R.I.P. Motherfucker
Richard Pryor was the motherfucker born to say the word "motherfucker". And he's no longer with us.
He has passed away at the age of 65 after a heart attack. He had been suffering with MS for many years.
Growing up the first exposure I had to Richard Pryor were the films he did such as his appearance in the Superman franchise and his regular pairing with Gene Wilder in late night televsion classics like "Stir Crazy".
It was only as I got into my early teens when I realised that not only did Richard Pryor used to be a standup but he was one of the funniest that there ever has been. So masterful with an audience, unafraid to lapse into regular converstaion, never scared to improvise material on the fly... He was a comic genius. The only person who surpassed his skill with an audience was Bill Hicks, also sadly deceased.
As I started to watch his material it didn't really matter to me that a lot of it was aimed for black America. There was nothing lost in translation. Pryor was championing freedom of expression and attacking the dominant ideology of America at the same time as being incredibly funny.
I knew, like all great minds, he had his demons, that he had grown up in poverty and lived in a brothel where his mother would turn tricks. It was remarked that one of the reasons that he had some of the views that he did was because every white man he met when he was young was going to fuck his mother...
I went to his home town of Peoria, Illinois when I had a stint in the states. Not much had changed. It was still a poor area with a high black population. I wasn't sure what I was doing with this kind of sub-pilgramige, but I'm glad I did. I felt that his whole outlook made a bit more sense. As a bum from a colliery town in the North East of England I knew what it was like to want to get out of your surroundings and achieve something. Anything.
Pryor started by effectively impersonating Bill Cosby who at the time was the acceptable face of Black America, being beamed into the homes of viewers all over the country. But he realised that this charade was not him, would not bring him what he wanted. He knew he needed to be tru to himself. The rest is history.
If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery then Pryor can consider one of the most flattered comedians. Every black stand up comedian owes him a huge debt, especially those like Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence. Every stand up comedian who wants to talk explicitly about sex, drugs and personal issues owes him a debt too. So candid were his stand up shows that his new material regularly came from all the stories that were reported to the papers about his addictions and health problems. He would always tell the truth behind these stories on stage, even if the truth painted him in a worse light than the papers had already attempted.
2005 had already been a bad year. We lost a lot of good men. This is a bad way to cap off the year. I'm just glad he's no longer suffering.
Richard Pryor leaves a proud legacy. R.I.P.
He has passed away at the age of 65 after a heart attack. He had been suffering with MS for many years.
Growing up the first exposure I had to Richard Pryor were the films he did such as his appearance in the Superman franchise and his regular pairing with Gene Wilder in late night televsion classics like "Stir Crazy".
It was only as I got into my early teens when I realised that not only did Richard Pryor used to be a standup but he was one of the funniest that there ever has been. So masterful with an audience, unafraid to lapse into regular converstaion, never scared to improvise material on the fly... He was a comic genius. The only person who surpassed his skill with an audience was Bill Hicks, also sadly deceased.
As I started to watch his material it didn't really matter to me that a lot of it was aimed for black America. There was nothing lost in translation. Pryor was championing freedom of expression and attacking the dominant ideology of America at the same time as being incredibly funny.
I knew, like all great minds, he had his demons, that he had grown up in poverty and lived in a brothel where his mother would turn tricks. It was remarked that one of the reasons that he had some of the views that he did was because every white man he met when he was young was going to fuck his mother...
I went to his home town of Peoria, Illinois when I had a stint in the states. Not much had changed. It was still a poor area with a high black population. I wasn't sure what I was doing with this kind of sub-pilgramige, but I'm glad I did. I felt that his whole outlook made a bit more sense. As a bum from a colliery town in the North East of England I knew what it was like to want to get out of your surroundings and achieve something. Anything.
Pryor started by effectively impersonating Bill Cosby who at the time was the acceptable face of Black America, being beamed into the homes of viewers all over the country. But he realised that this charade was not him, would not bring him what he wanted. He knew he needed to be tru to himself. The rest is history.
If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery then Pryor can consider one of the most flattered comedians. Every black stand up comedian owes him a huge debt, especially those like Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence. Every stand up comedian who wants to talk explicitly about sex, drugs and personal issues owes him a debt too. So candid were his stand up shows that his new material regularly came from all the stories that were reported to the papers about his addictions and health problems. He would always tell the truth behind these stories on stage, even if the truth painted him in a worse light than the papers had already attempted.
2005 had already been a bad year. We lost a lot of good men. This is a bad way to cap off the year. I'm just glad he's no longer suffering.
Richard Pryor leaves a proud legacy. R.I.P.
posted by Richard Lewis at 12:33 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home