Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul, and: Pryor Lives! How Richard Pryor Became Richard Pryor, or Kiss My Rich, Happy, Black … Ass! A Memoir by Cecil Brown (review)

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In many ways, the most concise depiction of Richard Pryor’s career is the promotional poster for the 1983 performance film Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip. Here, the comedian appears some three hundred feet tall, towering over the glitz, traffic, and billboards of Los Angeles’s famous Sunset Boulevard, grabbing his foot and screaming out in pain. In the lower left is a Volkswagen Super Beetle that has presumably just crashed into his toe while a crowd looks up at him. A decade after his death, this is the enduring image of Pryor: a titan of show business and American comedy who is larger than life, angry, fragile, and vulnerable.

Two recent examinations of Pryor’s life and career address exactly this theme. The first, Scott Saul’s Becoming Richard Pryor, is a meticulously crafted and thorough look at those elements that molded the comedian’s complex personality and turbulent personal life—not to mention his art. The second, Pryor Lives! How Richard Pryor Became Richard Pryor, is a self-published account from the comedian’s long-time acquaintance and sometime collaborator, Cecil Brown, a Berkeley educator known for his novel The Life & Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969). While Saul’s book begins with a look at Pryor’s family decades before Pryor himself was born, and Brown’s begins with the author’s association with the comedian in the late 1960s, both books take broad looks at the comedian’s life and career, paying special attention to Pryor’s all-important transitional period between 1967 and 1971. Although both question the myth surrounding actual incidents that triggered his metamorphosis, the best sources suggest a key moment came a few minutes into performance at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, when Pryor insulted the audience, walked off the stage, and retreated to California to live with friends and reformulate the course of his career. It was during his time on the coast that Pryor stopped being a Bill Cosby imitator and began to emerge as the hard-hitting comic who would go on to stare into the twin infernos of American racism and drug culture.

As with other Pryor biographies, Saul takes us deep into the world that created Pryor, into his native Peoria and its seedy world of prostitution, crime, and violence (especially violence against women, something that marked Pryor’s life until his dying days). Saul adds many details to the mix, including an in-depth portrait of Marie Carter Bryant, Pryor’s grandmother and arguably the most important woman in his life. In earlier books, we learn about how Bryant ran a prominent brothel and yet worked to give her grandson as normal a life as possible by enrolling him in Catholic school, taking him on fishing trips and picnics, and carting him to church. Through the use of newspaper accounts and interviews, Saul shows Bryant as a madam who knew how to keep the vice squad at bay, whose motto was “Don’t mess with my money,” and who was not afraid to use the straight razor she kept tucked in her bra in order to keep things running smoothly. Like her grandson, Bryant was a dynamic and complex personality filled with anger, defensiveness, and tenderness—and she was someone unafraid of danger.

Even more valuable, however, are Saul’s discussions of the comedy albums that marked Pryor’s rebirth, the somewhat ignored Craps (After Hours) from 1971 and That Nigger’s Crazy, from three years later, an album...