Richard Pryor, Giant of Comedy,
Dead at Age 65

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

Talk about Richard Pryor! Click here.

Richard Pryor, the cutting edge Black comic who transformed both comedy and America's public conversations abut race, died on Saturday, Dec. 10, of a heart attack. He was 65.

His wife, Jennifer Pryor, told CNN that he died of cardiac arrest shortly before 8 a.m. after her failed efforts to resuscitate him and after being taken to a hospital in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino. "He was an extraordinary man, as you know," she told CNN. "He enjoyed life right up until the end. He did not suffer, he went quickly, at the end there was a smile on his face ... he's a very, very, very amazing man and he opened doors to so many people."

Pryor, who celebrated his birthday on Dec. 1, had been suffering from multiple sclerosis and fading from the performance scene, for nearly 20 years. But before that, during the 1970's and 1980's, he, more than any other comic, brought to the comedic stage the pathos, brutality and raw expression of his generation of African-Americans that had just staged a social revolution in the streets. His revolution was on the stage, where he regularly dropped reality bombs about America's racism, peppered his routines with the N-word (then later recanted use of the word) and made increasingly in-your-face comedy out of various street characters and events in his life, often angering Blacks and Whites.

His routines also included incidents involving the police, like the time he shot up his car when one of his wives tried to leave him in, or in 1980 when he critically burned himself over much of his body while free-basing cocaine. In what many consider his finest comedy performance, on January 1979 at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, Ca. (recorded as "Richard Pryor: Live in Concert") he made comedy out of a heart attack he had experienced a few years before. The excruciatingly funny routine included his heart cursing at him, making him kneel and chiding for "eating all that pork." At the end of the bit, when he awakes in the ambulance with all Whites staring at him, he complains that he has died and gone to the wrong (White) heaven, where he will have to "listen to Lawrence Welk" for eternity.

"Richard Pryor is a cultural giant who transformed the medium he worked in just as Miles Davis transformed music," said Reginald Hudlin, president of entertainment for BET, who met Pryor and 'worked with everyone who was a disciple.' "Just in television alone, without "The Richard Pryor Show," you don't have "Saturday Night Live," you don't have "In Living Color," you don't have "The Chapelle Show. There is no stand-up comedian today that doesn't owe him a great debt."

Such signature routines frequently involved such explorations of the racial cultural divide—at a time when African Americans were boldly asserting a new Black aesthetic that did not shy away from criticism and ridicule of "The Man." Subsequent generations of stand-up comedians and screen writers—including Martin Lawrence, Robert Townsend, Bernie Mac, Cedric the Entertainer and D.L Hughley—have continue to copy this and other poses of Pryor, sometimes ad nauseum, in routines that include ridiculing the supposed white bread manner in which whites eat, walk, dance or even engage in sexual intimacy. The mimicry of Pryor's picking on Whites bold enough to be in his stand-up audience has become standard Black comedic fare.

Pryor's life-based routines, which expanded the usual set-up and punch line of the comedy routine, were influential on all comedians, including Robin Williams and Jeff Foxworthy. Many who have written about him—including the journalist Mel Watkins in his book, On the Real Side—have noted that Pryor's combination of wicked raw wit, pathos and social commentary was undoubtedly kindled during his childhood in the racially polarized community of Peoria, Ill., when he grew up in a brothel that his grandmother operated and where his mother worked as a prostitute. Despite their line of work, which first brought Pryor into contact with White men from the other side of the tracks, Pryor's family enforced strict discipline on him and wanted him to get a good education and make something out of himself.

According to Watkins, Pryor decided in 1963 to leave the chitlin circuits of the Midwest and head to the comedy stages of New York and Los Angeles, and, finally, to the big-money world of Hollywood films, where he coasted artistically during the final years of his working life in films including "Stir Crazy" and "Silver Streak." Meatier film performances earlier in career included a role as Billie Holiday's pianist in the 1972 film "Lady Sings the Blues" and a role as a union organizer in the important and underrated flick, "Blue Collar." He was married several times. He and his ex-wife, Flynn Pryor, have a son, Steven. He also has another son, Richard, as well as three daughters, Elizabeth, Rain and Renee.

"[Richard Pryor] is the groundbreaker," comedic actor and producer Keenan Ivory Wayans is quoted as saying in On the Real Side. "For most of us he was the inspiration to get into comedy and also showed us that you can be Black and have a Black voice and be successful."

Filmmaker Spike Lee said in a phone interview with CNN that Pryor "was a giant, he was an innovator, he was a trailblazer, and the way he used social commentary in his humor opened up a universe to other comics to follow in his footsteps."

This obituary first appeared on www.BET.com. Esther Iverem's new book of poems, Living in Babylon, is available at through SeeingBlack.com's store at Amazon.com.

— December 13, 2005

© Copyright 2001-05 Seeing Black, Inc. All Rights Reserved.