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Black and blue: The rise of the riotous Richard Pryor
Paradigm puncher ... Is It Something I Said? hits 40
Trailblazing
By then, Pryor had already co-written Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974) comedy film and he was more than ready for Hollywood. The 1976 smash Silver Streak cast him with Blazing Saddles star Gene Wilder (the first of four successful pairings with Wilder) and was swiftly followed by an extended cameo in the similarly successful Car Wash.
Pryor had arrived and was a player in the US, the UK and Europe – a top stand-up who could sell out major venues, garner gold records and star in major films. Someone who was now a regular on the biggest TV shows with the biggest stars.
He even had his own TV show, briefly, on NBC. It was short-lived, partly because he refused to compromise either his material or his language. Even when dealing with fictional pensioner characters such as Mudbone...
In 1978 he graced the throw-away fluff of the Motown musical The Wiz, before appearing in the more scripted, and more amusing California Suite.
The same twelve months also saw him take a serious role in Paul Schrader’s bleakly brilliant Blue Collar, a part which won him some serious praise. Whilse still in serious mode, the next year saw Pryor make an emotional visit to Africa – a move which made him reassess his work and stopped him, temporarily at least, from using the n-word onstage. It was an experience he swiftly put into his act.
Pryor never liked to be too serious for long, however, and he continued to use one particular word – best abbreviated as "mofu" – like it was going out of fashion. Pryor’s own mother was dead by this point, of course, as was his father. He played the latter’s demise for laughs in a short, vaguely obscene, routine that was almost certainly one of the first anywhere to use "recycling" as a punchline:
Pryor’s childhood had been no laughing matter, though, and success brought him little relief – just bouts of self-medicating with dangerous amounts of drink and drugs. A 1980 on-set interview for his Stir Crazy prison movie revealed a coke-addled man... and language that would have been broadcast as pure morse code, if it had ever been shown at all on TV.
Later that same year, while filming Bustin’ Loose, he set fire to himself freebasing cocaine – partly because he was also drinking pints of 151-proof rum. He survived, but there was a major scandal as he ran into the streets of LA, half-naked, screaming and burning, until the police could subdue him. He had to spend six weeks in a burns unit for what was, some said, a psychotic suicide attempt.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
