multimillion-dollar movie deals with Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Studios in 1977, and the National Broadcasting Company approached him to appear in a series of comedy specials. Personal troubles, however, still plagued him. On 22 September 1977 he ended an affair with the actress Pam Grier to wed a twenty-three-year-old starlet named Deboragh McGuire. They were separated after less than four months—during which time Pryor had suffered his first heart attack. In 1979 they were divorced.
After recovering from the heart attack in 1978, Pryor began a stage tour that showcased new comedy material. Another example of his turning crisis into comedy, it was an immediate success. Wanted—Richard Pryor Live in Concert, an album recorded at one concert, went gold immediately. A performance in Long Beach, California, was filmed and released as Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979); the low-budget movie broke box-office records in urban theaters across the nation and was hailed by critics. Describing Pryor as “a master of lyrical obscenity” and “the only great poet satirist among our comics,” the New Yorker critic Pauline Kael praised the film as “a consummation of his years as an entertainer... one of greatest performances we’d ever seen or would ever see.”
Live in Concert marked what many consider the pinnacle of Pryor’s career. In June 1980, less than a year after its release, another tragedy loomed. While freebasing cocaine in his Los Angeles home, Pryor set himself afire. He was severely burned, and many doubted that he would survive. Less than a year after being released from Sherman Oaks Hospital and Burn Center, however, he began work on Some Kind of Hero (1982) with Margot Kidder. He also returned to the comedy stage, where footage for his second concert film, Richard Pryor, Live on Sunset Strip (1982), was hastily assembled.
In August 1981 Pryor again married, but the volatile relationship with Jennifer Lee, a longtime companion, ended in divorce a little over a year later, in October 1982, and Pryor’s personal life continued its chaotic course. An affair with the twenty-year-old actress and writer Flynn BeLaine led to the birth of Pryor’s fifth child in 1984. Pryor and BeLaine were married in October 1986 but divorced a few months later, in January 1987. Meanwhile, his sixth child was born in 1987. The mother was the actress Geraldine Mason, whom Pryor had met while filming Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986). Pryor’s last child was also born in 1987, when BeLaine gave birth nine months after their divorce.
Pryor’s health was also failing. During the summer of 1986 doctors at the Mayo Clinic had informed Pryor that he had multiple sclerosis. Although he did not immediately publicize the diagnosis and would complete several more feature films, including See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), the progressively degenerative disease ultimately crippled him. On 1 April 1990 Pryor and BeLaine married for a second time but were divorced the following year. Finally, in June 2001 Pryor remarried Jennifer Lee. He occasionally appeared on stage in the early nineties, working from a wheelchair, and made his final movie appearance in Lost Highway (1997). By the mid-1990s, although his spirit had not been dampened, his career had come to a virtual halt. Tributes and accolades poured in, but the once outspoken comedian struggled to communicate during public appearances at such events as the 1998 John F. Kennedy Center ceremony, when he became the first recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Among other honors, he also earned the American Writers Guild Award (1974) and the American Comedy Lifetime Achievement Award (1992).
Lee was at his side on 10 December 2005, when Pryor died of cardiac arrest at Encino Hospital near Los Angeles. Services were held at Forest Lawn–Hollywood Hills Cemetery. Pryor’s impact and lasting influence on American humor and African American comedy, in particular, is universally acknowledged. He was undoubtedly the most influential comedian of his era. Like the legendary Lenny Bruce, he stretched the acceptable perimeters of uninhibited satirical commentary, but unlike his gifted predecessor, through the sheer virtuosity of his performance artistry, Pryor was able to transform that satire into a popular mass culture staple. As the playwright Neil Simon once said, he was “the most brilliant comic in America—no one [was] funnier or more perceptive.”
Finally, however, his achievements transcend comedy. He was the first comedian to successfully speak to mainstream America in the unadulterated language of the street. By humanizing and giving substance to voices and types that were often outcasts even within the ghetto, he paved the way for open expression from a segment of society that had been largely ignored. His final legacy may be that he was instrumental in opening up a broader, more humane view of African American life—an achievement that not only had an effect on all areas of popular entertainment but also influenced the way we perceive America’s minority communities.
Pryor’s life is chronicled in the book he wrote with Todd Gold, Pryor Convictions: And Other Life Sentences (1995). For more on his life and work, see Jim Haskins, Richard Pryor, A Man and His Madness: A Biography (1984); and Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy (1998), and “The High-Wire Satire of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor,” CommonQuest (Winter 1998). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 11 Dec. 2005).
Mel Watkins
Richard Pryor
Richard Pryor
Richard Pryor (born 1940) was one of the most influential stand-up comedians of his generation, and starred in a number of hit films and comedy recordings. He created a new type of humor, one that blended self-effacing statements about being African American with sharp political insights.
Richard Pryor was born on December 1, 1940 in Peoria, Illinois to LeRoy Pryor, Jr. (also known as Buck Carter) and Gertrude Thomas. A tough, streetwise kid, Pryor's father won a Golden Gloves tournament in Chicago at the age of 18. His mother worked as a prostitute and bookkeeper. Both parents were violent and alcoholic. Born out of wedlock, Richard suffered not only the stigma of illegitimacy, but also that of racism.
Pryor's youth was spent in a house of prostitution run by his grandmother, Marie Carter. His mother often disappeared for months at a time, and finally abandoned him when he was ten. His father rarely saw him. Therefore, Pryor's grandmother was his sole means of support as a child. She was strict and beat him when he misbehaved. Pryor frequented pool halls and was often in trouble. He was also the victim of physical and sexual abuse. When he was six, he was molested by a teenage pedophile named "Bubba," who, many years later, brought his own son to Pryor for an autograph. Rather than dwelling on his anger over the incident, Pryor worried that the pedophile's son was being subjected to abuse.
Discovered His Talent
Around the age of ten, Pryor realized that he could make people laugh and pay attention to him. "I was a skinny little black kid with big eyes that took in the whole world and a wide smile that begged for more attention than anyone had time to give," Pryor wrote in his 1995 autobiography, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences. In searching for love, he turned to comedy. By intentionally falling off a porch railing, he got people to laugh. On a rare outing with his father to a Jerry Lewis movie, Pryor saw his father break up with laughter. He decided to try to make his father and others laugh to win their approval and love.
One teacher in the several elementary schools he attended encouraged him. Marguerite Parker allowed him to stand in front of the class and entertain if he arrived on time. Another teacher, Juliette Whittaker at the Carver Community Center, gave him a chance to act. While at the Center, the 11 year old Pryor observed a rehearsal of Rumpelstiltskin. Telling Whittaker he would take any part, he proceeded to memorize all the parts. From Whittaker's plays, he received self esteem. She stated, "This child had a drive to be; he loved making people laugh, the spotlight, the attention you get. He needed that, the feeling of self-esteem he got. He was somebody." His comic abilities also created enemies who wanted to beat him up. He defused their envy with his jokes. Pryor was expelled from high school, but at the Carver Community Center, he was the star of a number of Ms. Whittaker's plays.
A Start in Stand-Up Comedy
By the age of 17, Pryor had fathered an illegitimate daughter, Renee. To escape from his responsibilities and his neighborhood, and to better his station in life, he joined the army the following year. Like the comedians Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby, Pryor saw the armed forces as an opportunity for advancement. His army career was undistinguished until he was discharged for slashing another soldier with a switchblade.
Shortly thereafter, he walked into Harold's Club in Peoria, and talked himself into a job. For the next several years, he acquired a reputation as a stand-up comedian in the black clubs of Chicago, Cleveland, and Buffalo. By 1963, he was a stand-up comedian in New York City. His hero and obsession was Bill Cosby. Pryor appeared on the Ed Sullivan and Merv Griffin television shows. He was one of the first black comedians to use the painful events from his own life for his comedy monologue. After his father's death, his memories of the hustlers, prostitutes, junkies, and winos of his youth took over his comedy routine. People Weekly noted, "Pryor had found his own stand-up persona, which grafted the profane edge of Lenny Bruce onto the pathos of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp." Pauline Kael portrayed him as "a master of lyrical obscenity; the only great poet-satirist among our comics." During the mid-1960s, Pryor's increased success brought more money and more stress, leading to a $200 a day cocaine habit.
Pryor moved to Los Angeles where he began to get small parts in movies. His big break came in 1972, when he played opposite Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. From 1974 until 1980 he starred in a number of hit movies, including Uptown Saturday Night, Car Wash, Silver Streak, Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, and Stir Crazy. During this time, Pryor also wrote comedy for the television shows, Sanford and Son, and The Flip Wilson Show, and aided Mel Brooks in writing Blazing Saddles.
Drugs and Violence Out of Control
While his public persona was a success, his private life was a disaster. Although he was making millions of dollars, he was using large amounts of drugs and becoming self destructive. In 1977, he suffered a heart attack. Shortly after the death of his grandmother, in 1980, he attempted to commit suicide by dousing himself with cognac and igniting himself with a cigarette lighter. Although he initially claimed it was an accident caused when he was high on cocaine, he later admitted that he intended to kill himself. He spent six weeks in a burn unit, which he described as one of the worst experiences of his life.
Pryor had a history of violence going back to his youth. When he was high on cocaine, he frequently beat the women he was involved with. He almost beat to death his fourth wife, Jennifer Lee, in 1979, while both were under the influence of alcohol and drugs. In his autobiography, he stated, "Uninterested in relationships, I caught women as if they were taxis." In other words, he got in and out of relationships very quickly.
Pryor married six times, the last two marriages to the same woman. He has seven children: Renee, Richard, Jr., Elizabeth Anne, Rain, Steven, Franklin, and Kelsey, although he doesn't currently acknowledge Renee. He also has a grandchild, Randis.
Cleaned Up His Act
In 1982, Pryor attempted to rehabilitate himself by joining a drug program to fight his addictions. The following year, after making the film Superman III, for which he received $4 million, he returned to abusing drugs and women. His daughter, Rain, recounted a turning point in his life "My dad was a very scared, closed person. Dad spent most of my childhood locked away in his room with his women and his drugs. He lived in his own reality. He trusted no one." In 1993, in Hawaii, Pryor had an epiphany and then a symbolic baptism. He threw his cocaine pipe in the garbage and allowed Rain to lead him into the ocean and immerse him in the water, although he was phobic about water. Rain stated, "For my dad, letting me lead him into the water was an expression of trust, almost unheard of for him. I think he was willing to trust me because I was a child. Why would I want to hurt him?"
The Lowest Point
With his life starting to get on track, Pryor wrote, directed and starred in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling, a semi-autobiographical movie. In 1986, he was stricken withmultiple sclerosis (MS), a disease that destroys the protective sheath around the nerves. MS affects the ability to balance and walk; eventually an MS victim cannot even move. Pryor discovered that something was wrong while filming the movie Critical Condition. When the director, Michael Apted, asked Pryor to walk over to him. Pryor's body would not respond. When he was diagnosed with MS, Pryor was devastated. "I was depressed; it was the lowest point of my life. But I struggled with hope … " In 1990, he had a minor heart attack and his MS got worse. He could not get out of bed. Pryor stated, "We take so much for granted, but man, lose the movement of your legs and you begin to take a closer look at life." With the aid of a personal trainer, he was able to walk again. "Since the earthquakes … didn't kill me, the drugs didn't kill me, the fire didn't kill me (although it hurt like a bitch), and my ex-wives (God bless them all) didn't kill me, there is no way I'm going to let the MS kill me." In his last film, Another You, released in 1991, Pryor appeared clearly ailing, a fragile shell of his former manic self. In 1991, he suffered a massive heart attack, and needed quadruple bypass surgery.
Pryor received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1993. In 1995, his autobiography Pryor Convictions and Other Sentences, was published. He was awarded the first Mark Twain Prize to celebrate American humor in 1998. Too weak to rise from his wheelchair, Pryor could barely whisper "thank you" when he accepted his award. The comedian wrote in a statement, "Two things people throughout history have had in common are hatred and humor. I am proud that, like Mark Twain, I have been able to use humor to lessen people's hatred."
Further Reading
Parker, Janice, Great African Americans in Film, New York, Crabtree Publishing, 1997.
Pryor, Richard, Pryor Convictions-and Other Life Sentences, New York, Pantheon, 1995.
Williams, John A. and Dennis A. Williams, If I Stop I'll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor, New York, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991.
Entertainment Weekly, April 30, 1993, p. 16; June 10, 1994, p. 76.
Jet, June 5, 1995, p. 58; November 9, 1998, p. 16.
The New York Times Magazine, January 17, 1999, p. 28.
People Weekly, May 29, 1995, p. 76. □
Pryor, Richard
Pryor, Richard
December 1, 1940
Born in Peoria, Illinois, comedian Richard Franklin Lenox Thomas Pryor overcame a troubled life in an extended family headed by his grandmother, Marie Carter, to become a preeminent comedian, film star, screenwriter, producer, and director, beginning in the early 1960s.
During Pryor's boyhood, Peoria was like the Deep South. Segregation and discrimination in housing, employment, and places of public accommodation were deeply embedded in southern Illinois. Forty percent of the
black population of Peoria was unemployed, while 32 percent worked for the Works Project Administration (WPA). Odd jobs supported the rest, including the Pryor family, which ran small carting firms, pool halls, and, Pryor claimed, houses of prostitution. Peoria remained segregated for a time even after the 1954 Supreme Court decision that forbade it.
At age eleven, Pryor, the son of Gertrude Thomas and Leroy "Buck" Carter Pryor, and, he once said, the seventh of twelve "Pryor kids," began acting at the Carver Community Center under the guidance of the drama teacher, Juliette Whittaker. Over the years she became the recipient of some of Pryor's performing awards; he also contributed to the private school she later founded, the Learning Tree.
After dropping out of school, Pryor joined the army in 1958, where his life was no less troublesome. After military service, he worked for his father's carting firm and the Caterpillar factory in Peoria. He also haunted the local clubs and watched television for the appearances of African-American entertainers such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Bill Cosby, personalities he wanted to emulate and eventually replace.
Within a few years Pryor was playing small clubs in East St. Louis, Chicago, Windsor (Canada), Buffalo, Youngstown, and Cleveland. Much of his comic material was drawn from his army service and the early Cosby comedy routines. By 1964 he had attracted enough attention to be booked for his first national television appearance, on Rudy Vallee's Broadway Tonight show. Three years later, after stops on the Ed Sullivan, Merv Griffin, and Johnny Carson shows, Pryor appeared in the film The Busy Body with Sid Caesar and other comedians—the first of more than forty films he acted in, wrote, produced, and/or directed into the early 1990s. His first major role was in Lady Sings the Blues (1972), with Diana Ross, in which Pryor played a character called Piano Man.
The Richard Pryor Show ran briefly on NBC-TV for part of 1977. It was innovative and conveyed a wide range of both comedy and tenderness, but it was too daring for the executives of NBC. Amid legal wrangling, the show went off the air and, typically, Pryor laid the blame on NBC. In 1984 he played himself as a boy in Pryor's Place, a children's show that aired on Saturday mornings. It too was short-lived, this time without recrimination.
From 1970 through 1979, Pryor starred or costarred in twenty-one films. He contributed to the script of Blazing Saddles (1973), and in the same year wrote for and appeared on The Flip Wilson Show and was a co-writer for Lily Tomlin's television specials, for which he won Emmy Awards in 1973 and 1974. He continued to perform in clubs and theaters around the country; these performances provided material for his two Richard Pryor Live in Concert films (both in 1979). The recordings of his performances earned him three Grammy Awards: That Nigger's Crazy, 1974; Is It Something I Said?, 1975; and Bicentennial Nigger, 1976. That Nigger's Crazy also became a certified gold and platinum album.
In 1980 he produced his first film, Bustin' Loose, star-ring himself and Cicely Tyson. Two years later he produced and wrote Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip. Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, which Pryor produced, directed, and helped write, was based upon his near-fatal self-immolation that occurred when he was freebasing cocaine in 1980. In 1986 Pryor, who had also survived two heart attacks, discovered that he had multiple sclerosis, but he continued to perform onstage.
Pryor was known as a "crossover" star, one who appealed to both black and white moviegoers. This label resulted from the "buddy" films he made with Gene Wilder—Silver Streak (1976), Stir Crazy (1980), and See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989)—although he had starred with white actors in sixteen other movies. Few of Pryor's films during the 1980s were memorable, not even the concert film Richard Pryor: Here and Now (1983), although Brew-ster's Millions (1985) and Harlem Nights (1989) attracted loyal audiences. But Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip most typified his pungent, raunchy comedy that echoed the African-American man in the street, which was precisely what made Pryor the great comedian he was.
When he was at his peak, few comedians could match Pryor's popularity. Most contemporary comedy is said to be "post-Pryor" because of the standards he set. His life was his act, but he shaped his personal experiences into rollicking comedy. His major themes were racism in its several forms and the battle of the sexes. Usually, the women bested the men. His topics were current and to the point, and his favorite character was an old, foul-mouthed, wise black man named Mudbone from Mississippi.
Richard Pryor became the first recipient of the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain prize for humor on October 20, 1998. Because of ill health, Pryor was not able to get out of his chair, but in his official response he wrote, "It is nice to be regarded on a par with a great white man—now that's funny! Seriously though, two things people throughout history have had in common are hatred and humor. I am proud that, like Mark Twain, I have been able to use humor to lessen people's hatred."
In August 2004 the first Richard Pryor Ethnic Comedy Award was given at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.
See also Comedians; Cosby, Bill; Davis, Sammy, Jr.
Bibliography
Haskins, Jim. Richard Pryor, a Man and His Madness: A Biography. New York: Beaufort Books, 1984.
"Richard Pryor." Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 24. Edited by Shirelle Phelps. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000.
Williams, John A., and Dennis A. Williams. If I Stop I'll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991.
john a. williams (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005