I really loved Richard Pryor.

He was such a deliciously smooth, funny truth-teller. His humanity was always on display: sometimes it was pretty and sometimes it wasn't so pretty. I thought he always believed what he was saying though. And he said it so well.

Also, growing up in the white midwest? Not so many black people around. Pryor's stuff gave me a little access to the race issue early, in junior high school, when I devoted all of my time to absorbing as much comedy as I could find. I didn't really understand some of what he was saying, but it was a little access to black culture and racial issues. It was old Pryor routines and Yo! MTV Raps on that count. Pretty much. And I remember loving NWA and borrowing Ryan Blenker's cassette copy of the first album because I knew my mom wouldn't let me buy it.

Anyway, back to Pryor.

He was a giant. And a genius. And a real human being. He exposed his own warts and flaws to show us all our own warts and flaws. So we could laugh at them and feel a little better.

Good obits:

The New York Times
Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post
David Edelstein in Slate
Digby at Hullaballoo

And here's a bit of the wonderful New Yorker profile of Pryor that you can buy here. I've managed to find a bit online:

ALTHOUGH Richard Pryor was more or less forced to retire in 1994, eight years after he discovered that he had multiple sclerosis ("It's the stuff God hits your ass with when he doesn't want to kill ya -- just slow ya down," he told Entertainment Weekly in 1993), his work as a comedian, a writer, an actor, and a director amounts to a significant chapter not only in late twentieth-century American comedy but in American entertainment in general. Pryor is best known now for his work in the lackadaisical Gene Wilder buddy movies or for abominations like "The Toy". But far more important was the prescient commentary on the issues of race and sex in America that he presented through standup and sketches like "Juke and Opal" -- the heartfelt and acute social observation, the comedy that littered the stage with the trash of the quotidian as it was sifted through his harsh and poetic imagination, and that changed the very definition of the word "entertainment," particularly for a black entertainer.

The subject of blackness has taken a strange and unsatisfying journey through American thought: first, because blackness has almost always had to explain itself to a largely white audience in order to be heard, and, second, because it has generally been assumed to have only one story to tell - a story of oppression that plays on liberal guilt. The writers behind the collective modern ur-text of blackness -- James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison -- all performed some variation on the theme. Angry but distanced, their rage blanketed by charm, they lived and wrote to be liked. Ultimately, whether they wanted to or not, they in some way embodied the readers who appreciated them most -- white liberals.

Richard Pryor was the first black American spoken-word artist to avoid this. Although he reprised the history of black American comedy -- picking what he wanted from the work of great storytellers like Bert Williams, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Nipsey Russell, LaWanda Page, and Flip Wilson -- he also pushed everything one step further. Instead of adapting to the white perspective, he forced white audiences to follow him into his own experience. Pryor didn't manipulate his audiences' white guilt or their black moral outrage. If he played the race card, it was only to show how funny he looked when he tried to shuffle the deck. And as he made blackness an acknowledged part of the American atmosphere lie also brought the issue of interracial love into the country's discourse. In a culture whose successful male Negro authors wrote about interracial sex with a combination of reverence and disgust, Pryor's gleeful, "fuck it" attitude had an effect on the general population which Wright's "Native Son" or Baldwin's "Another Country" had not had. His best work showed us that black men like him and the white women they loved were united in their disenfranchisement; in his life and onstage, he performed the great, largely unspoken story of America.

RIP Richard.