In the fall of 1978, I had cashed in the second installment of my student loan money and bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, enticed by a copy of Slash magazine sent to me by my friend Kate, who picked me up at LAX. We were in a jubilant mood on the drive to Kate's apartment, when she pulled over at a liquor store.
It was like a scene from a movie. Everyone inside was Black, and they stopped what they were doing and glared at us, both wearing leis. Kate whispered "Watts." We had unwittingly stopped in one of the most notorious neighborhoods in the country. It felt like another world to me, a 22-year-old raised on military bases, who learned everything he knew about inner-city blues from Marvin Gaye and news magazines.
Our trepidation was unfounded, however, as everyone went back to what they were doing. They didn’t carry Kahlua, so we grabbed something else, got back in the car and scooted on in silence. Few people talked about race in the 1970s. It was America's dirty secret, a subject to be avoided, like liquor stores in Watts.
Richard Pryor got the dialogue started. The comic giant, who passed away Saturday (Dec. 10, 2005), distanced himself from the pioneering honesty of Lenny Bruce and the insightful browbeating of Dick Gregory by being fall-down-hold-your-side hilarious. The time I saw him, at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood in January 1979, he came out, unintroduced, when the house lights were still on. "I love to come out during intermission sometimes, because there's only white folks in the audience," Pryor said. "Y'all afraid that if you get up, when you come back there'll be some big (Black person) in your seat." First you laugh at yourself.
Pryor's records were like little forbidden boxes that you'd open to blasts of golden light. This was Redd Foxx with purpose, a roller-coaster ride through the Black experience.
It takes a brave man to tap dance around the subjects of race and sex, even today, but what do you call a guy like Pryor, who stomped on taboos like a blazing bundle on the front porch, setting off spectacular fiery shards? He didn't know how to hold back the truth, and his courage made us understand each other better.
Pryor didn't tell jokes, he told stories about day-to-day things. He did voices. He brought back people from his past with vivid detail. Sometimes he would go on too long, like on the "Mudbone" routine or when he explored the mind of his dog. But like a jazz man, you'd follow him wherever he led.
The other great standup comic at the time was Bill Cosby, who will gladly admit that he was the polar opposite of Pryor. Cosby told stories about growing up poor. Pryor told stories about growing up Black. Where Cosby cleaned up the language of the street, Pryor flailed on the vernacular like an electric guitar. The knock on comedy albums is that they're funny only the first time, but you listened to Richard's albums over and over to get the cadence, the lingo, the effortless rhythm that let you know that what you were hearing was real.
Black stand-up comedy took over for authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni and Ralph Ellison in communicating the terms of oppression. And Richard Pryor led the charge.
Back before hip-hop, Pryor made America take one big step toward being an interracial nation. He co-wrote Blazing Saddles with three middle-aged Jewish men, plopping a small mound of cocaine on the table on the first day, and offering a rolled-up hundred to the others, with no takers. So Pryor snorted it all himself. Not a phony bone.
The greatest man of the 20th century -- greatest man, not Black man -- is Muhammad Ali, who was able to deliver his militancy with a wink of humanity and went from most hated to most loved by changing the people instead of himself.
I think you'd have to put Pryor up there with Ali. Think of what there was before him: Catskill one-liners and telephone gags. Just as Hank Williams broadened the emotional scope of material to influence every country singer who came after him, Pryor set the standard of raw honesty that has become the stuff of HBO comedy specials.
Pryor began his career as something of a Cosby imitator. His early routines, as seen on ``The Ed Sullivan Show'' and ``Kraft Music Hall,'' contained a cutesy recreation of a grade-school production of ``Rumplestiltskin,'' with Pryor doing all the voices. At a 1967 show at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, Pryor walked off the stage 10 minutes into his set, saying, ``What am I doing this for?'' When he returned to stand-up 18 months later, after acting in a few movies, he was ferocious and imaginative. The G-rated material was replaced by unflinching raps about sex and drugs.
The son of a prostitute and raised by her mother, who ran the whorehouse, Pryor trafficked in pathos like an inner city version of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp. Offstage, his life was hard drama. He was multi-arrested, most notably for shooting up a car that his wife tried to leave him in, and in 1980 there was the incident when he torched himself while smoking freebase cocaine. Pryor was the trouble man of American comedy, but there was something so human about the courage he displayed ratting on himself. No subject was off limits in Pryor's comic crucifixion.
King Richard took me and many others to a world we knew little about and made us see the sense and senselessness of it all. And the humor. We were half white, half Black at the Pantages that night in ‘79. But Pryor's genius made us all the same -- quivering, convulsing, knee-slapping masses. It's amazing what you can find when you lose yourself in laughter.