Richard Pryor: The Story We Got Wrong | From Big Lives

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:18
Speaker 2: 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 re examines the icons we think we understand, including Richard Pryor's, called Big Lives. Hosted by journalists Ky 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 Immanuel 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.

00:01:53
Speaker 1: Just 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?

00:02:09
Speaker 3: Oh man, Can I just say, I feel like the image that was fed to me is of this comedian and he was really funny but kind of just.

00:02:21
Speaker 1: Kind of like a hot mess.

00:02:23
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:02:23
Speaker 1: Well, the thing is, though, Emmanuel, you're not wrong. I snarted cocay for about fifteen years. My dumbass I started off smarting little tiny pinches, said I know I ain't gonna get hooked.

00:02:35
Speaker 4: I don't know coke.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: You can't get hooked. My friend's been snorting fifteen years.

00:02:38
Speaker 5: I ain't hooked.

00:02:44
Speaker 1: I was about snorting little teen didn't he make noise coke Etty get Jet.

00:02:52
Speaker 5: Past the album Please No More for Me.

00:02:55
Speaker 1: Six months later? I mean that is like a meaningful part of what happened in Richard Pryor's life, you know, I think there's more to that, and particularly the questions around why from BBC Studios and Pushkin Industries. This is big Lives. I'm kai right. We are both journalists and cultural obsessives who love trying to understand the world through an individual person's life. These are architects of our culture, people who have just had a huge impact on the way we live, the way we take in art, the way we think of ourselves, but who have been flattened over the years, and so we want to bring them back to life, look into their complicated big lives, and we're using the treasure trove of the BBC Archive to do that. There is over one hundred years of tape of some of the biggest cultural figures in our world. The BBC's got it and so we're digging through it. So listen. First off, if the basics of Richard Pryor, if you don't know who he is, he is a genre defining comedian. He talked to almost any comedian today, certainly of his era, they would say he's the goat. You know. He just had a titanic career, five Grammys, He was the first black person to host SNL. He first black person to make a million dollars in a movie.

00:04:23
Speaker 3: Wait what yeah?

00:04:25
Speaker 1: Okay, So, as I've been rooting around in the archive for Richard Pryor, there's this clip I found of his daughter rain prior in two thousand and six, so it's right after he died. They did a documentary about his life, and she said, this interesting thing, listen to this. There was always truth.

00:04:42
Speaker 6: He didn't make up things just to get a laugh or you know, tell a story that That's the one thing that I love about the man is that you maybe at times you didn't know what Richard you were going to get personally, but you always knew you were going to get Richard, if that makes sense. You're always going to get the man, whether messed up or not. And he would tell you he was messed up.

00:05:05
Speaker 1: And you know, like that honesty thing, the telling the truth piece, like that's the core Richard Pryor. That is like what was at the core of his fame and what people loved about him, and the messed up part also. You know, he is simultaneously, as you said at the beginning, just wildly self destructive. But the two I think they got something to do with each other. And you know, that is the thing that I am drawn to. There's a way in which the disruptive behavior is why he had such a massive impact on the culture. And I want to talk about that.

00:05:39
Speaker 3: That's dood.

00:05:49
Speaker 1: Welcome back. This is Big Lives, and we are talking about Richard Pryor. Okay, so Richard Franklin Lennox, Thomas Pryor. The third.

00:05:59
Speaker 3: It's always those sources of names that someone is like, right, we're going to reproduce this and put it on a job three times times.

00:06:06
Speaker 1: Three times.

00:06:07
Speaker 3: The third.

00:06:08
Speaker 1: I almost didn't take it in the third part. Right. He had a life, a young life as complicated as his long name. Born in December nineteen forty in Peoria, Illinois. He grew up in a brothel, oh okay, like an actual brothel. His mother was a sex worker, his father was a pimp and a boxer. Well, and his grandmother, you know, was really who raised him. She was like the big personality in his life. He called her Mama. He talked about her a lot throughout his career. And here is again his daughter Rain Pror talking about Mama in that two thousand and six documentary.

00:06:49
Speaker 6: You know, Mama was proud of herself for having this whorehouse because it's the one thing that put food on the table. And my dad's perception in growing up with that was a little warped in that environment, and women were to be used and to be bought with money, and he sort of had that, I think throughout obviously his entire life.

00:07:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you grew up in a brothel in that way, and it's just like it sounds like it's your family business.

00:07:15
Speaker 1: And family home, that's your whole world view. Yeah, and not surprisingly, you know, he was sexually abused as a child. If you grew up in that environment, and then at age fourteen gets thrown out of school because they discover he lives in a brothel.

00:07:33
Speaker 3: Wait, yes, sir, so he basically camerat to school a bit 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.

00:07:44
Speaker 1: 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 up ortunities to perform, and he starts heading down this road. So nineteen sixty three, he moved to New York City with ten dollars in his pocket. Yeah, dollar in 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 sixties.

00:08:28
Speaker 3: I don't know. Mostly just like everywhere you walk as like Bob Dylan singing with some body.

00:08:32
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. It's this intimate place. And you know, Bob Dylan, Woody Al and 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 a Nina Simone 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, was so nervous.

00:09:11
Speaker 3: That is such a specific description.

00:09:14
Speaker 1: Of right, that the man chook like malaria. So she says, to get him up on stage, she would rock him like a baby, like put her arms around him and just rock him till he calmed down. So she did that on the first night, and then the next night was the same, and the next I rocked him each time until he calmed down.

00:09:35
Speaker 3: Wow, she like midwife him into being basically that's right, yes.

00:09:39
Speaker 1: Nina Simone midwife Richard Pryor. And you know he says at the time, the kind of comedy he started to develop was essentially copying Bill Cosby, right, So like this is you know, the mid sixties. Bill Cosby is the certainly the reigning black celebrity, but probably like one of you know, because he's on TV right as a black man. That's really unusual at this time. And he's you know, Bill Cosby is like telling Cosby jokes.

00:10:11
Speaker 3: Right right, right, right, right, right about children, and then somebody's pinning something on a rug.

00:10:17
Speaker 1: Yes, and so Richard Pryor thinks this is comedy, and so I'm going to do that. There's this clip I found from his closest collaborator in comedy, Paul Mooney.

00:10:29
Speaker 7: He sort of modeled his career after Bill Cosby in the early stages, and that allowed him to be accepted by white audiences with a tone of voice. If you didn't noticee you were watching, you might have mistaken him for Bill Cosby.

00:10:44
Speaker 4: You can't get a cab in New York City, right, especially when it rains.

00:10:47
Speaker 3: All the cabs are owned by one company.

00:10:48
Speaker 4: Off duty, and he's pretty good at it, actually, And he starts to take off and he gets on the Ed Sullivan Show.

00:11:00
Speaker 1: That's his big moment, like and he starts doing these bits on the Ed Sullivan's show in the sixties, then becomes known as like a rising star as a consequence, you know, is the new Bill Cosby. But that is not going to hold for a man who grew up in a brothel.

00:11:19
Speaker 3: Right, because I know of Bill Cosby's comedies, is is it clean? From the most very it's And I'm also not really about race and not no.

00:11:30
Speaker 1: Gets on with white people, and so Richard Pryor is trying to get on with white people. Okay, So it's nineteen sixty seven. He's now become quite popular for doing this bill cosby kind of humor right on the Ed Sullivan Show No Less. And he's booked at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, and it's a big gig, right sold out audience, and he's standing backstage, you know, kind of weirdly reluctant to get on stage, looking out at the audience, right, and he's looking out at like a sea of white faces, like it's just like a white, white audience, and he's like, I don't know what am I doing? And he has what he describes that, Oh man, it's epiphany, you know, like I just I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. This is not what I want. I don't want to go out on this stage, you know. But he walks out anyway, and before he tells a single joke, right, Like, the very first thing he does is blurts out, what the fuck am I doing here?

00:12:38
Speaker 3: Wait?

00:12:38
Speaker 8: What?

00:12:39
Speaker 1: And he's just like, why am I here? You know, in the most profane way. So after he gets that out of his system, he goes on and tries to do the gig that he's signed up for. He starts telling these jokes, right, and about midway through the set he's just like nah and just walks off stage.

00:13:00
Speaker 8: Wait.

00:13:00
Speaker 3: Wait, So he goes out on stage and is like, basically he says the thing he's thinking, which are and then he recovers and is like, Okay, let me get back to a clean joke, sorry, folks. And then it's like actually this I'm just gonna go.

00:13:13
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna go, and just just walks off stage. And he's so petulant about it. He doesn't even walk off stage in the right direction, like he like deliberately walks off stage in like the wrong direction. So it's like awkward to get off the stage, and it's like a whole mess of night. And it's the disaster that you think, right, Like, his agent's like he'll never work again, and indeed, he like stops getting booked. You know, he's pushed into the small clubs and college towns and stuff like that. Like he's destroyed his career, right, you know, But it's in this moment as a consequence that he starts to rethink that career and he leaves New York and he moves to the Bay Area. Now this is you know, this is the sixties, right, and he starts getting involved in the sort of Bay Area counterculture. He starts getting involved with the black Power movement, right, that grows up out of Oakland, and that to change his understanding of like the world and his place in it and what he could do, and he starts to think about comedy that is more raw and honest, right, And so he begins this process and he says, like he says later, like that he realized comedy, real comedy wasn't just telling jokes, it was about telling the truth. And just to sort of give you an example of where this kind of comedy goes. Yeah, So he starts making albums. Nineteen seventy one, his second album, it's called Craps, right like after the Dice Game, and it's a wildly profane album. And I want to play you like one of the jokes. Okay, it's toward the end of the show. He goes on this truly profane riff about sex and then like the last twenty five thirty seconds of this is what I want you to pay attention to. But here it all. And yes, dear listener, this is the CLI with the discriminatory language in context.

00:15:12
Speaker 3: This this is the stuff you needed the warning fault, so be ready.

00:15:16
Speaker 1: All right, So here's Richard Pryor nineteen seventy one.

00:15:20
Speaker 9: You know, like, you can't talk about fucking in America, right, people say you're dirty, But if you talk about.

00:15:26
Speaker 8: Killing somebody, that's cool. I don't understand it myself. I'd rather come, Oh wow.

00:15:41
Speaker 9: I've had money and never felt as good as I.

00:15:43
Speaker 8: Felt when I come.

00:15:46
Speaker 3: Do nothing matter.

00:15:47
Speaker 9: But when you get in a nut, especially if it's a girl, niggas be signifying doing you act.

00:15:58
Speaker 1: I knew, you know, they only children.

00:16:01
Speaker 9: I was the only dude in the neighborhood.

00:16:03
Speaker 8: Would fuck this fagin though a lot of dudes don't play that shit.

00:16:06
Speaker 9: You come here in the daytime, I.

00:16:07
Speaker 4: Don't fuck me Flagan man at night you.

00:16:10
Speaker 9: Kiss him, right, But it's embarrassing because I meant to dude like ten years later, Hi, rich.

00:16:27
Speaker 1: So man, this is nineteen seventy one that he does this joke right when I heard this for the first obviously, not in nineteen seventy one, many years later, Like, 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 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.

00:17:06
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, because it's it's interesting because the way he says it is very matter of fact. We yeah, Actually the way the owers reacts is a law that also is normalized.

00:17:14
Speaker 1: That's right. That's like, oh, you know, you told the truth, you know. Yeah, yeah, no, like we're all a little gay, 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. Wow, and so a couple of things about this right one. It's a success. You know, like a few years earlier he was doing Bill Cosby jokes on Ed Sullivan. This pivot to his more profane Self is a success, but it's specifically a success with black people. And this stuff is a hit Craps in particular, like was kind of a cult classic for black people. That's how I encountered it. My parents had that album, you know, and I was digging around in it, you know, decades later, but it would be the beginning of his success. He had a concert film that in that same year that was a big hit. His next album, which was titled that Nigger's Crazy. Okay, that was like, like, that's a huge hit. But like even still he's wrestling with this fame and with his place in the culture, and it kind of comes to another head with the gay sex thing. I'm gonna tell you a story about that. So it's nineteen seventy seven and he's a superstar by this point, right, and he's booked as the headliner for a show at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles that's a fundraiser for gay rights. Right, Okay, Because so now this is the moment in the history of gay rights where it's like the movement has moved from like stonewall and liberation and sexual liberation to like a proper civil rights.

00:18:57
Speaker 3: Movement, right, right, right, right, They able to command venues like the Hollywood exactly.

00:19:01
Speaker 1: And what goes along with a proper civil rights movement is like a more proper kind of conversation, yes, about who you are, you know. And so the event happens and it's packed. There's seventeen thousand people there, mostly gay men. Most of the other acts are super like. It's got a human rights framework right to it, and so people are talking about human rights, you know. And Richard Pryor goes on, you know, and he gets on stage and he's clearly agitated, like you can see he's agitated. He's pacing around like he's you know, and the first thing he says is, I came here for human rights. What I found out is it's really about not getting caught with a dick in your mouth.

00:19:54
Speaker 3: So not the problem. No, they probably wanted for his benefit, right, What.

00:20:01
Speaker 1: About sex, y'all? And now what we're here talking about. But the crowd responds exactly as you did. They like, you know, this is right now classic Richard Pryor. That's right, shake it up, you know, And so he goes on to tell the gay sex joke, right like, he goes back to like he talks about the first time he gave a blowjob, and he names names. What was the guy's name, Wilbur harp In nineteen fifty two is the first man he sucked.

00:20:27
Speaker 3: Oh not that poor man, I.

00:20:32
Speaker 1: And you know, and he describes the experience as beautiful, and he says, you know, everybody was sucking harpstick. I was the only one to bring him roses. So it's the same sort of setup us. And so people are loving it. They're eating it up in the audience. But the whole time he's telling this joke, he is enraged, Like inside, he's enraged because backstage 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 in livid about this, And so he tells these averse jokes. The audience is with him, They're all in his palm. And they're laughing and enjoying it, and then he stops and says, how can fagots be racist? And he proceeds and that's a quote, uses that language and proceeds to light into them for being hypocrites. 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 for like and this is Los Angeles, right, yeah, So like 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 he, 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. Yeah, you know. Yeah, And so they're booing him and hackling him and all of that, and finally he just turns around, puts his ass in the air and kiss my happy rich ass and walks off stage.

00:22:39
Speaker 3: Kids my happy rich black man.

00:22:41
Speaker 1: Yes, which is still funny on top of everything else. You know, this is you know, obviously it's a horrible you know, I mean, the language is terrible and like, but you know, he's also telling the truth that we are still arguing about, like in the gay community. He is naming something, you know, that we are discussing, like the way white gay men are will be there for their rights, but not for anything else, including for the rights of black gay people.

00:23:19
Speaker 3: It's also just an interesting because it feels like the whole point of the event was to sort of bring the gay rights movement into sort of like a more mainstream button up sort of like to make it the sort of thing that like your average do good o white housewife of that era probably could be like, oh you do look at them, They're doing this thing, and he's refusing to basically keep it in that place. He's like, no, let's talk about what we're really heed to talk about.

00:23:46
Speaker 1: Well he can't. He's incapable.

00:23:47
Speaker 3: Okay, So what is going on for him? Like is he just rejecting just like the whiteness of it all one more time?

00:23:55
Speaker 1: Like Emmanuel, this is part of why I'm talking to you about this because I don't fully know, but I think that it connects to something that is going on for the whole generation of black people, this post civil rights generation for black people. Right, So like here he is, you know, he has found this success in these mainstream white spaces, right, but these mainstream white spaces that are now letting black people into them, are not they let stop being racist? You know, like right as we see it's the Hollywood ball right, Like there's still racist space.

00:24:30
Speaker 3: They're still racist as well. And he's also doing that thing. I don't know, there's this thing I feel like with black performers, especially in that era probably, which is, you know, we're only like a couple of decades removed from sort of like the dance black man dance kind of nature of like minstrel shows and people performing four white people in a way that was totally like black people were always the joke.

00:24:55
Speaker 1: We're always the joke. And so now are you the joke or are you laughing with me? You know? So I'm sure he's wrestling with some of that, and like adjacent to that is like just what am I doing here? Period? Like I need I need act says to these white spaces in order to become rich and famous, and the way that I want, you know, but these white spaces remain racist, you know, Like I kind of don't want to be here at all, you know, but I do want to be here at all. And like what do I do? Do I say something about the racism? Do I not say something about the racism? And you know, Richard Pryor's response to that seems to be when he short circuits is to spit in white.

00:25:33
Speaker 3: People's face, right, right, go.

00:25:35
Speaker 1: 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 I 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 exer 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?

00:26:31
Speaker 3: 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 meaning is the first person to do this or is exceptional in kind of some way by virtue of the fact we were 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 X's or like people who came before.

00:26:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and because part of what 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 stand out to the stage being so famous that they would book him for this even though he obviously was not a fit, you know.

00:27:20
Speaker 3: 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 it kind of had to reshape himself in front of black audience.

00:27:36
Speaker 1: One of the black audiences, and then he was okay.

00:27:38
Speaker 3: Right, and then it was okay, and then became famous doing that, but it still took him to the same place where it's like he still ends up performing in front of white people. And as funny as you were describing this, it kind of reminded me of like what happened to Dave Chappelle.

00:27:53
Speaker 1: Right, you know what, that's exactly right, that's exactly right.

00:27:56
Speaker 3: You're making all these jokes you get famous for, like in Dave Chappelle's case, making the Dave Chappelle Show, which was like this sort of skitch show that aired in like the early two thousands, and he got famous for like doing these very like I Haven't Got risky, very race focused, very honest and honest jokes that black people loved, and then eventually he had to stop because it's just like, wait, I feel like white people are laughing at this in a way that is making me very uncomfortable and me being the biggest this show has ever been. At the height of his fame, the attention he's drawing and trying to figure out just like, Okay, how can I be this famous when I have white fans right and in a white gaze?

00:28:41
Speaker 1: And you know, maybe the comparison is apt as well, because, like I think, you know, the today's Dave Chappelle is a man who is self destructed. And part of my interest in this is like the self destruction that Richard Pryor engages in as a consequence of this stuff was epic and I'm gonna tell you about that after a break.

00:29:05
Speaker 5: Okay, welcome back.

00:29:15
Speaker 1: This is Big Lives. We are talking about Richard Pryor, and we are now going to talk about his ampic self destruction. All right, So June of nineteen eighty, Yes, Richard Pryor is wildly wealthy. By this point. He has already been the first black person to make a million dollars in a movie. So you know, his Hollywood Bowl flame out, you know, was not enough to derail him. He's that famous now. And he co wrote Blazing Saddles. Do you know the movie Blazing he co wrote? Yes, sir, that's Richard pryor so those things have happened, he's like killing it. Also, he is spending more than a quarter million dollars a year on drugs, just on drugs alone. That's what he says in his memoir Wow and So June and nineteen eighties, he's like on a days long binge of freebasing cocaine. So it's been going on days. He's at his mansion in Los Angeles. It's this sprawling estate, you know, and he's not having fun while he's doing this. Yeah, you know, he's just really really high. And you know, he has this moment where his manager describes it as like he's trying to deal with his guilt for the crime of being Richard pryor whatever the hell that means.

00:30:48
Speaker 3: The crime of being Richard pryor whatever.

00:30:50
Speaker 1: I have no idea what that means, but that's what he's experiencing in the moment while he's on this like binge, and he takes a bottle of one and fifty one proof from that, I guess he's drinking while he's on this day's long cane. He pours it over his head and he lights himself on fire. A fireball erupts engulfs his body because the free based cocaine also has these volatile substances in it. Oh wow, you know, flames cover more than half his body. He runs out of the mansion, past his security, out the gates, runs down the street, a streaking ball of fire. I mean, it's awful, it's horrific, and you know he somehow survives this.

00:31:47
Speaker 3: That was my next question. So he survives that, but probably with like horrendous bund horrendous burns.

00:31:54
Speaker 1: He has six weeks of recovery. I want to play some of that documentary from two thousand and six again where people in his life try to make sense of this moment. And so you're gonna hear from his daughter again and his son now, and from his closest collaborator in comedy, Paul Mooney. So here's that he wanted to end his life.

00:32:20
Speaker 10: Sometimes you get to a point where you can't take anymore and you don't know how to get away out of it, or you know, you don't see a way out, and a lot of times you take matters into your own hands, saying this is the only option I have.

00:32:33
Speaker 1: Richard was trying to kill himself.

00:32:36
Speaker 2: Definitely, Definitely what makes you say about it because.

00:32:41
Speaker 1: It was the way he was acting before he did it. He was trying to get out of here. I'm sure of it.

00:32:46
Speaker 6: He told me straight out, I didn't have an accident, baby, I tried to kill myself. I wanted it to stop.

00:32:53
Speaker 3: He just couldn't take it.

00:32:55
Speaker 1: We couldn't take it.

00:32:56
Speaker 3: Could you explain what you were talking about?

00:32:59
Speaker 6: Well, Mama had to passed away, you know, Mama had passed away, the thing that was his rock, his foundation. Now what who's going to tell you off? Nobody in your life wants to tell you off?

00:33:09
Speaker 1: Why could You're.

00:33:10
Speaker 3: Richard Prior if that makes sense, because when you told me the way in which he did, I'm like, oh, this is that is a suicidal act.

00:33:19
Speaker 1: But at the time, who knew, you know, like also just the act of a deranged drug addict, right, you know, But you think about like this balancing act he had been doing with himself, right of like chasing fame in this white space, you know, really wanting to be in these black spaces. Yeah, and I can imagine mama. You know, his grandmother, who raised him in a brothel, was probably a lot of like what made the balance.

00:33:50
Speaker 3: Right, right, it's like he has this grounding presence in his life. Yeah. I could totally see a wale in which his grandma is his grounding presence that reminds him where he comes from, that connects him to his childhood in that way, you know.

00:34:02
Speaker 1: So it's a horrible event, but classic Richard Pryor, he turns this into comedy when he comes back from this. In nineteen eighty two, he makes a comedy film, Richard Pryor Live on Sunset Strip. It's his next concert film.

00:34:18
Speaker 4: Uh.

00:34:19
Speaker 1: And I would say it was my introduction to Richard Pryor. I remember watching that with my family, you know, and he tells the story of this moment as of this long drawn out bit that becomes like one of his most famous bits. And I just remember watching my family, My father particularly just tears crying, you know, at like that tears funny laugh you get when somebody's telling the truth that feels real to you.

00:34:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, like if that it hit close to home, you know, for your dad and people.

00:34:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, of that generation of like they got it, you know, 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, so he was not a drug addict, but he's self destructed with like. He was a surgeon who treated people for diabetes and heart disease and preventable illnesses, and he died at fifty eight of diabetes and heart disease, right like, and it just you know, just constantly anything he could do to undermine his own health. Yeah, and you 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?

00:35:46
Speaker 3: I mean, it feels ridiculous to say this because it's so low a stakes and what we've talked about, But it's like nobody wants to be the black guy at a white like dance party in the middle of the circle.

00:36:00
Speaker 1: You know what I mean, in the middle of the circle.

00:36:02
Speaker 3: In the middle of everyone looking on you and display in that way. Like there's something about that sort of experience, whether it's performing on the stage where in front of means of people, whether it's you're a like 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 it's being made to accept you, and like facing a choice, you even sort of fully embrace that. 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, Like to 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, and it becomes sort of like a stress fracture where like you're just like, oh, I can't, I can't keep doing this, I can't. Yeah, like you.

00:37:11
Speaker 1: Need to get into therapy. You have found it's a different colleague for you. It's because and so that is the crime of being Richard Pryor is those small changes to yourself that ultimately become a fracture.

00:37:27
Speaker 3: Right, And it's one of those things for him too, where probably the more he leaned into, like the Richard Pryor Act, the stuff that had first had seen maybe too risky to do in front of white people. Like if you lean back into the thing that brought you peace or brought you some fulfillment. What worked in the late sixties to sort of like get rid of your white fans and to connect with black people. By the time of the eighties and the seventies is something that white people are eager to lap and they want to be in on the joy.

00:37:59
Speaker 1: You want to be on the joke. And you got you know, enough money to have a million dollars a year drug.

00:38:05
Speaker 3: Problem, right you right, you might be losing track of who you are period. There's no way you could also be be who you uh man?

00:38:14
Speaker 1: So you know, I mean and from here it's interesting because like not long after that, so this is nineteen eighty two, by like I think it was like in the mid eighties, we now know he got diagnosed with MS. You know, do you know the film Harlem Knights.

00:38:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, that is a wild film.

00:38:33
Speaker 1: It is a wild film. I love this. This is Eddie Murphy's first directing opportunity. This is like an all star cast of black comedians in the eighties. You know, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Della Reese, Red Fox, like, all of these legends get together make a kind of slapstick comedy about like being gangsters in Harlem. It's a total bomb in the box office, but is a cult classic amongst black people. And Richard Pryor in it is kind of not the funny one. Yeah, you know, he kind of plays it straight. And Eddie Murphy has said in public that like he was frustrated by that in the filming.

00:39:13
Speaker 3: Oh, like Eddie was frustrated. Yeah, He's like, oh, I want you to beaver.

00:39:17
Speaker 1: Richard Pryor was my legend, you know, and he blamed like the film not you know, when it didn't get the kind of critical response that it was supposed to get. He's like part of it. He's riffing on why. One of the things is like I thought me and Richard were going to be on set yucking it up, figuring things out, but Richard was just kind of clocking it in. And then Eddie says, like I later discovered like he had just been diagnosed with MS oh and we didn't know that, but he knew that, and so he was his decline was beginning, and so you know, he continued to be in the culture for a bit, but I you know, I don't remember when his last film was, but he starts to fade away, and it's just a tragedy, you know, because I just think he would have still been such.

00:40:06
Speaker 3: A great because you're saying he was born in nineteen four, Yeah, so he's only five years older than George W.

00:40:14
Speaker 1: Bush. Yeah. Or take another example, Steve Martin, right older than Steve Martin, who has got a hit TV show right now, right, you know, and it's still actively making things. I think Richard Pryor would still be making things, and I wonder what he'd be doing, you know, to push us, you know, the kind of truths he'd be telling that we don't get, you know, And that is also a little bit of the tragedy for me of that generation. There's so many of them, you know.

00:40:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, who so young out you know, yeah, wow.

00:40:48
Speaker 1: Thank you for processing this with me.

00:40:50
Speaker 3: Of course, of course, it's interesting because where we're going next is I think kind of related it speaks to a lot of similar ideas that we talked to you today, but I think through a very different lens. Okay, And so I'm gonna play a couple of clips for you, and I'm curious if you know who we're going to talk.

00:41:09
Speaker 1: Let's do it. I'm ready, all right.

00:41:11
Speaker 3: So this first one is from two thousand and three.

00:41:14
Speaker 11: I don't necessarily think it's specific to England. I think everywhere there's going to be people that are talented that can really rhyme or can really make a bait. And then not necessarily in the forefront of the music industry, you know, it's just about who the record company is gonna put out. You know, there's a lot of talented people everywhere.

00:41:33
Speaker 3: Do you have any idea who this might be.

00:41:35
Speaker 1: I recognize the voice that I'm trying to like the person with it, but I'm like, I know that person.

00:41:41
Speaker 3: Oh all right, Well we have another one, this time a couple years later, from two thousand and sixty.

00:41:46
Speaker 11: When I go on stage, I like stress as slutty as possible because it makes me dance for some reason. But I do it because I'm an assertive young woman and I'm not trying to sell records base on the way I look, and that's why I do it.

00:41:58
Speaker 1: Apart from the fact that I like dressing, I guess that I like her like I don't know now I've I've actually lost my way.

00:42:07
Speaker 3: Listen, what you are having right now is the experience that mews of people around the world had when they first heard her, which was I don't know who visits, but I love this woman and I want to hear more. I'll play one more clear. I'm lucky that I can sing songs that might be happy. I wrote about stuff that you know.

00:42:23
Speaker 11: I'm lucky that I get to give myself therapy every day by singing songs about a really tough time in my life.

00:42:29
Speaker 3: Not everyone can do that. Everyone's go and talk about other people.

00:42:32
Speaker 6: You know.

00:42:32
Speaker 3: I'm very lucky. Yeah, yeah, all right, So don't tell me now to be But do you feel like you have an idea?

00:42:38
Speaker 1: I don't.

00:42:39
Speaker 3: Wow. All right, well we have to wait and see, but.

00:42:41
Speaker 1: I am very excited to find out. Big Lives is a production of BBC Studios and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me Kai writ and Emmanuel Joji from BBC Studios. Our producer is Emma Weatherell. Our archive producer is Samira Chowdry. The sound designer is Melvin Rickaby, executive producer is Annie Brown, Production coordinator is Galen Davis Connelly, and production manager is Mabel Finnegan right from Pushkin in the Streets. Our executive producer is Constanza Gayato, producer Daphne Chen, legal advisor Jack Flanagan, and marketing by Morgan Ratner and Jordan vic Billen