Richard Pryor

I love comedy. I love laughing, as well as making other people laugh. So it was much sadness when I read yesterday that Richard Pryor had died at age 65.

My parents did something they probably should not have when I was young: they put a television in my bedroom, ostensibly so that I could watch MTV and play my Atari video game. (Back then, MTV actually played music videos!) This way, I would not tie up the main television in the living room, as my parents did not want to watch MTV nor watching me play games. (They gave my dad headache, and the primary colors and beeps and synthesis music.) So at a young age, I had a television in my room, and it was at this point I discovered another channel: HBO.

I loved HBO, but my parents told me not to turn it on after 6 PM., which, of course, meant I would do just that. Especially when they went to bed! And it was here that I discovered real comedy, as opposed the watered down tell-one-joke, move onto the next type of stuff I had seen up to that point in my life.

Two comedians were the most responsible for how I viewed what was funny and what was not: Richard Pryor and George Carlin. George was, in my mind, the thinking mans comedian. His mind was so sharp, and had such a quick whit, that I fell in love with his style of delivery. But I also found Richard just as funny, but for completely different reasons. A lot of Richards’s comedy was lengthy stories about his childhood, growing up black, and his much-documented problems with drugs. While I was not black, much of the stories he told were much the same way I was (being) raised at the time. I also went to a public school, and every school I went to was almost evenly split between white and black students.

(An aside: race was never an issue with any of us until we hit Junior High School. Until that point, white and black kids were all equally friends. But something happened in the seventh grade, and clicks formed. My black friends, it seemed, all of a sudden did not want to hang out with me anymore, and there was weirdness I did not really understand for a long time there. For a long time, I thought it was something I did wrong. I finally asked a guy who I had been a friend with for years “Why don’t you ever want to do anything after school anymore?” to which he replied, “You’re white, you can’t understand where I am coming from.” I told him “We are the same age, you grew up five houses from me. Neither of our families have much money. You ARE me.” But it was a wasted effort. I was white, and his new friends were black, and I was not welcome.)

Richard Pryor used language I used around my friends, but never around my parents or other adults. He spoke to me, made me laugh, and did so with an attitude and rawness that was both familiar and foreign to me. I loved it. (His movies, for the most part, were hit and miss. I don’t feel he ever had that one break-out roll that should have defined him on the silver screen, playing the idiot too many times, or padded and safe rolls next to Gene Wilder. Had Richard gotten some of the types of rolls Eddie Murphy had, such as Trading Places or 48 Hours, his stardom would have been even greater.)

Some people are taking the attitude “Well, when you do as many drugs as Richard Pryor did, what do you expect” when hearing of his too early demise. While that may be true, it is also true that Richard Pryor changed the face of comedy in many ways that none before him did. He was a true pioneer, a comedic genius who, at 65, died way too young. I wish I had gotten the chance to meet him in person, but at the very least, I can go back and listen to his comedy concerts and laugh once again.