A New Black Superstar

The Pryor Engagements Go Up and Up

Words, too, can be born again. Just then it seemed to have been purged from the language, an epithet consigned to the ashcan by a more enlightened society, there it is again: nigger. But when Richard Pryor says it, it means something different from what it did through too much of America's history. Depending on his inflection or even the tilt of his mouth, it can mean simply black. Or it can mean a hip black, wise in the ways of the street. Occasionally, nigger can even mean white in Pryor's reverse English lexicon. However he defines it, Pryor is certain of one thing. He is proudly, assertively a nigger, the first comedian to speak in the raw, brutal, but often wildly hilarious language of the streets.

"Nigger is his favorite word," says Beau Bridges, the co-star of Greased Lightning, Pryor's new hit movie. "Niggers is beautiful," Pryor explains. "Got their own rhythm and play their own games. Whitey don't know how to play."

Bicentennial Nigger, Pryor's latest comedy album, won a Grammy last year, as did That Nigger's Crazy in 1974. Greased Lightning, the amiable story of Wendell Scott, the first black race-car champion, is going like--well, you know what--at the neighborhoods, and Pryor's acting is the only thing to remember from such films as Silver Streak and Car Wash. His next movie, Which Way Is Up?, will be released in November. Also on his packed schedule is The Wiz, the film version of the longrun, all-black Broadway hit. Pryor will of course be the Wiz himself. Pryor has multipicture deals with both Warner Bros, and Universal studios. This week he begins taping his own comedy variety series for NBC.

Everyone wants Pryor, and, barring an accident of nature, he appears certain to be the next black superstar--if he is not already. "Of all the actors working now," says Lily Tomlin, "he is the one who has the most instant rapport with his audience." Paul Schrader, who directed him in Blue Collar, which will be released in February, does not stop there.

Says he: "I feel quite strongly that Richard will be the biggest black actor ever." Lome Michaels, who produces NBC's Saturday Night, on which Pryor has appeared three times, can top even that exuberant encomium. "Richard Pryor," he says, dismissing half a billion other funny fellows, "is the funniest man on the planet."

Everything about Pryor is special. "A lot of people try to tell the truth and make it funny," says Wiz producer Rob Cohen. "Most comedians use truth as a point of departure. Not Richard. No one else is so accurate and compassionate. He just lets it run, and you see it." Pryor does not tell jokes, and he probably would be tongue-tied if he attempted a one-liner. Instead, like Tomlin, perhaps his closest white friend, he does sketches.

Playing Mudbone, the levee-tender, or Oilwell, the "dangerous nigger" who fights the cops, he lets the humor build up gradually as the audience understands the character he is impersonating--or is possessed by. "What Lily and I do transcends stand-up comedy crap," he boasts. "We make it theater. We involve the audience in truth because everything we do is real. Both of us are possessed when we are onstage. Yes, man, I'm talking literally. Possession, man."

Blacks, whites, men and women: all fall before Pryor's humor, which can sometimes be, Cohen notwithstanding, about as compassionate as a firing squad. As the Rev. James L. White, dressed in silver sequins and high-heeled silver boots, he takes on all black TV and radio preachers. The Rev. White disdains little black dollars from little black folk. Says he: "We're looking for the Billy Graham dollars." Changing into a medal-encrusted uniform, Pryor is Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada, the man of the mad, murderous giggle. "I love American people," says the field marshal. "I had two for lunch."

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 it."

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 and a packinghouse laborer. To get out of Peoria --and poverty--he volunteered for the Army and was sent to West Germany.

A teacher in Peoria had encouraged him to become a performer, and when he returned from Germany he started a routine there at a little club. In 1963 he went to New York City and cabarets in Greenwich Village. He wanted to be like Bill Cosby, the first black comedian to achieve national success. As he remembers, he said to himself: "Goddamn it. This nigger's doin' what I'm fixin' to do. I want to be the only nigger. Ain't no room for two niggers."

He did not 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 to talk in the argot of the pool shark and the hustler, a language so obscene that it is no longer obscene, with four-letter words so common that they now seem part of the verbal furniture. Is he vulgar? Of course, but not in his own eyes. "Vulgar," he says, "is like Richard Nixon being allowed in Red China. That's very vulgar. That's vile. Vulgar, onstage, is colorful."

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."

While he has appeared on the tube numerous times, and had his own special last May, Pryor has always been uneasy before the television camera. TV is no stranger to vulgarity, but it cannot tolerate obscenity. When he does a TV stint, Pryor must censor himself as he did in the years before his Las Vegas awakening. His friends, who think he should concentrate on movies, advised him against committing himself to the NBC series. Last spring Pryor tried to break his contract, or at least reduce his projected schedule. NBC, however, refused to let him out. Though he makes network brass as nervous as they make him, NBC is desperate for a hit. The Richard Pryor Show has been strategically placed in the same Tuesday night slot as ABC's Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley, which are No. 1 and No. 2 in the ratings. With his fresh, unpredictable humor, Pryor might just be the wild hit that could topple the opposition.

The only thing that has not come naturally for Pryor has been living. For several years he was hooked on cocaine, a fact he now includes in his comedy routine. "I snorted up Peru," he says. "I could have bought Peru." Married and divorced three times, he has four children--three girls and a boy. A long-term relationship seems beyond his grasp, but his main companion right now is Pam Grier, who played his wife in Greased Lightning.

For the moment life is calm. Pryor's mansion in the San Fernando Valley --with two guest cottages, tennis court, swimming pool, gymnasium and 52 fruit trees--is about the same distance as Samarkand from the slums of Peoria. Sometimes even he can't believe his good fortune. "Damn, what's the name of that tree?" he asks someone, pointing at the vegetation in question. No one knows, and then Pryor himself remembers. "Apricot. Yeah, that's it," he says. "Ain't that something? A nigger with an apricot tree."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.