A Man Who Transformed the World as We Knew it.

Richard Pryor, comic voice of black America, dies

Ned Temko
Sunday December 11, 2005
The Observer


Richard Pryor, whose genius for turning personal tragedy and social injustice into humour made him one of the most influential American comedians of the last four decades, died yesterday. Pryor, who was 65, had been ill for several years with multiple sclerosis.

Born in the Midwestern state of Illinois and brought up in a brothel, he began, like many black comedians at the time, by trying to appeal to respectable audiences. All that changed after what he later called a stage 'epiphany' in 1967, before a posh hotel audience in Las Vegas. He looked into the crowd, paused, suddenly said into the microphone 'What the fuck am I doing here?' - and walked off stage.

What followed was a redefined Pryor, a self-styled angry 'nigger' who combined the profanity of Lenny Bruce with the perfect timing of old Vaudeville. Over the next two decades, he made a huge impact as a stand-up comedian with a foul mouth and a sharp wit, inspiring a generation of artists from Eddie Murphy to Robin Williams.

Pryor moved from stand-up to a series of hit film comedies during the Seventies and Eighties, starring in films including Stir Crazy, and Silver Streak.

He didn't tone things down after he became famous. In his 1977 NBC television series The Richard Pryor Show, he threatened to cancel his contract with the network. NBC's censors objected to a skit where he appeared naked except for a flesh-coloured loincloth to suggest he was emasculated.

His stage routine and films often drew on personal tragedy, particularly when he set himself on fire while using cocaine in 1980. This led to a painfully funny stand-up act recorded in a film, Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip. He once told an interviewer it was 'much easier for me to talk about my life in front of 2,000 people than one-to-one. I'm a real defensive person ... If you were sensitive in my neighbourhood, you were food.'

Even when he was in poor health with MS, a degenerative disease of the nervous system, comedy remained a lifeline. During one performance in the early Nineties, he asked: 'Is there a doctor in the audience?' All he got was nervous laughter so he added: 'No, I'm serious. I want to know if there's a doctor here.'

A hand finally went up. 'Doctor,' Pryor said, 'I need to know one thing. What the fuck is MS?'

The comedian once marvelled that 'I live in racist America and I'm uneducated, yet a lot of people love me and like what I do and I can make a living from it. You can't do much better than that.'