BECOMING RICHARD PRYOR

Smart blend of social history and biography centering on one of the funniest—and most tragic—people of our time.

By Saul’s (English/Univ. of California; Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, 2003) account, Richard Pryor (1940-2005) wrestled out the demons of physical abuse, racism and addiction on a stage that at first wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. That effort produced some strange results. One of the more interesting detours in this already digressive narrative follows the course of the autobiographical film This Can’t Be Happening to Me, a look at Pryor’s childhood in a brothel; the film started as a broad comedy, then became serious, then took on the coloring of a “tripped-out imagination that made [the film] cousin to a midnight movie like El Topo.” As Saul observes, it helped that Pryor and the family that so often figured in his comedy were “powerfully dramatic people,” thus it was natural that Pryor should so readily bend genres to insert seriousness in funny situations and comedy into grave discussions. Saul’s psychobiographical essays are illuminating, as when he writes of a young Pryor discovering that white girls were more receptive to him than were white boys. Race is a driving theme throughout, and Saul closes on a note that is both hopeful and resigned. Asked whether he viewed the world in terms of black and white, Pryor said, “I see people…as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn’t come to be yet.” Saul is sometimes guilty of forced analogies, as when he finds an echo of the resignation of Richard Nixon, whom a Republican senator compared to “a piano player in a whorehouse who claims not to know what’s going on upstairs,” in Pryor’s own time in the house of bawd. Still, this is a well-executed study that gives Pryor due credit as pioneer, intellectual and artist.

Better written and more thoughtful than David and Joe Henry’s Furious Cool (2013). The latter remains worth reading, but this book is the place to start.