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Chapter 1: What defining moments shaped Richard Pryor's early life?
I'm C. Fishman from Orbit Media, and I want to tell you about our new series, Lives of Crime, the most intimate stories imaginable of life as an outlaw, because they're told by the outlaws themselves.
Where's this day going to end? Will I be in prison or will I make a million dollars? I would go to a Chipotle and meet up to get $20,000 in cash. I put the shotgun right behind his ear.
He stiffens up, and I pull the trigger. Lives of Crime from Orbit Media drops March 24th on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
Pushkin. The most powerful thing a person can do is tell the truth in a room that isn't ready for it. Comedic legend Richard Pryor did just that. We talk a lot on Revisionist History about moments that get misrepresented. Richard Pryor had many of those moments. He's called one of the greatest comedians who ever lived, as if what he was doing was simply funny. But it was more than that.
It was a confession. It was a man standing on a stage and saying things that people were not prepared to reckon with about race, about pain, about desire, about what it costs to be honest in a dishonest world. Today, I'm sharing a preview of a new podcast that reexamines the icons we think we understand, including Richard Pryor.
It's called Big Lives, hosted by journalists Kai Wright and Emmanuel Josie. They dig into the BBC archives to explore the story behind the icons who shape our culture. Trailblazers like David Bowie, George Michael, Muhammad Ali, and Tina Turner to better understand how each legend set the stage for our contemporary cultural landscape.
Their episode on Richard Pryor refuses the easy version of the story. Kai and Emmanuel trace Pryor's life from a childhood in a Peoria brothel to his complex rise to fame, and they don't flinch from any of it. The racism he survived, the self-destruction, the volcanic honesty that cost him everything. Here's a preview.
If you like what you hear, find more episodes of Big Lives wherever you get podcasts.
Just to let you know, there's discriminatory language and content in this episode. Okay, Emmanuel. Yes, Kai? What is the first image that comes to mind, first sort of caricature even that you have when I bring up Richard Pryor?
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Chapter 2: How did Richard Pryor's comedy challenge societal norms?
And not surprisingly, you know, he was sexually abused as a child if you grew up in that environment. And then at age 14, gets thrown out of school because they discover he lives in a brothel.
Wait. Yes, sir. So he basically came into school and they're like, oh, we discovered that you are living in a brothel, which is potentially like unsafe situation. And we're just going to kick you out.
That's right. You need help. Go. So, you know, so, yeah, he gets kicked out of school. And he does, though, go and find sanctuary in this place, this community center in Peoria, where he meets what he calls the angel in his life. It's this woman who's a drama teacher and sees real potential in young Richard Pryor and starts coaching him and giving him opportunities to perform.
And he starts heading down this road. So, 1963, he moves to New York City with $10 in his pocket.
Classic, yeah.
He's got a dollar and a dream. And he starts performing in the Greenwich Village scene. And I don't know how much you know about that scene from the early 60s.
I don't know, mostly just like everywhere you walk, there's like Bob Dylan singing in some bar.
That's right. That's right. It's this intimate place. And, you know, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Miles Davis, like John Coltrane, all these people are performing in these little clubs. The Village Gate is like one of the big ones. So Richard Pryor gets booked at the Village Gate on one of his first nights. He's opening for Nina Simone. Wow.
I love thinking of, like, young Richard Pryor through Nina Simone's eyes. She's talking about he is so scared, right? Like, to get up on that stage that apparently, she says, he shook like he had malaria.
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Chapter 3: How did Richard Pryor's childhood in a brothel influence his career?
I don't understand it. Myself, I'd rather cum. Oh, wow. I've had money and never felt as good as I felt when I cummed.
So nothing matter but when you get in the nut, especially if it's a girl.
Niggas be sick if I ain't doing your act. I'm like, I'm new. You know they all been choking on me. I was the only dude in the neighborhood that would fuck this faggot, though. A lot of dudes don't play that shit, you know, because in the daytime, I don't fuck no faggot, man. At night, you're kissing... Right, but it's embarrassing because I meant to do, like, ten years later. Hi, Rich.
So, man, this is 1971 that he does this joke. When I heard this for the first time, obviously not in 1971, many years later, I heard this album, but I was a teenager and it was the first time in my life I had ever heard a man, certainly a black man, talk matter-of-factly about having sex with another man.
And he uses, you know, this language and this framework, but he's like saying, you know, we all do it.
Like people have sex, men have sex with each other.
Why do y'all act like you don't do it? And it just blew my mind. Like I have an emotional memory of hearing it, you know, and being like, what?
Well, yeah, because it's interesting because the way he says it is very matter-of-factly. Actually, the way the audience reacts is a laugh that also is normalizing.
That's right. That's like, oh, you know, you told the truth. You know, we all know, like, we're all a little gay. You know? But that's the kind of truth telling we're talking about. And, you know, he goes on telling these kind of jokes about his bisexuality throughout his life.
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Chapter 4: What struggles did Richard Pryor face with fame and self-destruction?
He had seen... So this is a pretty white event, you know? And there had been this black dance troupe that went on and had, like, some technical trouble and asked for help. And he witnessed the white production staff be dismissive of them and, like, not help them. And then there was a white dance troupe that had the same technical trouble and they got all the help they needed.
Naturally, yeah.
And he was just... and livid about this and so he tells these reverse jokes the audience is with him they're all in his palm they're laughing and enjoying it and then he stops and says how can faggots be racist And he proceeds, and that's a quote, he uses that language, and proceeds to light into them for being hypocrites.
Wow.
So then he just lays into them for essentially for being hypocrites, you know, for not wanting to stand up for Black people in the way that they now want everybody to stand up for them. And this is Los Angeles, right? So he's like, where were you during Watts? You know, and where are you for Black civil rights? And, you know, it gets pretty bad.
And, you know, he starts feeling himself in it, you know, because he's mad. And he says, I hope you all get arrested when you leave here. Because, you know, it's illegal to be gay. Like, sodomy is illegal. And that's just a really nasty thing to say to somebody, you know. Yeah, yeah. And so they're booing him and heckling him and all of that.
And finally, he just turns around, puts his ass in the air and says, kiss my happy rich ass and walks off stage.
Kiss my happy rich black man ass. Yes.
Which is still funny on top of everything else. This is, you know, obviously it's a horrible... I mean, the language is terrible and like... But, you know, he's... also telling a truth that we are still arguing about, like, in the gay community. He is naming something, you know, that we are still discussing. Like, the way white gay men will be there for their rights,
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Chapter 5: What impact did Richard Pryor have on the comedy landscape?
Right? Right. Go fuck yourselves.
Right.
You know, but I will say part of my interest in him is like I my father, I feel like I watched go through this, you know, like as this man who, you know, was the first this and the first that in his field, he was a doctor. You know, and so, like, he was routinely in whites-only spaces. He really wanted to be in black spaces. You know, that's where he preferred to be.
But to have the success he wanted, he had to be in these spaces. And I think it kind of curdled him, you know? And for all of them, what ends up happening, and I don't understand why, I mean, I don't know why this happens, but all of them start to self-destruct. You know?
And I guess part of my... Like, if you talk to a Black Gen Xer, like, this is a regular part of my conversation with my Black peers, is thinking about this. Is this something that, like, your generation talks about? Do you have this?
I think it's something... Honestly, I think it's something in my generation when you talk to Black kids who grew up in suburban spaces. And just by existing, just by doing stuff, I'm the first of this. Every other Black person I'm meeting is the first person to do this or is exceptional in kind of some way by virtue of the fact we're in this room or this place.
But, I don't know, I feel like the stakes of it are way more real for, like, Gen Xers or, like, people who came before. For our parents.
Yeah, you know. Because part of why is the struggle to carry that. Like, what they do, how they carry that, that they had tried so hard to be there. He worked so hard to go from being... you know, the kid that grew up in a brothel to standing on this stage, being so famous that they would book him for this, even though he obviously was not a fit, you know?
A hundred percent. And also it's just like, it's so telling to me because he came up doing one type of comedy that was very white people safe. And then ultimately had a break with that. And then by necessity kind of had to reshape himself in front of Black audiences.
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Chapter 6: How did Richard Pryor's approach to comedy evolve over time?
Like, why he would. And I don't get it. To this day, I don't get it. Why this impulse to self-destruction? You know, my father absolutely wasn't a drug addict, but he self-destructed with like he was a surgeon who treated people for diabetes and heart disease and preventable illnesses. And he died at 58 of diabetes and heart disease. Right.
And it just, you know, just constantly anything he could do to undermine his own health.
Yeah.
And every time I am in conversation with other Black Gen X people, we talk about this and that they've seen in their parents or someone in their family. I don't understand it. I don't understand why it went to self-destruction. But I also want, you know, from someone from your generation, is this at all legible to you? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?
I mean, it feels ridiculous to say this because it's so lower stakes than what we've talked about, but it's like... Nobody wants to be the black guy at a white dance party in the middle of the circle. You know what I mean?
In the middle of the circle.
In the middle of the circle of everyone looking on you and displaying that way. There's something about that sort of experience, whether it's you're performing on stage in front of millions of people, whether it's you're a doctor like your father was.
There's something about finding success and realizing that that success means that you have to exist in a society that your whole life has never wanted you, still doesn't really want you now, is being made to accept you. And... Like, facing a choice, you either sort of fully embrace it, you lean in, and you end up changing yourself, probably in ways that are so small, right?
That you don't even necessarily notice them. Probably in your everyday life, you're going about it and you're like, I'm doing what I've always done, doing the stuff that has gotten me to this place. But you are probably on some level changing yourself in these small ways that maybe don't hurt you in the moment, but harm you as time goes on.
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