Richard Pryor (1940 - 2005) - Democratic Underground

WilliamPitt

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Sat Dec-10-05 05:14 PM
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Richard Pryor (1940 - 2005)

Comedian Richard Pryor Dies at 65

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 10, 2005

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Richard Pryor, the caustic yet perceptive actor-comedian who lived dangerously close to the edge both on stage and off, died Saturday. He was 65.

Pryor died shortly before 8 a.m. of a heart attack after being taken to a hospital from his home in the San Fernando Valley, said his business manager, Karen Finch. He had been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system.

''We loved him and will miss you,'' his ex-wife, Flynn Pryor, said from her Florida home.

Pryor was regarded early in his career as one of the most foul-mouthed comics in the business, but he gained a wide following for his expletive-filled but universal and frequently personal insights into modern life and race relations.

His audacious style influenced an array of stand-up artists, including Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall and Damon Wayans, as well as Robin Williams, David Letterman and others.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/obituaries/AP-Obit-Pryor.html?hp

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When Richard Pryor received the Mark Twain Prize for humor at the Kennedy Center on Oct. 20 he was too weak to perform or even to speak. That was left to Chris Rock, Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg, a few of the many comedians whose work he has inspired. I'm both exhilarated that Pryor's getting his due before he's dead and pissed as hell that a man who could give "motherfucka'" a thousand profoundly different shadings is, at 58, virtually speechless. You just know he'd have some hilarious and profound insights into Bill and Monica, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, and all the bizarre happenings in the last days of the 20th century.

Most every comedian under 50 has been influenced by Pryor, and not just the black ones. Watching and listening to them, it's as if Pryor's shadow always hovers nearby, revealing itself to varying degrees in inflection, pacing, body language, choice of material. Crippled by multiple sclerosis, unable to perform, still, Richard Pryor lives! Watching tapes of his stand-up comedy, his movies, his brilliant but short-lived (two months in 1977) television show, I laugh so hard I am forced to the bathroom as tears run down my face. I find comfort in the immortality of his work, that ability to damn near always be timelessly on point.

What is most wonderful and most missed about the humor of Richard Pryor is his simultaneous rage and vulnerability -- that sense of being mad as hell yet still yearning for and believing in acceptance and reconciliation, whether he was riffing about black folks, white folks, women, politics, black male macho or drug addiction. For Pryor, humor and talking much shit was a way to reveal not only his, but our collective psyche. In the process he used his voice, body and mind to turn himself into, not them, but us: the old man Mudbone, an angry black woman doing that head thing only we can do, his dick, assorted animals, a junkie getting off, an awkward white guy, his own heart in the middle of a mutinous attack on his much-abused body.

http://www.salon.com/bc/1998/11/24bc.html

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No one was better than Richard Pryor. Period. End of file.