![]() Between numbers, he would tell jokes and wow audiences. Pryor landed a gig singing in a Peoria nightclub. I got up, ran to my grandmother, and slipped in the dog poop. A little dog wandered by and poo-pooed in our yard. I wasn’t much taller than my daddy’s shin when I found I could break people up. By this time, an idea had come to him: he could always make people laugh-soldiers, fellow workers, family members. He was drafted in 1960 but attacked another GI of higher rank and wound up discharged after 13 months, many of them spent in the stockade. In addition to daily bullying, he was twice sexually molested, once by a john at the bordello, another time by a member of his church.Ī high school dropout at 14, Richard spent the next six years doing odd jobs, from truck driver to janitor to untutored drummer in a pickup band. He was small, thin, and shy-the classic grade-school victim. ![]() Apart from Leroy’s brutality and Gertrude and Marie’s professional activities (Richard once saw his mother in bed with Peoria’s white mayor), the bright kid suffered from a slew of other miseries. It was too late he had become unmanageable. From that point on, Marie raised him-or tried to. His mother seemed to love him, yet when Richard was ten she ran off. The boy grew up in an atmosphere of moral confusion: prostitution was the family’s source of income, yet he attended a predominantly white Catholic school. ![]() His father, Leroy, was a boxer turned pimp who paid little attention to his son except to intimidate him when he stepped out of line. Richard’s grandmother, Marie Carter, was a madam, her daughter Gertrude (his mother) a hooker. “If they worked at all, they were probably employed at one of the nearby slaughterhouses. “Black folks didn’t have it so good in Peoria,” he recalled. Pryor grew up in Peoria, Illinois, in the forties and fifties. He was a savage, equal-opportunity satirist he targeted white racism, his fellow African-Americans, and-finally and most severely-himself. He was always himself, yet could populate the stage with a cast of characters ranging from a pack of dogs to a bewildered black alcoholic to a Mafia thug. His vocabulary was down and dirty, but his work had a surprising elegance. He was conscious of his minority status but refused to take the route of special pleading. On his way to fame and self-destruction, Pryor became the funniest man in America by creating a new kind of comedy-a hilarious, heartbreaking, and conflicted view of life seen from the underside. Yet he is modest enough, and wise enough, to warn his colleagues: “You should not even get onstage and attempt to be funny unless you realize you’re never going to be as funny as Richard Pryor.” One, Chris Rock, has every right to boast about his accomplishments. Other African-American comedians preceded him, and since his death in 2004, a handful of young black performers have earned more money and entertained larger audiences. Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.Playwright Neil Simon called him “the most brilliant comic in America.” For humorist Lily Tomlin, he was “a gifted, raging, soaring, plummeting, deeply human man with the tender boy inside-the greatest pioneering comic artist of the last three generations.” Critic Pauline Kael dubbed him “a master of lyrical obscenity the only great poet satirist among our comics.” They weren’t exaggerating.Britannica Beyond We’ve created a new place where questions are at the center of learning.100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians.COVID-19 Portal While this global health crisis continues to evolve, it can be useful to look to past pandemics to better understand how to respond today.Student Portal Britannica is the ultimate student resource for key school subjects like history, government, literature, and more.Demystified Videos In Demystified, Britannica has all the answers to your burning questions.This Time in History In these videos, find out what happened this month (or any month!) in history.#WTFact Videos In #WTFact Britannica shares some of the most bizarre facts we can find.Britannica Classics Check out these retro videos from Encyclopedia Britannica’s archives.Britannica Explains In these videos, Britannica explains a variety of topics and answers frequently asked questions.
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