Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor (December 1, 1940 – December 10, 2005) was an American comedian, actor, film director, social critic, satirist, and writer who made trenchan…
Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor (December 1, 1940 – December 10, 2005) was an American comedian, actor, film director, social critic, satirist, and writer who made trenchant observations with a storytelling approach. ◦ He was born December 1, 1940, in Peoria, Illinois, and grew up in a brothel run by his grandmother, Marie Carter; his mother was a prostitute and his father a former boxer, hustler, and pimp. ◦ After his mother abandoned him at age 10, Pryor was raised primarily by his grandmother Marie, "a tall, violent woman who would beat him for any of his eccentricities." ◦ He was sexually abused at age seven and expelled from school at 14. ◦ His trauma included walking in on his mother with the white mayor of Peoria. ◦ Over his career he produced 20 comedy albums, won five Grammys, appeared in more than 30 films, and in 1980 became the first black actor to earn a million dollars for a single film (Stir Crazy). ◦ He battled multiple sclerosis for nearly two decades before his death in 2005. ◦ In 1998 he was the first person to receive the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. ◦ ◦
Pryor articulated his own self-image as an artist: "I saw myself as a victim of the system, an outsider for whom justice was out of reach, a dream. And then I saw how closely my situation mirrored the black man's larger struggle for dignity and equality and justice in white society. So I became a kind of prism, refracting the experience of a race." ◦ At heart, he was an acerbic social critic, delving into the divisions of race and class with humor filled with profanity, anger and broadly drawn characters. ◦ He presented black life in a straightforward, unapologetic way that broke down barriers and opened doors for present-day comics such as Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock. ◦ He was a savage, equal-opportunity satirist who targeted white racism, his fellow African-Americans, and -- finally and most severely -- himself, and he refused to take the route of special pleading. ◦
Pryor modeled his early career on Bill Cosby, but soon decided to stop playing it safe. ◦ He developed a foul-mouthed persona, drawing on black life to give his comedy a realistic and gritty edge. ◦ During the 1970s he used the racial epithet "nigger" regularly; he said he wanted to take the sting out of it, hoping that saying it over and over again would numb him and everybody else to it. ◦ A 1979 trip to Africa changed his views, and he swore he would never use the word in his stand-up again. ◦ He refused to alter his material for network censors, resulting in a short-lived NBC variety show cancelled after four episodes. ◦ He said of the show, "They offered me ten episodes, but I said all I wanted to in four." ◦ Even at his most confessional, he "wasn't telling us the whole truth about the night that almost killed him" and refused to address the incident until the one-hour mark of *Live on the Sunset Strip*. ◦
He saw himself as "a kind of prism, refracting the experience of a race." ◦ During the 1970s he used the racial epithet "nigger" regularly because he wanted to take the sting out of it, hoping that saying it over and over again would numb him and everybody else to it. ◦ A 1979 trip to Africa changed his views, and he swore he would never use the word in his stand-up again. ◦
Pryor produced 20 comedy albums and appeared in more than 30 films. ◦ He was an acerbic social critic delving into the divisions of race and class. ◦ His sole directorial effort was *Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling*, a biopic. ◦
He made trenchant observations with a storytelling approach. ◦ His humor was filled with profanity, anger and broadly drawn characters, and he often wrote about his own troubles and hardships: drug abuse, failed marriages and arrests. ◦ His vocabulary was down and dirty, but his work had a surprising elegance. ◦ He was always himself, yet could populate the stage with a cast of characters ranging from a pack of dogs to a bewildered black alcoholic to a Mafia thug. ◦ His recurring stage characters, headed by a wise old drunk called Mudbone, "were at once volatile and vulnerable, gross and sensitive, streetwise and intimidated." ◦
His recurring stage characters "were at once volatile and vulnerable, gross and sensitive, streetwise and intimidated." ◦ He was a savage, equal-opportunity satirist who targeted white racism, his fellow African-Americans, and -- finally and most severely -- himself. ◦ Even at his most confessional, he "wasn't telling us the whole truth about the night that almost killed him" -- the burns resulted from either a suicide attempt or a freebasing explosion, or some impossible-to-separate combination of both. ◦ His sole directorial effort, *Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling*, is a biopic "wrapped in a protective layer of fiction" and is "honest and unflattering but only up to a point," representing one chapter in a larger autobiographical project filled with candor and contradictions. ◦
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