Pryor, Richard

(b. 1 December 1940 in Peoria, Illinois; d. 10 December 2005 in Los Angeles, California), award-winning comedian, actor, and writer who is widely considered the most influential comedian of his era.

Pryor was born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III in Saint Francis Hospital in Peoria, Illinois. His father, Leroy “Buck Carter” Pryor, was an itinerant vaudeville performer who met Pryor’s mother, Gertrude Thomas, while on the road in the late 1930s. They settled in Peoria and were married about three years after their son’s birth. A few years later, the embattled couple separated. Although the young Pryor, an only child, sometimes visited with his mother, she became a shadowy presence in his life. Responsibility for his upbringing was left largely to Marie Carter Pryor, his paternal grandmother, who operated a string of local bars and brothels in which both Pryor’s mother and father worked for a time.

Pryor’s childhood was at best bizarre and extreme. “Family is a mixed blessing,” he wrote in the autobiography Pryor Convictions: And Other Life Sentences (1995). “You’re glad to have one, but it’s also like receiving a life sentence for a crime you didn’t commit.” Indeed, growing up among the seamy, often violent world of hustlers, pimps, and prostitutes in Peoria’s black ghetto left an indelible mark, which influenced his turbulent personal life and his satirical view of society.

At age six Pryor was enrolled in a Catholic grammar school, but when school authorities discovered the nature of the family business, he was expelled. The clash between his disreputable family life and the conventional moral tenets of the outside world into which his grandmother attempted to introduce him, along with at least two instances of sexual abuse by adults and several racist encounters, contributed to his growing adolescent confusion and trauma. Although he was bright, the self-described “skinny little black kid” became a troublemaker and class cutup. He began using his quick wit and antic humor to amuse classmates and ingratiate himself with bigger, more violent street gang members. By age fourteen he was expelled from school because of his disruptive behavior. He never returned.

He remained in Peoria, picking up odd jobs and occasionally appearing at open-mike comedy shows. He also fathered the first of his seven children, a daughter who was born out of wedlock in 1957. Frustrated and unable to support himself, Pryor joined the army in 1958. His stint in the service ended in 1960 when he was discharged after assaulting another soldier during a brawl. Returning to Peoria that year, he took a job at a tractor company and married Patricia Price; their son was born in 1961. Settling into a “normal” life, however, was unsatisfying. Pryor was drawn to the stage. He had seen the comic Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby, the comedian he most admired and imitated, on television and was convinced that he could be as funny as they were. He soon began doing impressions and telling standard jokes at a local nightclub. After the birth of their child, he and his wife were divorced in 1961, and Pryor left Peoria to hone his craft on the Midwest black club circuit. He then moved to New York City in 1963, determined to match Cosby’s success.

Appearances in Greenwich Village cafés led to bookings in larger clubs, and in 1964 Pryor made his national television debut on Rudy Vallee’s show On Broadway Tonight. Later appearances on the The Ed Sullivan Show, The Merv Griffin Show, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and the offer of his first film role in The Busy Body (1967) prompted Variety to rave about his “healthy instinct for irreverence.” Despite the success, Pryor was unhappy with his “white bread,” Cosby-like approach to humor. He was haunted by a darker, more irreverent comic vision. “The pressure built up until I went nuts,” he later wrote. Offstage, a series of brawls, run-ins with authorities, domestic disputes, and an escalating cocaine habit reflected his inner turmoil. Pressure increased in April 1967, when Maxine Silverman (whom he did not marry) gave birth to his third child. The couple separated immediately afterward.

Pryor’s personal and professional conflicts came to a head in September 1967 during an appearance at the Las Vegas Aladdin Hotel when, disoriented and frustrated, he walked off the stage in the middle of his act. Told that he would never work in Las Vegas again, he moved to Los Angeles and, his stand-up career in near ruin, went into virtual exile. From 1968 to the early seventies, aided by the young comic and writer Paul Mooney, he wrote and tried out edgier, character-based material that reflected the ghetto voices he had heard during his childhood. Initially there was some resistance to the explicit language and sexual content. But by the time his second album—Craps (After Hours)—was released in 1971, his humor was finding an audience with young African Americans as well as some peers. “I was in the audience when Richard took on a whole new persona,” Bill Cosby said. “He worked on them, doing pure Pryor, and it was the most astonishing metamorphosis I have ever seen. He was magnificent.”

In 1967 Pryor married Shelley Bonus, and in July 1969 his fourth child was born. The marriage dissolved that same year, as the comic struggled to advance his career. By 1973, however, Pryor was again gaining recognition outside the black community. There was talk of an Oscar nomination for his performance in Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and he and Mel Brooks were collaborating on the script for Blazing Saddles (1974). Pryor was also writing for the The Flip Wilson Show and Redd Foxx’s Sanford and Son television show, and in 1974 he won an Emmy for writing contributions to Lily (1973), a Lily Tomlin television special. His third album, That Nigger’s Crazy (1974), was the first of a series of records that, although they were X-rated, won Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album of the Year. In the mid-seventies Pryor also had notable appearances on the late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live and featured roles in such films as the box-office hit Silver Streak (1976), Greased Lightning (1977), Which Way Is Up? (1977), Blue Collar (1978), and The Wiz (1978).

Pryor had emerged not only as one of the country’s most innovative comics but also as one of the film industry’s most marketable stars; his stock at Hollywood studios rocketed. He signed multimillion-dollar movie deals with Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Studios in 1977, and the National Broadcasting Company approached him to appear in a series of comedy specials. Personal troubles, however, still plagued him. On 22 September 1977 he ended an affair with the actress Pam Grier to wed a twenty-three-year-old starlet named Deboragh McGuire. They were separated after less than four months—during which time Pryor had suffered his first heart attack. In 1979 they were divorced.

After recovering from the heart attack in 1978, Pryor began a stage tour that showcased new comedy material. Another example of his turning crisis into comedy, it was an immediate success. Wanted—Richard Pryor Live in Concert, an album recorded at one concert, went gold immediately. A performance in Long Beach, California, was filmed and released as Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979); the low-budget movie broke box-office records in urban theaters across the nation and was hailed by critics. Describing Pryor as “a master of lyrical obscenity” and “the only great poet satirist among our comics,” the New Yorker critic Pauline Kael praised the film as “a consummation of his years as an entertainer... one of greatest performances we’d ever seen or would ever see.”

Live in Concert marked what many consider the pinnacle of Pryor’s career. In June 1980, less than a year after its release, another tragedy loomed. While freebasing cocaine in his Los Angeles home, Pryor set himself afire. He was severely burned, and many doubted that he would survive. Less than a year after being released from Sherman Oaks Hospital and Burn Center, however, he began work on Some Kind of Hero (1982) with Margot Kidder. He also returned to the comedy stage, where footage for his second concert film, Richard Pryor, Live on Sunset Strip (1982), was hastily assembled.

In August 1981 Pryor again married, but the volatile relationship with Jennifer Lee, a longtime companion, ended in divorce a little over a year later, in October 1982, and Pryor’s personal life continued its chaotic course. An affair with the twenty-year-old actress and writer Flynn BeLaine led to the birth of Pryor’s fifth child in 1984. Pryor and BeLaine were married in October 1986 but divorced a few months later, in January 1987. Meanwhile, his sixth child was born in 1987. The mother was the actress Geraldine Mason, whom Pryor had met while filming Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986). Pryor’s last child was also born in 1987, when BeLaine gave birth nine months after their divorce.

Pryor’s health was also failing. During the summer of 1986 doctors at the Mayo Clinic had informed Pryor that he had multiple sclerosis. Although he did not immediately publicize the diagnosis and would complete several more feature films, including See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), the progressively degenerative disease ultimately crippled him. On 1 April 1990 Pryor and BeLaine married for a second time but were divorced the following year. Finally, in June 2001 Pryor remarried Jennifer Lee. He occasionally appeared on stage in the early nineties, working from a wheelchair, and made his final movie appearance in Lost Highway (1997). By the mid-1990s, although his spirit had not been dampened, his career had come to a virtual halt. Tributes and accolades poured in, but the once outspoken comedian struggled to communicate during public appearances at such events as the 1998 John F. Kennedy Center ceremony, when he became the first recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Among other honors, he also earned the American Writers Guild Award (1974) and the American Comedy Lifetime Achievement Award (1992).

Lee was at his side on 10 December 2005, when Pryor died of cardiac arrest at Encino Hospital near Los Angeles. Services were held at Forest Lawn–Hollywood Hills Cemetery. Pryor’s impact and lasting influence on American humor and African American comedy, in particular, is universally acknowledged. He was undoubtedly the most influential comedian of his era. Like the legendary Lenny Bruce, he stretched the acceptable perimeters of uninhibited satirical commentary, but unlike his gifted predecessor, through the sheer virtuosity of his performance artistry, Pryor was able to transform that satire into a popular mass culture staple. As the playwright Neil Simon once said, he was “the most brilliant comic in America—no one [was] funnier or more perceptive.”

Finally, however, his achievements transcend comedy. He was the first comedian to successfully speak to mainstream America in the unadulterated language of the street. By humanizing and giving substance to voices and types that were often outcasts even within the ghetto, he paved the way for open expression from a segment of society that had been largely ignored. His final legacy may be that he was instrumental in opening up a broader, more humane view of African American life—an achievement that not only had an effect on all areas of popular entertainment but also influenced the way we perceive America’s minority communities.

Pryor’s life is chronicled in the book he wrote with Todd Gold, Pryor Convictions: And Other Life Sentences (1995). For more on his life and work, see Jim Haskins, Richard Pryor, A Man and His Madness: A Biography (1984); and Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy (1998), and “The High-Wire Satire of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor,” CommonQuest (Winter 1998). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 11 Dec. 2005).

Mel Watkins