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I think that partly I just got lucky. Since Pryor himself was no longer alive when I started the project, they were more inclined to feel free to speak their truth. But I think that they also sensed that I was approaching Pryor with an appreciation for the complexity and power of his story—that I wasn't approaching it sensationally.
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The book is called Becoming Richard Pryor because a lot of the beauty of Pryor's story is that he was in love with becoming—in love with experimenting as a comedian and an actor and, even, as a person in his daily life and in his relationships. So my focus is on that drama of development: How did a skinny black kid, abused from all sides and with few career paths open to him, become the fearless performer who revolutionized American comedy? The quick answer is that he did it through great struggle: His life was full of blockages and breakthroughs.To my mind, the final great breakthrough is Pryor's Live in Concert, which came out of a stand-up tour that coincided with the death of his grandmother. That moment in 1978 is both the clinching moment of my tale— Live in Concert is the pinnacle of his achievement as a comedian who told the story of his life onstage—and the beginning of a new, and far more sobering, story. His grandmother was the central figure in his life. After she died in 1978, he spun into a depression that led him to become addicted to freebase and, eventually, to set himself on fire. And after the fire, he was a different artist: still deft and capable of hilarious moves in his comedy, but more guarded and risk-averse. I handle his life after 1978 in an epilogue, but the fascinating (and less understood) part of Pryor's life is, I think, what happened up to that point.
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In order to tell the first part of Pryor's story, the story of a childhood spent in the red-light district of Peoria, I needed to be able to set Pryor and his family in a larger context. I had a lot of questions buzzing in my head: What was Peoria's vice district like? What kinds of schools did Richard go to? What sort of clubs did he perform in? And what kinds of audiences did he find there? But there was no solid historical study of Peoria, so basically I had to do a great deal of that research myself. By the end of that process, I'd amassed what was to me a remarkable cache of materials: personal documents like Pryor's school records and his family's photo albums; the legal records of his parents (including their divorce papers); and a lot of more wide-ranging stuff that dealt with the history of segregation and desegregation in the city, and the fate of its red-light district.My solution was to build a website that would be a curated archive of my research. So I assembled a team with a great number of diverse talents: in web design, coding, writing, even filmmaking (we made a short film about Pryor's childhood).
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I think Pryor's time in Berkeley did open up his style as a performer in a crucial way. It was in Berkeley that he first experimented with being unfunny, whether that meant being tonally perplexing or politically scathing. It was in Berkeley that his work really took on a new fearlessness: He didn't seem to care whether his audience followed him on his wayward path or not. So although the creative emanations of his Berkeley period (with the big exception of the transcendent "Wino and Junkie" sketch) did not ever see the light of day during his prime, Berkeley did leave a huge impression on him.Much of his best stuff, post-Berkeley, has something of Berkeley in it. It pushes at the boundary of what comedy can be, sometimes because of the razor-sharpness of its politics, sometimes because it's blending together emotions that don't go together easily.
It was around 1972-73 that Pryor started thinking of himself as someone who loved throwing himself into character. He said that "being a character" was what made him "come alive"; he loved the feeling of "being in your conscious and subconscious at the same time." By 1972, he'd been experimenting with character-centered comedy for about four years, but starting at that point he comes to embrace the idea that he'll lose himself in character. And in losing himself in the flow of character, he gains enormously in power as an artist. The best of his acting—whether in stand-up or in his Hollywood films—comes out of his commitment to the integrity of that process.We don't think of Pryor as much of a physical comedian, but you're very careful to give him his due as someone in total control of his facial gestures.
It's gratifying to me that you noticed that. To me, Pryor was a true virtuoso as a performer. It wasn't just that he was supremely inventive as a comic (though that's true), but that he was able to execute his ideas indelibly because of his gifts as a performer. He had great chops. His body was his most expressive medium—and had been since his earliest days as a performer, when his models were highly physical comedians like Red Skelton and Jerry Lewis. He layered on top of that physical grace all sorts of other gifts—gifts for storytelling, for political satire, for throwing himself into a character —but to me, his gifts as a physical comedian sit at the foundation of what he was able to achieve.
Pryor appreciated the finesse of Cosby as a storyteller onstage, but he was also allergic to sanctimony and excellent at sniffing out hypocrisy in American life. So Cosby's hypocrisy—how he browbeat working-class black people for their lack of morals while also drugging black women himself—would have rankled him, not least because he was cudgeling people with whom Pryor identified. Pryor's strategy onstage was the opposite of Cosby's: Rather than posing as a model of authority (rock-solid fathers like Cliff Huxtable), Pryor was the perennial underdog, always on the verge of cracking up under pressures he couldn't handle. Rather than covering up his flaws, he dramatized them. Cosby's disgrace suggests that Pryor not only had the more profound artistic strategy—he may also have had a more sustainable way of living in the world.Find out more about Becoming Richard Pryor and order a copy of the biography here.