Word: pryor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Johnny Carson was TV's aloof arbiter of taste, Merv Griffin, who died Aug. 12 at 82, was the welcoming show-biz uncle who seemed to want everyone he brought on his talk show to become a star--including Richard Pryor and George Carlin, whose careers he helped launch. He laughed at his guests' jokes, gushed at their stories, joined them in songs--perfecting an easygoing, unironic manner that was seemingly impervious to the winds of change. Far more than a TV personality, though, the former Big Band singer was also a creator and entrepreneur. In 1964 he came...
...have the cachet or the clout of Carson's. But Griffin and his producers were smart enough to realize that to compete they had to take more chances, and that made him more receptive to some of the era's most groundbreaking new talent. George Carlin and Richard Pryor were little-known stand-up comics performing in the folk and jazz clubs of Greenwich Village in 1965 when scouts from Griffin's show discovered them just weeks apart and booked them on the show. Griffin gave both of them multi-show contracts and had them on regularly for the next...
...heard. That, however, was not Petey. And he knew it. He could talk fast, all right, but he was at heart a free-associating yarn spinner, a man who had to establish his own rhythms, not live by those of other people. He was never going to be Richard Pryor. Or Nipsey Russell...
...Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock have all traded on demystifying nigger. And in doing so, they have advanced the racial debate further than a thousand roundtable discussions populated with the best Ivy League minds. Pryor and Chevy Chase's Saturday Night Live "word association" sketch was a prime example of comedy's power to explore racial interplay in the workplace, the constant questioning of blacks as to when a comment is harmless and when is it racist. Chase is the white human-resources executive. Pryor, the black job applicant. What begins with Chase: "White," Pryor: "Black," devolves...
...Silver Streak, Pryor and Gene Wilder's comedic take on The Defiant Ones. In the penultimate moment, Pryor's character, camouflaged as a lowly train porter, flips a gat on the uppity white villain, demanding to know, in a brilliant combination of anger and comic timing, "Who you callin' nigger?" Yeah. That was all of us. That was all of black America wanting to know from any race baiter as we moved through the Establishment: Excuse me, who exactly are you calling nigger...