By elementary school, he was performing stand-up routines for classmates on a weekly basis. Growing up around prostitution and violence (in his autobiography he describes watching his mother service a client and seeing his father shoot a man), Pryor took to comedy. He was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1940, a city that was a “famously average embodiment of Middle American values” and also “awash in gambling havens, speakeasies, whorehouses, and corruption.” He was raised mostly by his grandmother, who ran a brothel, though his mother and father were part of his life. Pryor certainly led a life worthy of biographical treatment. It’s a shame that Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him by David Henry and Joe Henry neither lives up to its slick title nor the complicated life of the man himself. Onstage, he hid little of himself: While performing at a gay-rights benefit in San Francisco, Pryor startled the crowd by declaring, “I’ve sucked dick … and it was beautiful.” Then, after inviting them to “kiss my rich happy black ass,” he walked off the stage. He also plumbed his own personal experience with a flair for self-deprecation that could be as discomfiting as it was funny.
He was masterful-a truth teller, an incisive social critic, a man who opened up a great deal of the black experience to a general audience. Though the term genius is used rather promiscuously, few comics merit the label as much as Richard Pryor did.
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