Richard Pryor
A fearless, autobiographical storyteller who turned his own hard life and the realities of race in America into comedy that reached a mass audience. He died on December 10, 2005, aged 65.
Personality
Pryor worked from raw honesty and impulse. His comedy was character-driven storytelling rather than conventional jokes, drawn from his own life and the people he grew up around. He could be badly nervous on stage early on, and he acted on sudden convictions: in 1967 he walked off a sold-out Las Vegas stage mid-show and afterwards rebuilt his act around franker material. After a 1979 trip to Kenya he announced he would stop using a racial slur that had been central to his act. Some colleagues, including Gene Wilder, described him as demanding on film sets.
Under pressure
Pryor's life swung between crisis and comeback. He grew up in hard circumstances in his grandmother's household in Peoria and was expelled from school at 14. A record-label dispute nearly kept his breakthrough album off the shelves in 1974, and The Richard Pryor Show was cancelled after four episodes in 1977, with Pryor unwilling to soften his material for network censors. After a near-fatal fire at his home in 1980, he returned to stand-up and addressed the episode directly in the concert film Live on the Sunset Strip (1982). He kept acting into the late 1990s.
The arc
Born in Peoria, Illinois, Pryor served in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1960, worked Midwestern clubs and moved to New York in 1963. His early television act followed Bill Cosby's style; by the late 1960s he had broken with it. In the 1970s he wrote for Sanford and Son and shared an Emmy for a Lily Tomlin special, co-wrote Blazing Saddles, and released Grammy-winning albums. Silver Streak and Stir Crazy with Gene Wilder made him a box-office star, and Stir Crazy made him the first Black actor paid a million dollars for a film. His last film role was in Lost Highway (1997).
Legacy
Pryor changed what stand-up comedy could be, showing that personal confession and frank talk about race could reach a mass audience. Comedy Central in 2004 and Rolling Stone in 2017 both ranked him the greatest stand-up comedian, ahead of George Carlin. He was the first Black host of Saturday Night Live and the first recipient of the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Later generations of Black comedians, including Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock, built on the path he opened, and his concert films remain models of the form.
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