Word: pryor
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When he talks about whites, Pryor possessed by Richard Pryor-can be almost as lethal as "Big Daddy." In the U.S., he says, "they give niggers time as if they were giving lunch. You go [to court] looking for justice, and that's just what you find -just us." On his album Bicentennial Nigger he says, "We're celebrating 200 years of white folks kicking ass... You all probably have forgotten about it. Well, I ain't never gonna forget...
...Pryor's hostility toward white society can be traced back to Peoria, 111., where he grew up. He likes to say that his grandmother was the madam of a whore house and that from the beginning he saw white men debasing black women. He may be telling the truth, but no one in Peoria remembers, and the street where his grandmother lived has been blasted away by urban renewal. What is certainly true is that Pryor, now 36, grew up in a poor and broken family. By 14 he had quit school and started work as a janitor...
...push out Cosby, or any of the other black comedians-Redd Foxx, Dick Gregory, Flip Wilson, Godfrey Cambridge-who achieved fame in the '60s. But Pryor did find room in the spotlight, and by the middle of the decade he was appearing on the TV talk shows and pulling golden gigs in Las Vegas...
Then, in 1970, when he was standing on the stage of the El Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, something snapped and, in Pryor's words, he "went crazy." With a packed audience in front of him, he walked off the stage. What had happened was that he realized he was not Cosby, the smooth, controlled comic of the cerebrum. He was, if anyone, Lenny Bruce, the angry, violent screamer from the acid gut. Pryor changed his act, bringing it back in spirit to Peoria's black ghetto and the mean streets all over the U.S. He started...
...Pryor's colorful vulgarity found an S.R.O. audience, not in Las Vegas but on the concert hall circuit. Writing, he dis covered, came naturally. He wrote part of Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, several segments of Sanford and Son, and parts of two Lily Tomlin specials. Acting came just as naturally. If he never said another funny word, Pryor could undoubtedly make it as a major Hollywood actor. Says Michael Schultz, director of Greased Lightning: "He can do the same scene ten different ways-all of them right...