Richard Pryor would have milked the absurdity for all it was worth: Nearly everything the comedian ever said that makes him worthy of an outpouring of major obituaries cannot be quoted in those eulogies.
It’s like his final, expletive-deleted joke on us all.
Profane and profound, an influential molder of popular culture from humor to hip-hop, and a self-described “drug-addicted, paranoid, frightened, lonely, sad and frustrated comedian,” Richard Pryor died Saturday of a heart attack. He was 65.
“In my mind, I’ve written [my] obituary,” Pryor wrote in his 1995 autobiography “Pryor Convictions.” “But instead of the cause being drugs or a heart attack or an angry woman, as most would’ve expected, MS has added a punch line.”
MS–multiple sclerosis, the progressive nerve disease–attacked Pryor in 1986, and as it took over his body, he went from being the best-known and highest-paid African-American entertainer of his day to a life of seclusion and near-silence, confined to a wheelchair and battling ex-wives over money. At his last major public appearance in 1998, the Kennedy Center awarded him its first Mark Twain Humor Prize. Pryor sat in the balcony and waved feebly; his face, once so expressive, frozen in a pathetic grin. Onstage, his footstep-followers lightly roasted him.
“I wanted to be just like him,” joked Damon Wayans. “Except for the drug habit and the failed marriages and the temper and the guns.”
That was Pryor: So much accomplished and so much squandered. He brought rough aspects of black life slouching into the mainstream, making both blacks and whites laugh and squirm in ways they had never known. Possessor of what the Tibetans call “crazy wisdom,” he offered satire, bitterness, joy and painful truths instead of jokes, and spared nothing, least of all himself.
The demons that drove Pryor to greatness, however, also nearly destroyed him. His lifelong battles with drug addiction led him to waste his talent on an endless succession of bad movies, from “The Toy” to “Superman III.” For the latter, he was paid $4 million, then a record for a black actor, even though he knew going in it was terrible. He did them all, he said, for “the monies.”
Pryor did not grow up in grinding poverty, but he had a childhood that marked him for life and that he mined repeatedly for his comedy. Born Dec. 1, 1940, in Peoria, his mother, Gertrude, was a prostitute and waitress, and his father, Buck, whom he saw beat his mother regularly, was a pimp and bartender. His grandmother, who raised him from the age of 10, owned a brothel.
“He was the beginning of a new dawn of comedy,” Whoopi Goldberg said on a Comedy Central tribute to Pryor. “It wasn’t cute and sweet. It was a little scary.”