Becoming Richard Pryor (68 page)

T
here are two periods in comedy in America: before Richard Pryor and after Richard Pryor.” So declared actor-comedian Paul Rodriguez, and few practicing comics, whether born in 1929 or 1969, would beg to differ. Among the generation before Pryor, Mel Brooks has classed Pryor as “the funniest comedian of all time,” ahead of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harpo Marx; Bob Newhart has named him “the single most seminal comedic influence in the past 50 years.” Among the generation after Pryor, he has been called “the Picasso of our profession” (Jerry Seinfeld) and “the Rosa Parks of comedy” (Chris Rock). Comedians from Eddie Murphy and Damon Wayans to George Lopez and Margaret Cho have recalled the impact Pryor made on their young selves and offered a version of Bernie Mac’s economical tribute: “Without Richard, there would be no me.”

But if Pryor was, in Wayans’s words, the artist who “started it all,” what exactly did he start? It’s easier to nod to the scale of Pryor’s achievement than to capture its precise contours. His artistic legacy is extremely various—and as packed with complexities as the personality he presented onstage. Pryor could be foul-mouthed and delicate, cruel and tender, straight-ahead and experimental. He could be the most hilarious and the most troubling of comedians. He could be soul brother number one and a trickster who slipped the bonds of race. How to encompass all these Pryors?

We might start by refusing to pigeonhole him in the most obvious way. Conducting interviews for this book, I commonly heard the complaint that Pryor was misunderstood as an artist—that too often people mistook the headline-generating part of Pryor’s style, his use of obscenity, for the whole. “All they remember is the profanity,” said the poet-critic Amiri Baraka, “and they can’t get to the profundity.” Actor Tim Reid went so far as to suggest that “Richard has probably
spawned more bad comics than any comic in history”: “they listened to his words but they didn’t understand his creativity.” For his part, Pryor himself grew frustrated when hip critics kept grouping him with Lenny Bruce, the other pioneer of obscenity in stand-up; he said he suffered from “the Lenny Bruce syndrome.” And considering Pryor’s approach to the stage, one can understand why the comparison rankled. Lenny Bruce was a satirist who made points; Pryor was a searcher who explored, in the words of Mudbone, how oftentimes “there is no point to be made.”

Perhaps it’s best, for clarity’s sake, to isolate three different aspects of Pryor’s achievement: his legacy as a stand-up comic, as a social critic, and as a crossover artist.

As a stand-up, Pryor was a revolutionary in the spirit of the high 1960s, suggesting that nothing was off-limits. Not only did he refuse to respect the boundaries of “good taste,” but more powerfully, he turned his own powers of scrutiny on himself and declared that nothing was off-limits there, either. His anxiety and his fury, his self-loathing and his cravings for intimacy, sex, and power—in other words, the parts of him that might have shamed or endangered him—were the lifeblood of his stage act. There was a swirling, centrifugal energy to Pryor’s stand-up; audiences were pulled deep into his inner drama. At the same time, Pryor had a finely honed capacity to fling himself outward and into character. His stage instantly became a carnival of working-class black life, or a free-fire zone where the battle of the sexes played out. Often, even a personal soliloquy evolved into a multicharacter playlet, his angels and demons manifesting as characters with their own voices and body language.

To create these well-populated worlds, Pryor didn’t merely unzip his brain and let the characters out. Rather, he used his craft. In the tributes from his fellow comedians, one hears the admiration of those who understand the effort that goes into the look of effortlessness. In Pryor’s case, his craft was mastered over three decades, through lessons with a succession of teachers and collaborators. Over his first twenty years, he absorbed, from his grandmother, a gift for storytelling;
from his father, an eye for the cruel yet telling detail; and from the examples of Jerry Lewis and Sid Caesar, an antic expressiveness that made caricature come alive. Over the next ten years, he discovered, with his comic friends in Greenwich Village, how to lose himself in improv; with Redd Foxx, how to make dirty jokes his own; and with Paul Mooney and his Berkeley writer friends, how to sharpen the political edge of his satire. Later, as he collaborated with the likes of Mel Brooks and Lily Tomlin, he remained open to what each could give him, whether as catalyst or sounding board. He perfected the art of dramatizing his own imperfections, and the world’s.

As a social critic, Pryor is best summed up by the epithet his friend Paul Mooney coined for him: Dark Twain. Just as Mark Twain looked at the aftermath of the Civil War and meditated, with wit and troubling insight, on how people remained unfree after the watershed of emancipation, so Pryor skeptically sized up America in the moment after the freedom movements of the 1960s had washed over it. Having grown up in brothels, he never lost the raw, brothel-oriented point of view. The ugliness of the world was not something to be flinched at or avoided. He detested euphemisms because they dulled the hard smack of the truth; he wanted to bring his audience to its senses. And so he became, for many in the 1970s, a guide to how much and how little the world had changed after Black Power and Flower Power. Blacks might have a new set of rights on paper, but they were still brutalized by police, criminalized by the media, shunted off to prisons, or caught in the gears of the welfare bureaucracy. Lovers might talk more frankly about sex and pleasure, but they still talked past one another or stung one another with insults. And as for drugs, well, they might open the doors of perception, but they might also drop you into the abyss, or worse.

With material like “Bicentennial Nigger” and “Black Death,” Pryor could be severe as he followed the logic of American violence to its brutal end. (Another connection with Twain: the finale of
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
has the self-satisfied hero electrocuting twenty-five thousand knights until they have fused into
“homogeneous protoplasm, with alloys of iron and buttons.”) Yet Pryor wasn’t the sort to deliver a message in italics or hand down a judgment from a mountaintop. He was allergic to self-righteousness and shuddered to find it in himself. Rather than hold himself up as a model of integrity, he presented himself as someone in danger of cracking up, reduced to a lesser version of himself, with just his mother wit to save him. Here he showed a way of handling the pressure of stereotype that later performers, of all backgrounds, found liberating. “The comedian who really moved me was Richard Pryor,” recalled Roseanne Barr. “I knew that he was inside the stereotype and fighting against it, that he was going to blow it up from the inside. I got that immediately. I thought, By God, I’m going to do the same thing being a woman.”

Pryor’s work as a crossover artist is probably the most misunderstood and underappreciated aspect of his career. His Berkeley friend Ishmael Reed captured the common view when he wrote, upon Pryor’s death, that Pryor was a “comic genius who let Hollywood use him.” (Reed wished, for Pryor’s legacy as an artist, that the comic had resisted the charms of the film industry and stayed in Berkeley.) Reed’s view has taken hold for reasons that are easy to understand. Pryor was generally more unbuttoned on the concert stage than the sound stage, and he himself disavowed many of his films upon their release, offering that he’d been “hustled” or that he’d done a project just for the money. As he grew older he didn’t seem to shed these misgivings: in his memoir, he spent shockingly little time on the films that consumed much of his energy in the 1970s and after. And as few critics would dispute, Pryor’s movies after 1983 were often weak tea. It can be tempting, then, to draw a line between the “genius” Pryor and the “sellout” Pryor, with the “genius” Pryor conveniently color-coded as the “blacker” Pryor. His stand-up albums and concert films, powered by the creativity of a black man alone onstage, would fall in the “genius” category; his non-concert films would stand as evidence of how an obtuse Hollywood failed to adapt to the arrival of a formula-shattering black talent.

There are two problems with this view. First, while one can lament
all that Pryor didn’t accomplish on-screen, the more remarkable story is how Pryor became one of the most unlikely stars in Hollywood history, jimmying a window open, sneaking into the dream factory, and taking over one of its projection rooms.
Lady Sings the Blues
,
Wattstax
, and
Silver Streak
—each of these breakthrough films for Pryor had been conceived with him in a minimal role at best, then were jolted into a new shape by his improvisations. In his Hollywood career, Pryor was aided and abetted by a wide range of collaborators, mostly Jewish or black, who believed in his wayward talent and sometimes staked their credibility upon it. The list of these collaborators is long, and might start with the names John Badham, Mel Brooks, Michael Campus, Rob Cohen, Berry Gordy, James B. Harris, Arthur Hiller, Max Julien, Thom Mount, Sidney Poitier, Paul Schrader, Michael Schultz, Mel Stuart, and Hannah Weinstein. And while it would be wrong to underplay the tension Pryor felt toward many of them, especially white directors like Badham, Campus, and Schrader, it would be churlish to deny that they were crucial intercessors. By trusting in Pryor’s talent, they gave him a new platform, one often conceived with the brazen character of his stand-up in mind.
Bingo Long
,
Which Way Is Up?
, and
Blue Collar
were all scripted with Pryor’s stand-up crackling in the background, and the finished films have a good deal of its bounce and bite.

The second problem with the dismissal of Pryor’s crossover work is that it can lead us to misconstrue the nature of his creativity. In some sense, all his creative projects—not just his films for Hollywood—were the result of his hunger to “cross over.” He grew up in the tough-minded world of Peoria’s red-light district, and though he held tight to his native knowledge as the grandson of Marie Pryor, madam and matriarch, he yearned for an alternative to the dominion of Marie—a world where he might discover his freedom. His first major crossover performance was at Blaine-Sumner elementary school, before a group of white classmates; his second, at the Carver Center, before a “respectable” black audience of parents and children; his third, at Harold’s Club, before a mixed audience looking to escape respectability. He never stopped from there. “Pryor’s career in total,” sums
up critic Greg Tate, “was a masterpiece of how to keep it moving.”

The stage attracted Pryor because it was a place to experiment with his identity, to make himself as large and as various as his imagination allowed. He pushed beyond the boundaries of his blackness even as he dramatized the extraordinary richness of black life—a balancing act that made him an “off-color” comedian in a different, more profound sense. He was an unusual combination: a trickster in love with the power of disguise and a seeker driven to push beyond surfaces and get to the bottom of things, where he hoped to find something like love, or a state of sheer connection.

When asked by Barbara Walters, not long after he burned himself alive, if he saw the world in terms of black people and white people, Pryor answered by reframing the question.

“I see people,” he said searchingly, “as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn’t come to be yet.”

W
riting this book has been an intensely collaborative effort, and it gives me great pleasure to acknowledge those who helped give it shape.

Richard Pryor’s own family was extraordinarily generous, adding much insight to my sense of Pryor and his formative years. I would like to thank his great-uncle Allen Pryor, his daughter Elizabeth Pryor, his daughter Rain Pryor, and his son Richard Pryor Jr. for their gracious response to my inquiries. In particular, I would like to thank his sister Barbara McGee for the trove of family photographs she shared; his sister Sharon Wilson Pryor for her brave choice to revisit painful memories with me; and his wife Jennifer Pryor, whose assistance allowed me to procure Pryor’s school and U.S. Army records.

One of the joys of writing this book is that it gave me a reason to meet a small galaxy of fascinating people and ask questions—often extremely impertinent ones—about their past. The book would be inconceivable without the generosity of those who agreed to reflect on their past involvements with Richard Pryor and the circles he inhabited. I wish to thank Bob Altman, Irving Arthur, Michael Ashburne, John Badham, Bill Banks, the late Amiri Baraka, Pete Barbutti, Pat Benson, Andrew Bergman, the late Harvey Bernhard, Jimmy Binkley, Michael Blum, Ben Caldwell, Caryl Camacho, Joe
Camacho, Ralph Camilli, Don Campbell, Michael Campus, Matt Clark, Rob Cohen, Loren Cornish, John Davidson, Ron DeBlasio, Jim Demetropolis, Henry Diltz, Paul Dorpat, Rick Edelstein, the late Alan Farley, Susan Fink, Jane Fishbeck, Silver Saundors Friedman, Sandy Gallin, Carl Gottlieb, Dick Green, Hillis Griswold, Michael Grussemeyer, Cecil Grubbs, Paul Hampton, James Harris, Patricia Heitman, Bert Heyman, Thomas Henseler, Arthur Hiller, Maria Höhn, Henry Jaglom, Margaret Kelch, Craig Kellem, the late Zalman King, Harvey Levine, Robert Marchese, Lonette McKee, Kres Mersky, John Moffitt, Joe Mosley, Sam Mosley, Sonya Nesbit, Harold Parker Jr., Ishmael Reed, Tim Reid, the late Manny Roth, Michael Schultz, Kirk Silsbee, Willis Smith, Penelope Spheeris, Dave Sprattling, Norman Steinberg, the late Mel Stuart, Murray Swartz, Judy Tannen, Renee Taylor, Ros Taylor, Joan Thornell, Fred Tieken, Cathryn Timmes, John Timmes, Lily Tomlin, Rocco Urbisci, Melvin Van Peebles, Jeff Wald, Hollie West, and Bruce Scott Zaxarides.

The research for this book took me through a maze of archives large and small, public and private, where I found no shortage of material that begged to be deciphered. For helping me to locate, interpret, and/or reprint such material here, I owe a special debt to the following individuals and institutions: Pam Adams, Linda Aylward and Elaine Sokolowski of the Peoria Public Library, the Bahai Center of Peoria, the Bradley University Special Collections Library, Don Cannon, the City of Peoria’s Records Office, the Decatur Circuit Court’s Office, Brian DeShazor of Pacifica Archives, Deborah Dougherty, Dan Einstein of UCLA’s Film and Television Archive, Zephyr Frank, John Glover of Fort Leonard Wood, Martha Hammer of the Peoria Police Department, Edie Harris, David Houston of the
Los Angeles Daily Journal
, Rick Hunter and Amy Schwegel of the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library, Tal Kahana, Norm Kelly, Harry Langdon, Tammy Lomelino of the Peoria County Circuit Clerk’s Office, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Mary Ann Mason, Rachel McPherson, the Paley Center for Media, Richard Peek
of the University of Rochester, the
Peoria Journal Star
, the Peoria Public Schools Office, Dylan Penningroth, Jim Ralph, Marcia Reed, Loni Shibuyama of ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, and USC’s Cinematic Arts Library and its David L. Wolper Center for the Study of Documentary. I would like to give an extra tip of the cap to Rhino’s Reggie Collins, who has often lent me his expert knowledge of Richard Pryor’s recordings, released and unreleased.