Farewell, Pryor, with awe, thanks

A few words on the death Saturday of an authentic American genius.

It is the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, a nightspot on the Sunset Strip in L.A. Richard Pryor is talking and I wish he would stop. Just for a second. But he won’t.

I am out of my seat, bent almost to the floor. Can’t breathe. Stomach aching like somebody punched me there. In pain. Serious pain. From laughing. Never knew laughing could hurt so good.

Flash back a little. Same time period. Pryor is talking again. To me alone, this time.

We are behind the gates of his home in the San Fernando Valley. The incident in which he set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine is in the unguessed future. The episode in which he told the crowd at a gay rights benefit to kiss his “rich, black ass,” the one where he shot at a car in which his then-wife was trying to leave him, his battles with NBC over censorship of his short-lived TV show, his tax troubles with the IRS, are all recent memory.

Pryor is talking about all of that, explaining how it is that his comedy flows so freely from that wellspring of disaster, controversy and pain.

“Comedy and tragedy are flip sides of the same coin,” I say with a nod, trying to sound sage. He corrects me. “Comedy is tragedy,” he says.

His voice is whispery and soft. He is the saddest man I’ve ever seen. And the funniest, too.

Pryor, who died at 65 of a heart attack at his home in the San Fernando Valley after years of failing health, would see no dichotomy there. Comedy is tragedy. –

And so it follows that this boy who grew up in a brothel, named for pimps, he said (Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor), this victim of childhood rape and sexual molestation, this dropout, this drug addict, this multiple sclerosis patient, this multiple heart attack victim, this often-married man, this angry guy scarred by the unearned unfairness that comes of being black in America, this walking bundle of contradiction, conflict, psychoses and neuroses, was also one of the funniest human beings who ever lived.

It’s all of a piece: His comedy was shaped by his pain, fueled by his desperation, given life by his rage. It was authentic, it was naked, it was pure, it was unfailingly human.

And yes, it was profane. Prodigiously, profusely and profoundly so.

That’s the part younger comics always misunderstand when they try to ape Pryor. You see them saying outrageous things and then standing back waiting for the laugh and you realize they think it’s about cursing. It’s not a hard mistake to understand; Pryor, along with Lenny Bruce, expanded the vocabulary of American comedy, freed comics to explore language that had always previously been taboo.

But it was never simply about the language, never about anything as cheap as shock value. It was about giving voice to those who’d never had voice before, about forcing the rest of us to recognize the humanity we shared with street hustlers, pool hall losers, winos, prostitutes, poor people, and a singular old man named Mudbone.

Richard Pryor came like a jolt of electricity into a world where comedy was all mother-in-law jokes, observational humor and one-liners. Pryor’s comedy was race and sex and politics and society and drugs and religion and life. His comedy was about what it meant to be human – flawed, screwed-up, imperfect, human. It was a revelation.

I’ve heard it said that the definition of greatness is when everything that came before you becomes obsolete and everything after bears your mark. That was Pryor. After him, Milton Berle and Bob Hope could never again seem quite as amusing. And virtually every comedian who followed – Murphy, Chappelle, Letterman, Rock, Hughley, Williams – bears his mark.

But none is quite like him. None was ever as revelatory, as dangerous or as courageous. That’s because his comedy wasn’t an act. It was a survival mechanism, a way of understanding the world and the harshness that sometimes dwells therein.

It was, in the largest sense, a lesson in how to be. Honest enough to acknowledge how hard this life sometimes is. Brave enough to laugh anyway.