I loved Richard Pryor. I loved his willingness to be vulnerable and share his ups and downs, to comment on hard issues with a strange grace that proclaimed the truth about the world, but with a kind of shrug that suggested both weariness and optimism, more sadness than anger, and shared humanity and inhumanity. I always had the sense that he was his own worst enemy, that he had no interest in cultivating enemies elsewhere. He did not seem to be about hurting anyone else, because he understood pain too well.
I think he was the funniest man ever born, which probably means he was also the saddest.
Roger L. Simon has a terrific personal remembrance on Pryor. Ed Morrissey mentions “Blazing Saddles”. Oh, my…Pryor would have made that movie something even more memorable than it is!
For me, I just hope the man is at peace. I hope God opened wide the gate. He will be missed. Heck, he was already missed, in his illness. Now, it’s just worse.
UPDATE: Riehlworld has some wonderful clips of Pryor being brilliant. H/T Ann Althouse.
December 11th, 2005 at 5:54 pm
He did elevate profanity to an art form. He was funny, and some of the stuff with Gene Wilder is about as good as it gets.
December 11th, 2005 at 10:57 pm
Interesting how that word “vulnerable” seems to be the one a lot of us are using to remember Pryor. I thought he was immensely funny but immensely vulnerable as well, and that the combination made him the unique artist and human being that he was.
I entitled my post “Richard Pryor: vulnerability and bravado”:
Pryor sometimes (although not always, by any means) focused on race, but his routines transcended race at the same time. How did he do this?
If you watch those old Pryor routines, look at his eyes. I was always transfixed by them. They are the eyes of a brave but very very frightened child. An intense and very feeling one, as well, who seems almost too vulnerable to bear the world and its hardships, but is going forward nevertheless into every experience it has to offer.
I’m not saying Pryor was a child. But he kept within him, quite close to the surface (and somehow managed to express, despite his all-too-adult persona and his wild comic flair) the intensity of vulnerability and pain most people feel when very young. For the majority of us this pain and vulnerability lessens, or goes underground, with adulthood. But for Pryor, both always appeared all-too-easily accessible–much too easily for his own good.
And it was his own good that he seemed famously and carelessly unconcerned with…
Yes, indeed: RIP, Richard Pryor.