Richard Pryor died 10 years ago this December. But the howls of pain and laughter still linger in the midst of the latest Pryor renaissance.
The most definitive biography published yet, Scott Saul's Becoming Richard Pryor (HarperCollins, $27.99) is in stores, a little over a year after the release of the brothers David and Joe Henry's Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (Algonquin, $16.95 paperback). A documentary produced by Pryor's widow Jennifer Lee, Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic, is on DVD. Lee Daniels (The Butler, TV's Empire) is set to direct a Hollywood movie, Richard Pryor: Is It Something I Said?, starring Mike Epps as Pryor and Eddie Murphy, whose Pryor impressions are legend, as Pryor's dad.
But it's not just all that. Comedy is now more raw, confessional and self-aware than ever before. You can see it in the discomfort provoked by Louis C.K., and the nightly social commentary of Larry Wilmore on Comedy Central's The Nightly Show, and the obsessive comedy studiousness of Mark Maron's WTF podcast.
They're all Pryor's children.
"Pryor exploded the idea of what comedy could be by troubling its boundary lines - not just what words could be used but what kinds of feelings could be explored," Saul says via email. And the issues Pryor laid on the table, from race relations to police brutality, gain relevance with each passing month.
"Pryor found a way to talk onstage about how whites and blacks have such a different relationship to the police, or how blithely white policemen use chokeholds on black suspects," says Saul. "Those pieces of social commentary remain hauntingly relevant today - hauntingly because they give us a visceral sense of how little has changed."
These social wavelengths barely reached my radar when I became a Pryor addict in the late '70s. My childhood household was freshly imbued by HBO, and I could not stay away from Richard Pryor: Live in Concert. I watched it any and every time it aired, usually late at night when I should have been hunkering down for a nurturing eight hours of sleep. I learned to mimic Pryor's imitation of white men swearing. I gaped at his fearless explorations of race and power. I giggled uncontrollably when he riffed on his fear of snakes in the woods. I got maybe half of the jokes, but that didn't stop me from taping it on a beat-up cassette recorder and playing the tape ad infinitum. Probably not healthy behavior for a 10-year-old, but a good deal of fun.
Breaking through
At the time I couldn't have known Pryor was rewriting the book on comedy and race by baring his wounds for all to see. I didn't know he launched his career as a clean Cosby wannabe, or that he grew up in a Peoria, Ill., brothel, or that he had recently driven himself and the NBC suits mad with his not-ready-for-prime-time variety series. I just knew this was the funniest man I had ever seen, and that his humor seemed to come from a place of primal vulnerability.
We tend to remember Pryor as fearless and revolutionary, and he could be both. He broke through and found his own incendiary voice when he stopped imitating Bill Cosby and mined his deepest self and rawest autobiographical details: the street characters that made his childhood neighborhood a daily adventure, the family members who made a vocation of vice, the drugs and the booze to which he couldn't say no. He ruled the stage only when he learned to make it a showcase for his demons. He cut himself open for the world to see, a practice that left an incalculable mark on subsequent generations of comedy.
"So much of comedy is bragging about how great everything is, and Pryor made it acceptable to make jokes about your weaknesses," says Dallas-based comedian Paul Varghese. "I've always loved his ability to get laughs without saying a word. Nonverbal communication to get a laugh is so difficult to do, and it's something I've always wanted to master. I always try to write in that vein."
Pryor's influence and inspiration extends beyond comedy and into other cultural realms, including hip-hop. Countless artists have sampled Pryor, from A Tribe Called Quest (on "After Hours") to ODB (on "Shimmy Shimmy Ya"). Kendrick Lamar, on his recent jam "King Kunta," drops Pryor's name to suggest his place in a lineage of black royalty. Pryor remains the coin of the realm in the most vital and commercially viable form or urban culture.
The Pryor of Saul's book makes most rap stars look like Boy Scouts. He shoots a hole in the gold record on his wall and in a fully stocked aquarium. He habitually beats the women he loves most. He famously set himself on fire in 1980; Saul's book makes clear that this was no freebasing accident but a "terrible improvisation" conceived in agony.
Steep price
Pryor paid a price for digging deep, even as he became a bankable Hollywood star. After his self-immolation he emerged from the hospital averse to risk and less inspired. As Saul writes, "The new Richard was less brave and open - less willing to improvise, or wander into strange terrain, or risk the red-hot act of creative aggression that makes an audience howl in shock and astonishment."
That new Richard haunts my childhood memories as well. I laughed plenty when I saw Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, recorded and released in 1982.But even then I could tell this was a more timid and exhausted performer. It turns out that during the first night of taping, Pryor left the stage in the middle of his set, muttered, "I don't know what I'm doing here," and didn't return.
But the creative demise was clearest in the kinds of movies he chose to star in during the '80s. Go back now and try to watch The Toy or Superman III or Harlem Nights. That's Richard Pryor up there, and yet it isn't. It's a once-dangerous man teaching himself how to play it safe and keep his monsters at bay. He had lost a vital piece of himself, perhaps the same piece he had yet to find back in the early '60s, when he was still struggling to hone his voice.
Pryor lived on the cutting edge and then backed away, much like one of his gifted progeny, Dave Chappelle, who turned away from the explosive racial humor of Chappelle's Show, left a pile of money on Comedy Central's table and all but disappeared for a while. Mining pain for art can eventually get too painful.
Pryor's final years were slowed even further by multiple sclerosis, although it was a heart attack that finally claimed him, at the age of 65. Thankfully Pryor left plenty to remember him by: Live in Concert, his remarkable run of albums in the '70s and that short-lived but surreal middle finger toward NBC (you can check out the Richard Pryor Show on DVD).
He's gone, but the laughter still hangs in the air, shot through with a cry of anguish.
