America's Most Beloved Comic Rebel

By Richard Zoglin

When he broke into TV in the mid-1960s, on shows like Merv Griffin and Ed Sullivan, RICHARD PRYOR--who died last week of a heart attack at age 65--was a cute, rubber-faced young comic with a knack for physical comedy and a childlike sweetness; in one of his earliest bits, he impersonated a band of scared grade-schoolers performing Rumpelstiltskin. Within a few years, he had become America's most celebrated comic revolutionary. Frustrated with the safe material he was doing on TV and in nightclubs, he walked out on a gig in Vegas, moved to Berkeley, Calif., and began talking about the things that mattered to him: race (assaulting the audience with the once taboo word nigger), sex and his own colorful, often tumultuous life. He re-created the street characters--winos, pimps, junkies--he had grown up with in the Peoria, Ill., ghetto, where his grandmother ran whorehouses. And he dragged the culture along with him. His comedy albums--starting with his 1974 masterpiece That Nigger's Crazy--were best sellers and won five Grammys. He pioneered a new genre, the feature-length comedy concert, with his 1979 film Richard Pryor: Live in Concert. He was a hit in more traditional films too, winning an Oscar nomination for his nervy performance as Piano Man in the Billie Holiday biography Lady Sings the Blues, pairing with Gene Wilder in buddy comedies like Silver Streak and Stir Crazy, and showing his dramatic range as a doomed autoworker in Paul Schrader's Blue Collar.

His no-holds-barred comedy was matched by a private life that seemed an unending soap opera--outbursts of violence, run-ins with the law, and drug abuse that culminated in 1980, at the height of his freebasing years, when he set himself on fire and nearly died. All of which, remarkably, became fodder for his stand-up. "You know something I found out?" he said of his self-immolation. "When you're on fire and running down the street, people get out of your way." Multiple sclerosis, diagnosed in 1985, all but silenced him in his later years. But his ruthless honesty and performing brilliance set a standard by which every comic since must be measured.

With reporting by Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, ELIZABETH L. BLAND, Logan Orlando