Legendary Funny: Richard Pryor

Richard Pryor
(1940-2005)


The man was funny. I was nine years old the first time I heard one of Richard Pryor’s jokes. It was 1968 and there was no cussing in our house, so the Saturday afternoon that my older brother Jimmy put the LP vinyl on the hi-fi, my mother immediately told him to turn that mess off. But my father was laughing too--and we kept listening. At the time there was another comedian named Wild Man Steve who also had a dirty mouth, telling jokes mostly about sex. But Richard Pryor's comedy took things to another level. Threads of black pride, resistance, and politics weaved in and out of his jokes about sex, black masculinity, drugs, white people and the usual material that comics exploit. Pryor was no saint, but he gave us something else to think about.

White? Black. Negro? Whitey. Colored? Redneck. Tarbaby? Peckerwood. Spearchucker? White trash. Junglebunny? Honkey. Nigger? Dead honkey. Many will remember this word association exchange from a Saturday Night Live skit with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase. This was one of the first Pryor introductions to mainstream white people (if there is such a thing). In a sense, Pryor put honest talk about race on the table like no other comedian.

After returning from a trip to Africa in 1979, Pryor said he would not use the nigger word again. Everybody in Africa was black, he said, and there were no niggers. He felt a kinship to those who looked like the average black person back home, in Harlem, Cleveland, Mississippi, Detroit, and elsewhere. Pryor left the continent with somewhat of a spiritual conversion, vowing to never use the word again. That was big for a comic who virtually copyrighted the word in his stand-up routines.

I could name a few names and say that they are following in Pryor's footsteps, but those steps are too big to fill. You know who they are. Let's just honor him by remembering the good laughs he gave us. Nothing else is needed. He was legendary funny and conscious.