Comedian Richard Pryor died yesterday, Saturday, December 10, 2006 from a heart attack. He was 65 years old.
By confronting racial differences and lampooning social mores while giving voice to people (such as himself) who grew up and lived in the margins of society, he forever altered the face of mainstream comedy.
Once the profane, edgy, manic Pryor bogarted his way into what had once been the province of safe, smiling, middle-of-the-road comics, it would never be the same again. Pryor was angry, confessional, insightful — and the funniest man alive. He was in your face, shaking out all of life's dirty little secrets — often through the prism of his own troubled life — and in doing so, he emboldened a generation of humorists to tackle edgy material.
"By telling the truth about his pain, Richard held up a mirror to society, and we were able to see our fears, our beauty, our prejudice, our wretchedness, our hopes, our dreams — all of our contradictions. He is truly the greatest comedian of our time," Damon Wayans says in the liner notes of the nine-disc Rhino box set Richard Pryor: And It's Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968-1992).
Some imitators misunderstood his genius, seeming to think they could reach his heights by simply being foul-mouthed. But Pryor's liberal use of the F-word and the N-word (which he would renounce after an eye-opening 1979 trip to Zimbabwe) was just a residue of his self-expression. The real humor was in the meaning of what he said.
"What I'm saying may be profane, but it is also profound," Pryor was quoted as saying in Richard Pryor: Black and Blue by Jeff Rovin.
More from USAToday here.
According to Yahoo Movies Pryor appeared in 43 movies. Here is the Filomgrapy of Richard Pryor.
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