Richard Pryor in 1995, already suffering from the "disease God put together from
bits of other diseases". Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/AP
As the piece in today's paper inadvertently demonstrates, Richard Pryor doesn't translate well to print. The excerpt from his infamous 1975 appearance on Saturday Night Live is so full of parentheses - signifying expressions, gestures, actions - that it's almost impossible to read. It's a script as much as a transcript. A script only capable of being performed by one man.
Richard Pryor's volatile spontaneity may have been his most defining trait, but it's this that makes him especially hard to capture, and which makes his death on Saturday seem so sad. Sixty-five isn't so very young, of course, but Pryor's career effectively ended nearly two decades ago: following a drug-fuelled accident (some say suicide attempt) that left him with horrific burns in 1980, he realised six years later that he had multiple sclerosis, a disease that steadily shut down his life and left him unable to perform.
He screwed comedy out of the situation, of course, interrupting one of his final live performances to ask whether there was a doctor in the audience. Greeted only by nervous laughter, he persisted until finally a hand went up. "Doctor," Pryor said, "I need to know one thing. What the fuck is MS?" He later offered an answer, equally memorable and no less awkward to deal with: the condition was, he said, "a disease God had put together from other diseases".
Tributes to Pryor, collected since his death, have some difficulty pinning him down. Reginal Hudlin, head of Black Entertainment Television, told the LA Times: "I've been trying to figure out the analogies to what Richard Pryor means, and the closest I can come to is Miles Davis. There's music before Miles Davis, and there's music after Miles Davis. And Richard Pryor is that same kind of person."
WJ Weatherby, writing in the Guardian, said: "Listening to Pryor was often like being in a black living-room and hearing the master of the house talk in a way he only did at home." But Pryor refused, of course, to be closeted away, openly fighting the racism and censorship of the studios and the TV execs, transmuting the bitterness of oppression into scabrous, explosive comedy.
If you're looking for tributes, you could do worse (in fact you couldn't do better) than get hold of one of the live performance albums, mercifully transferred to video and DVD: Live in Concert (1979), Live on the Sunset Strip (1982), Here and Now (1983). They're raw, angry and brutally funny: Pryor as he should be remembered, not sanitised by death.
