I had begun writing on an entirely different subject for this month’s column—plea bargaining—but then a friend called to tell me that Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III had died. I put all thoughts about plea bargains aside, went down to my basement, and dug out an old Pryor album. Staring at it, I was overwhelmed by how sad I felt, and overwhelmed that I was so overwhelmed. Why should the death of a foul-mouthed drug addict, who blew through six marriages and self-immolated while freebasing cocaine, matter to me? The answer came before I finished asking the question: For thirty years, going back to the first time I heard a Pryor routine, his comedy soothed my soul and gave me perspective. Not to mention that he was bust-a-gut funny.
I first saw Richard Pryor in the 1972 Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues. He plays “Piano Man,” Holiday’s main musical sideman, who dies of a drug overdose. I was thirteen then, and to me, Pryor was just another actor. About a year later, however, one of my friends relayed a riff from a Pryor album in which he theorizes about why Patty Hearst ditched her rich family and joined her captors in robbing banks (if you haven’t heard the routine, it had something to do with race and genital size). I was astounded that someone would make a joke like that on a record. I had to hear it for myself. So I bought the album and, early one morning when everyone was asleep, I crept down to the basement. I turned on the stereo with the volume low and traveled to another, more scandalous world. The next day, I bought two more albums.
In the months that followed, whenever my sister and I felt like living dangerously, we would mix a batch of “special ice tea” (tea and cheap wine), sneak down to the basement, and listen to Richard Pryor albums. Pryor, born and raised in his grandmother’s brothel in Peoria, Illinois, transported us from our middle-class, good-Negro world to one where people called each other niggas, liberally used the f-word, and put white people in their places. Listening to his brutally funny stories made us feel rebellious, cool, and authentically black.
Some of Pryor’s routines became permanently etched into our memories. His musings became an underground language for us “brothas” in the “soul patrol,” code for cool in what, for us, was often a very uncool world. When we wanted to navigate a delicate social situation—talk our way into a hot date, or out of a big mess—we would use one of Pryor’s skits for inspiration. What we did not fully appreciate at the time was that he had more to offer than dirty talk and vulgarity, though I admit that was a strong part of the initial attraction. Pryor was also a master storyteller who, with impeccable inflection and timing, commented on the daily struggles of life from an unvarnished African-American male point of view. Unlike Bill Cosby, who sanitized his routines to make them palatable to the mainstream (i.e., a white audience), Pryor was raw and real. When talking about his drug addiction, he commented that he must have “snorted up Peru.” He spoke vividly of the emotional pain in having your woman walk out on you and the physical pain in becoming a human torch while freebasing cocaine.
What my little posse in Denver was doing—incorporating Pryor’s routines and jokes into a vocabulary—was being done by kids, especially black males, all over America in the seventies. Pryor’s stories and quips fueled a national dialect for African-American men. When I arrived at Harvard in 1977, I found that referring to a Pryor routine usually brought a knowing nod from other black students, whether they came from Manhattan’s Upper East Side or South Central L.A. When I dated a white girl and the black coeds gave me the cold shoulder, I took solace in Pryor’s biting remark that, “Black women look at you like you killed your mama when you are out with a white woman … they say, ‘Yeah, why should you be happy?’ ”
Obviously, it was not only black men who fully “got” Richard Pryor—he sold too many albums and was too big a box-office draw to suggest that. But there is no question that Pryor fully “got” us because he was one of us. He exposed the challenges of being an African-American man with such wit, and such surgical precision, that he became our collective mouthpiece—the ultimate soul brother. Pryor taught guys like me to use humor as both sword and shield as we make our way through a world riddled with pain. Richard, thank you for being you, because in doing so you helped me, more than you’ll ever know, become comfortable being me. Peace.
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