Richard Pryor

Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor was born on December 1, 1940, in Peoria, Illinois. His upbringing was harsh by any measure. His grandmother, Marie Carter, ran brothels in Peoria, and his mother, Gertrude Thomas, worked as a prostitute in one of them. His father, LeRoy Pryor, was a former boxer and hustler. Richard spent much of his childhood in his grandmother's establishments, an environment he later described unsparingly in his stand-up act and in his 1995 memoir Pryor Convictions ^[1].

His mother abandoned the family when Richard was young, leaving his grandmother as the dominant figure in his life. He suffered abuse as a child, including sexual abuse by a neighborhood teenager, experiences he spoke about publicly as an adult ^[1]. School offered limited refuge. A teacher named Juliette Whittaker recognized his gift for performing and encouraged him, giving him early chances to act in local productions at the Carver Community Center. Pryor credited her for decades afterward.

He was expelled from school at fourteen and worked a string of odd jobs around Peoria, including truck driving and meat packing. In 1958 he enlisted in the United States Army. His service lasted from 1958 to 1960 and ended after he was involved in a violent altercation with a white soldier while stationed in West Germany ^[2]. Back in Peoria, he began singing and telling jokes in small black nightclubs, discovering that the stories of his own neighborhood could hold an audience.

Pryor left Peoria in the early 1960s and worked the club circuit through the Midwest and East Coast before arriving in New York City in 1963. There he performed in Greenwich Village coffeehouses alongside emerging talents of the era. His early act was consciously modeled on Bill Cosby: clean, genial, and built for mainstream television. The approach worked well enough to land him appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Merv Griffin Show in the mid-1960s ^[2].

Success in that mode left him restless. By his own account, the turning point came in Las Vegas in September 1967, when he walked off the stage at the Aladdin Hotel mid-performance, unwilling to continue with an act he considered false to who he was ^[1]. The years that followed were a period of reinvention. He moved to Berkeley, California, around 1969, where he immersed himself in the counterculture and the Black political and literary scene, spending time with writers such as Ishmael Reed and activist Huey P. Newton.

When Pryor re-emerged, the transformation was complete. His new material drew directly on the world he had grown up in: winos, hustlers, preachers, and working people, rendered as full characters rather than punchlines. The 1971 album Craps (After Hours), recorded at a small Los Angeles club, captured the rawer style. His 1974 album That Nigger's Crazy became a commercial breakthrough, reaching gold status and winning the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Recording ^[3]. Who was Richard Pryor at this point? To critics and fellow comics, he was the most fearless voice in American comedy.

Any account of Richard Pryor achievements begins with the albums and concert films that redefined stand-up. He won five Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Recording, for That Nigger's Crazy (1975), Is It Something I Said? (1976), Bicentennial Nigger (1977), Rev. Du Rite (1982), and Live on the Sunset Strip (1983) ^[3]. His 1979 concert film Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, shot in Long Beach, California, is widely regarded by comedians and critics as one of the greatest stand-up performances ever filmed ^[4].

His writing career ran parallel to his performing. In the early 1970s he wrote for the television series Sanford and Son and The Flip Wilson Show, and he shared an Emmy Award in 1974 for his writing on a Lily Tomlin television special ^[2]. He co-wrote the screenplay for Mel Brooks's 1974 western satire Blazing Saddles, one of the highest grossing comedies of its decade. Brooks had wanted Pryor to star in the film, but the studio declined to cast him ^[4].

As a film actor, Pryor became one of Hollywood's most bankable stars of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He earned strong notices for a dramatic supporting role in Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and for Paul Schrader's Blue Collar (1978). His comic partnership with Gene Wilder produced four films, beginning with Silver Streak (1976) and Stir Crazy (1980), both major box office successes ^[5]. Other prominent titles included Which Way Is Up? (1977), Bustin' Loose (1981), and Superman III (1983), for which he received one of the largest salaries then paid to a comic actor. In 1983 he signed a production deal with Columbia Pictures reported at forty million dollars, through his company Indigo Productions ^[5].

Pryor's private life was turbulent and heavily publicized. He married seven times to five women: Patricia Price, Shelley Bonis, Deborah McGuire, Jennifer Lee (whom he married twice), and Flynn Belaine (also twice). He had seven children, including the actor and comedian Richard Pryor Jr. and the actress Rain Pryor ^[1]. Several of his marriages ended amid accounts of volatility and domestic conflict, subjects he addressed with startling candor in his own act.

Drug addiction shadowed much of his adult life, particularly cocaine. On June 9, 1980, Pryor suffered severe burns over roughly half his body in a fire at his home in the San Fernando Valley while freebasing cocaine. He spent six weeks in a hospital burn unit and later acknowledged that the incident had been a suicide attempt during a drug-induced psychosis, a subject he mined in Live on the Sunset Strip ^[1][6]. The episode became one of the most famous near-death experiences in American entertainment.

His politics and conscience surfaced in unexpected ways. After a 1979 trip to Kenya, he announced that he would stop using the racial slur that had titled two of his albums, a decision he explained on stage and in interviews ^[1]. He was also an animal welfare advocate late in life, lending his name to campaigns by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

In 1986 Pryor was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative neurological disease that gradually took away his mobility ^[6]. He continued to work through the late 1980s, directing and starring in the semi-autobiographical film Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986), in which he played a comedian reviewing his life after a fire. Later films, including Harlem Nights (1989) with Eddie Murphy and Redd Foxx, and a final Gene Wilder pairing, Another You (1991), came as his health declined.

By the mid-1990s he used a motorized scooter and appeared in public rarely. One late acting turn drew particular praise: a 1995 guest role on the CBS drama Chicago Hope as a patient with multiple sclerosis, which brought him an Emmy nomination ^[2]. That same year he published his memoir, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences, written with Todd Gold.

Honors accumulated as his performing life ended. In 1998 the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts named him the first recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, an award created to recognize lifetime achievement in comedy ^[7]. Comedians including Chris Rock and Whoopi Goldberg paid tribute at the ceremony. Pryor died of cardiac arrest on December 10, 2005, at his home in Encino, California, nine days after his sixty-fifth birthday ^[6].

Few entertainers have shaped their field as thoroughly as Pryor shaped stand-up comedy. Before him, most mainstream comedians told jokes; after him, the dominant mode became personal truth-telling, in which the performer's own failures, fears, and observations supplied the material. Jerry Seinfeld called him the Picasso of the profession, and comedians as different as Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, and Robin Williams named him a primary influence ^[4].

Institutional recognition followed his death. Comedy Central ranked him first on its 2004 list of the hundred greatest stand-up comedians. His album That Nigger's Crazy was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2006 he received a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award ^[3]. His concert films remain standard study material for working comedians, and his hometown of Peoria erected a statue of him, Richard Pryor: More Than Just a Comedian, in 2015.

Any Richard Pryor biography ultimately turns on a single quality: honesty pushed further than audiences thought possible. He talked about race, addiction, sex, and his own catastrophes with a precision that made painful subjects funny without making them small. The basic Richard Pryor facts, five Grammys, an Emmy, the first Mark Twain Prize, some forty film roles, describe the career. The influence lives wherever a comedian steps on stage and tells the truth about a hard life ^[4][7].