“Cocaine’s not addicting. My friends have been snortin’ coke for fifteen years and they’re not addicted.”
Welcome to the world of Richard Pryor. It’s a world where a young African-American boy grew up in an inner city brothel, discovered he had a talent for stage performance, and went on to become one of the greatest stand up comics of all time and a movie star too. If you grew up in the 1980s, your introduction to Richard Pryor was probably in family friendly movies like The Toy or Superman III. But those who explored his works further were probably shocked at first by the X-rated brand of humor on his comedy albums in which “bitch”, “motherfucker”, and the n-word are used over and over again. On stage, on screen, and in his personal life he was a complex man with a multi-faceted personality. In Scott Saul’s biography Becoming Richard Pryor, all these different sides are brought out on display. It’s like exploring the closet of a disguise artist to find an almost incomprehensible range of clothing styles that don’t go together but still make up a picture of the man who owned them. Only Pryor wasn’t just changing outfits to suit each individual character he played the way a normal actor would; these weren’t disguises since they came from inside the man, revealing to public view the crazy world that existed inside his head.
There are a lot of ways Scott Saul could have written this biography. He could have simply emphasized the course of Pryor’s professional career. He also could have emphasized the turbulent social and private life of the man. But instead he brought those two threads into a multi-dimensional biographical portrait showing how they contributed to the development of Richard Pryor’s work as an artist. Knowing that Pyror saw himself foremost as an artist rather than a comedian and actor helps clarify what a loftof his life was all about.
Richard Pryor’s childhood was something that no child should ever have to live through. He was raised in Peoria, Illinois by his grandmother, a strict disciplinarian and madame of a brothel who always carried a pistol on her person. His father was also a pimp and a violent man. Pryor spent his childhood seeing women being mistreated in various ways. He also went to integrated schools where he experienced racism first hand while also learning how to navigate in the white world as a Black person. He was smart but not a great student, getting attention by being a class clown. Then a perceptive woman working as a stage director in a youth center saw his potential and inspired him to pursue a career in the performing arts.
Eventually Pryor moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and easily found his way into the bohemian night clubs where he did stand up and got involved with improvisational acting troops. These actors were of the experimental and avant-garde variety and Pryor carried a surreal sense of absurdity into later works as a comedian and film maker.
It didn’t take long for him to get a break so he ended up in Hollywood starring in corny TV variety shows. Although he had made it into show business, he felt lost as though he wasn’t being himself, a situation that led to a nervous breakdown on stage during a performance in Las Vegas. After recovering from that crisis, his stand up comedy took a new, uninhibited turn and Pryor began drawing on his own life experiences to create a unique brand of performance that nobody had ever seen before. He began telling stories, switching his voice and demeanor to represent different characters in absurd situations. A lot of these characters were drawn from people in the African-American community. There were pimps, winos, junkies, con artist preachers, revolutionaries, and do gooders, all ciphers of recognizable character types. What Richard Pryor got right was that he mirrored these personages to the Black community, showing them the faults and shortcomings of people they recognized, but doing so in a way that humanized them. This wasn’t cruel humor. It was self-effacing humor, something rare in American comedy, that allowed Black people a chance to laugh about the things that troubled them. Richard Pryor also found success as a cross over comedian, appealing to progressive white audiences because he gave them a window into a Black community that they never experienced first hand despite their support for integration and the politics of Civil Rights.
The issue of racial politics play a prominent role in this book. Richard Pryor was deeply committed to the African-American cause and a fair bit of his performances were related to issues of racism and social justice. Even when making jokes about winos or tall tale bullshitters like his recurring Mudbone character, there was always a sense that these people were welcome as members of the Black community despite their human imperfections. Even when making jokes about white people he did so in a way that showed white people how they look in Black people’s eyes. This was done in a way that made white people laugh at themselves. Pryor’s relations with the white community were sometimes contentious though. As a child he had white friends at school and often encountered white men in the whorehouses where he lived, something that probably helped him get along with white people later in life, but later in his film career he got into long running disputes with directors and actors who didn’t always see things from his point of view. There were other times when he felt like he couldn’t trust white people even though acceptance in the white community was often a priority of his. And yet making it to the big time meant making it in the white world of entertainment. He had this conflict over being true to his art and his people or selling out, but somehow he came out on top, finding himself in script writing, producing, and acting that he would never have gotten into had he not pushed himself beyond the obstacles that other Black artists saw in their way.
There was one area in which his relations with white people was the most controversial: his relationships with white women. Maybe the seeds for his problems were planted in his childhood when he tried to be friends with white girls in school only to have their parents forbid their friendships because he was Black. As he got older, Pryor married seven different white women and all of the marriages were disastrous. He was an habitual wife beater and all of his wives ended up with bruises, broken bones, and knife wounds. Pryor’s rages were fueled by high doses of cocaine and alcohol and didn’t stop with domestic violence; he sometimes destroyed his own houses in the process. You don’t have to be more than an armchair psychologist to see how his upbringing contributed to this with his violent grandmother, his absentee mother, his woman-beating father, and housefuls of prostitutes that put up with abuse on a daily basis, sometimes even humiliating him for being skinny and weak. He probably felt a great deal of confusion over women as well as anger at the dominant white power structure, so by marrying white women and assaulting them, he dominated them through a violent expression of rage, a maladaptive means of working out his frustrations This is the ugliest side of Pryor’s life and something that could ruin him in the eyes of his fans. The author of this biography treads lightly in this territory. The purpose of the book is to examine the development of Richard Pryor’s art, therefore emphasizing his extreme misogyny could easily distract attention away from that purpose. Yet Scott Saul would be doing a great disservice to his audience by downplaying or dismissing the truth of Pryor’s violence altogether. He finds an uneasy balance in his writing. It is a balance that makes you uncomfortable as it should, but it is a balance nonetheless.
This biography also covers Pryor’s career in Hollywood films. Aside from being the primary script writer for the classic comedy Blazing Saddles, he also acted in a number of movies during the 1970s. Pryor had a charismatic appeal and a strong on-screen presence. It could be said that he was a first rate actor and comedian starring in a series of mediocre movies. But what this biography shows is how much Pryor dedicated to working with directors and other actors to ensure that his characters would project a positive image of Black people to Black and white audiences alike. These movies are all overlooked today, but this book shows how instrumental they were in bringing Black film characters to be accepted in the mainstream of American cinema. Fortunately this book winds down in the early 1980s when Richard Pryor set himself on fire after freebasing cocaine and spares us an in depth analysis of what most would call Pryor’s sell out phase when he starred in commercial blockbusters, turning in less than inspiring acting performances yet maintaining his on screen charm all the while.
Becoming Richard Pryor is a brilliant biography. The media likes to feed us stories of multiple personality disorder. The status of that mental illness is a matter of dispute to professional psychiatrists, but the designation does fit Richard Pryor, only in his case he sublimated his multiple personalities into stand up comedy routines and acting. Some might criticize Scott Saul for pulling punches when writing about Pryor’s monstrous dark side, but he needed to do that maintain focus on the intended purpose of this biography. If the intended purpose is to show how the life Richard Pryor led off stage and off screen served as inspiration for his performing art, and also to show how Pryor developed his talents over the most important span of his career, then this book is entirely successful. It also reminds us that art is a flower that grows out of a damaged mind. We have to separate the art from the artist, but we also have to be careful when the art and the artist are so intricately entwined. As horrible as Richard Pryor was in his personal life, his art still managed to be uplifting, inspiring, and socially aware while making sharp observations about the human condition. It was all done by a man with a rare talent for being both entertaining and skilled at communicating while also being delightfully weird. Maybe we can still celebrate him for being a genius artist while condemning the worst things he did.
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