Becoming Richard Pryor

November 17, 2014
Drawing on interviews with family and friends, unpublished journals and court records, Saul (Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t) jauntily chronicles the year-by-year, and almost day-by-day, evolution of the young man from Peoria who developed into the man that Jerry Seinfeld called “the Picasso of our profession.” Saul examines the forces that propelled Pryor to the top of his game in the late 1970s, tracing the comedian’s early years being raised in a brothel and his introduction to improvisational acting by teacher Juliette Whittaker to his days in New York’s Greenwich Village and Manny Roth’s Café Wha? honing his skills. In his heady days in L.A. he played baseball with Aaron Spelling and Bobby Darin. Saul then documents Pryor’s retreat to Berkeley in 1969, where he found himself part of the city’s counterculture movement. Glaringly honest, Saul shines a light on Pryor’s descent into drugs, his brutal treatment of his wives, and his fretful insecurities about his own abilities. In the end, Pryor emerges as a revolutionary stand-up comic who perfected the art of dramatizing his own imperfections, and the world’s; a trenchant social critic, often called “Dark Twain”; and a crossover artist whose work in film often failed to achieve the incendiary raw power of his live comic shows.

January 1, 2015

There are many things to praise about this title, not least of which that it is an exhaustive historical account of the legendary entertainer Pryor's life (1940-2005) and career up to the late 1970s. Saul (Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't) marshals more archival resources and personal interviews than any previous biographer of the comedian, providing a comprehensive chronology of his early years. The exacting detail is often painful reading. Pryor grew up in a brothel (a contested biographical detail until now), and even while striving toward themes of liberation in his work, he abused lovers and substances prodigiously. Yet the author demonstrates how Pryor's background and turmoil, as well as larger social and political forces of the 1960s and 1970s, fueled his creativity and willingness to take artistic risks. For now this book serves as the final word on how its subject rose to occupy a singular spot in the American comedy and cinema landscape. VERDICT This essential book for Pryor enthusiasts will be equally valuable to scholars of modern American history and popular culture.--Chris Martin, North Dakota State Univ. Libs., Fargo

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2014
Smart blend of social history and biography centering on one of the funniest-and most tragic-people of our time.By Saul's (English/Univ. of California; Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, 2003) account, Richard Pryor (1940-2005) wrestled out the demons of physical abuse, racism and addiction on a stage that at first wasn't quite sure what to do with him. That effort produced some strange results. One of the more interesting detours in this already digressive narrative follows the course of the autobiographical film This Can't Be Happening to Me, a look at Pryor's childhood in a brothel; the film started as a broad comedy, then became serious, then took on the coloring of a "tripped-out imagination that made [the film] cousin to a midnight movie like El Topo." As Saul observes, it helped that Pryor and the family that so often figured in his comedy were "powerfully dramatic people," thus it was natural that Pryor should so readily bend genres to insert seriousness in funny situations and comedy into grave discussions. Saul's psychobiographical essays are illuminating, as when he writes of a young Pryor discovering that white girls were more receptive to him than were white boys. Race is a driving theme throughout, and Saul closes on a note that is both hopeful and resigned. Asked whether he viewed the world in terms of black and white, Pryor said, "I see people...as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn't come to be yet." Saul is sometimes guilty of forced analogies, as when he finds an echo of the resignation of Richard Nixon, whom a Republican senator compared to "a piano player in a whorehouse who claims not to know what's going on upstairs," in Pryor's own time in the house of bawd. Still, this is a well-executed study that gives Pryor due credit as pioneer, intellectual and artist. Better written and more thoughtful than David and Joe Henry's Furious Cool (2013). The latter remains worth reading, but this book is the place to start.

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Starred review from December 15, 2014
For all his autobiographical bravado on stage, Pryor was tight-lipped about his life when he was offstage. He had a proprietary sense regarding his life, wanting to tell his own story in his own way, according to music scholar Saul. Drawing on interviews with Pryor's family, wives, lovers, friends, and colleagues as well as documents from court transcripts and screenplay drafts, Saul delivers an intimate look at Pryor's life, from childhood to the late 1970s. Raised in brothels among characters he later brought to life in his gritty stage acts, Pryor took refuge in his ability to make people laugh. His life was his raw material, from a rough childhood to failed marriages and relationships, racial struggles, drug addiction, and regular human foiblesall filtered through a crackling personality. Pryor ascended to stardom in Hollywood in the 1970s, bringing vitality and improvisation to his work on stage and in such films as Blazing Saddles and Blue Collar. Saul explores Pryor's creative process and the unpredictability that thrilled audiences and often horrified agents and directors. Saul portrays a complicated man, who reveled in the absurdities of life, tingeing harsh realities with biting, often obscene, humor, leaving an enduring mark on American comedy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)