Richard PryorRichard Pryor, whose blunt, blue and brilliant comedic confrontations confidently tackled what many stand-up comics before him deemed too shocking to broach, died last Saturday. He was 65.
Pryor suffered a heart attack at his home in San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, early Saturday morning. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
The comedian's tremendous body of work, a political movement in itself, was steeped in race, class, social commentary, and encompassed the stage, screen, records and television. He won five Grammys and an Emmy and was at one point the highest paid black performer in the entertainment industry. The highly lauded but misfortune-dogged comedian inadvertently became a de facto role model, a lone wolf figure to whom many an up-and-coming comic - including Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Robin Williams and Richard Belzer - have paid due homage.
Pryor had a history both bizarre and grim: self-immolation (1980), heart attack (1990) and marathon drug and alcohol use (that he finally kicked in the 1990s). Yet he somehow - often miraculously it seemed - continued steady on the prowl, even after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986, a disease that robbed him of his trademark physicality.
Verbally potent and physically eloquent, Pryor worked as an actor and writer as well as a stand-up comic throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. He won Grammys for his socially irreverent concert albums and in 1973 he walked away with a writing Emmy for a Lily Tomlin television special.
Pryor starred in major feature films - from Lady Sings the Blues and the semi-autobiographical directing turn in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, to the less memorable The Toy and Superman III. He also co-starred with comedian Gene Wilder in the highly popular buddy films Silver Streak and Stir Crazy.
But it was his concert films - particularly Richard Pryor - Live in Concert (1979) - that many critics consider to be his best work.
Called genius by some, self-destructive madman by others, Pryor, throughout the tumult of a zigzagging career, remained an inclement force of nature.
In 1975, he appeared on Saturday Night Live, at the time considered to be among TV's most irreverent shows. But it wasn't until he went on the air that SNL instituted for the first time a five-second delay to ensure that Pryor did not ruffle the NBC censors.
In later years, his life was a blur of bad choices and reckless acts. Scarred by drugs, violence, quadruple bypass surgery, broken marriages and estranged children, Pryor, submerged in personal chaos, tried to take his own life. The initial reports of June 9th, 1980, were that the comedian accidentally set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine.
Pryor finally revealed the truth in his autobiography Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences, explaining how he poured cognac over himself and set it alight.
The incident, like many of Pryor's more dramatic mishaps, turned up as encore-worthy centrepieces of his stage routines. Among them, the much talked about New Year's morning in 1978 when he repeatedly fired a .357 magnum revolver into his then wife's car.
Pryor was best known for his searing analysis about the state of race relations. He was honoured by the Kennedy Centre for Performing Arts with the first Mark Twain Prize for American humour. "I feel great about accepting this prize," he wrote in his official response, his familiar edge glinting through.
"I feel great to be honoured on a par with a great white man - now that's funny!" The comedian was poignant in his remarks to a Washington Post reporter shortly after winning the honour. "I'm a pioneer. That's my contribution. I broke barriers for black comics. I was being Richard Pryor; that was me on that stage. But I was on drugs at the time."
Born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1940, Pryor grew up in one of his grandmother Marie's string of whorehouses that catered to various black entertainers and vaudeville performers. Pryor developed and honed his comedic skills at an early age as class clown, and later was tapped by mentor, Juliette Whittaker, director on the Carver Community Centre in Carver, Illinois, as "a 14-year-old genius". She helped to develop his stage and dramatic skills.
A father by 14 and army veteran by 17, Pryor had a wealth of material from which to draw. At the time, many black comedians eschewed not only social commentary, but they also tended to mute any fury, or at the very least sanded the edges of the country's racial realities. Pryor, however, dived head first into the deepest of uncharted waters.
"African Americans were accepted as clowns and jesters," wrote one commentator, "but were expected to avoid satire and social commentary - the comedy of ideas."
Much of the entertainer's bottomless font of searing observations - social, political, racial - was attributed to his own wrestling with personal demons: a dramatic push-me-pull-you relationship with success within a mainly white industry and his own racial allegiance.
In his 30 years as a performer, Pryor recorded more than 20 albums and appeared in more than 40 films, including California Suite (1978), Brewster's Millions in (1985) and Harlem Nights (1989). He became the highest paid black performer in 1983 with his $4 million fee for Superman III.
Along with his Grammys and Emmy and the Oscar nod, his script for the comedy satire, Blazing Saddles written with Mel Brooks, won the American Writers Guild Award and the American Academy of Humour Award in 1974.
Pryor found himself slowed and increasingly incapacitated in later years as MS took hold. He travelled in a motorised scooter and continued to write and perform throughout the 1990s. Even with the help and therapeutic sparring of ex-wife Jennifer Lee, the disease left the once physically inexhaustible and seemingly insurmountable Pryor immobilised and imprisoned.
He told the Washington Post in 1999: "The drugs didn't make me funny. God made me funny. The drugs kept me up in my imagination. But I felt . . . pathetic afterward . . . Drugs messed me up."
Pryor, who married six times, is survived by sons Steven and Richard and daughters Elizabeth, Rain and Renee.
Richard Pryor: born December 1st, 1940; died December 10th, 2005