Black and blue: The rise of the riotous Richard Pryor

Paradigm puncher ... Is It Something I Said? hits 40

Pryor art

Three years later Pryor surprised many by re-marrying his fourth wife Jennifer Lee – it was his seventh marriage to five different wives – and she then became his manager. Together, they won back the rights to some 40 hours of analogue recordings from the 1960s and early 1970s, leading to the issue of several box sets, most noticeably the nine-CD collection And It’s Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros Recordings (1968–1992) and The Anthology on Warners/Rhino.

One for the collection: And It’s Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros Recordings (1968–1992)

In 2004 he was voted No 1 on Comedy Central’s list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All-time, an honour that got a healthy response from his friends and family. Alas, Pryor himself was far from healthy and a heart attack in December the next year killed him, his death occurring just nine days after his 65th birthday.

Amongst those Pryor undoubtedly influenced are musicians such as Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy (who used samples of his work), as well as the biggest comedians of the last thirty years: Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Hicks, Denis Leary, Martin Lawrence, Eddie Izzard, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock and many spoke of their sadness at his death, as well as the free-flowing innovation of his work.

A six-foot bronze statue was unveiled in Peoria in Pryor's honour in May 2015

But for many fans it was the Kennedy Arts Centre president, Lawrence J Wilker, who provided Richard Pryor’s real epitaph. Back in 1998, Wilker said Pryor had been given the first Twain humour prize because:

As a stand-up comic, writer and actor, he struck a chord, and a nerve, with America, forcing it to look at large social questions of race and the more tragic-comic aspects of the human condition. Though uncompromising in his wit, Pryor, like Twain, projects a generosity of spirit that unites us. They were both trenchant social critics who spoke the truth, however outrageous.

On May 1 this year, a six-foot bronze statue of Richard Pryor was unveiled in Peoria, Illinois. It is sited, incidentally, less than a mile from the crumbling brothel where he was born and raised. ®