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in the middle of a sold-out performance at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, when he walked off the stage, feeling restricted by the conventional atmosphere of the upscale Las Vegas hotels of the time. From then on, he became the Richard Pryor the world knows now: a bold, risk-taking performer who would forge new paths for all comedians who followed.

DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
    Pryor moved to Berkeley, California, in 1969 to regroup. During the next few years, the company he kept—people like African American writer Ishmael Reed and the cofounder of the Black Panthers, Huey P. Newton—and the counterculture he observed helped him to grow both as a person and a comic.
    Pryor no longer just delivered jokes. Instead, he acted out life as he saw it, bringing real and often taboo topics to the public for
the first time: race, sex, drugs, poverty, discrimination, and violence. Mixed-race audiences howled as he paced the stage spewing profanities while slipping in and out of his many personas, including crowd favorite Mudbone, the drunken philosopher. Pryor talked about the ugliness inside people and brought it out for examination; then he’d defuse the animosity and ill will with laughter. His humor was color-blind, and through exaggerated characters and animated, often sexually explicit monologues, Pryor softened the edges of hard truths so that no topic was off limits, not even his private life.

ROUGH STUFF
    Pryor wasn’t afraid to spotlight his personal demons, of which he had many. From cocaine addiction, tax evasion, and repeated domestic violence charges to serious health issues, his willingness to make himself the object of laughs made it possible for people whose lives bore no resemblance to his to relate to him. After he shot his car full of holes, he joked about how bad drugs were if they could make you do that. After he set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine, he joked about what he had learned: “When you run down the street on fire, people will move out of your way.”
    His raw, raunchy style of stand-up was clearly not for everyone, but it left many wanting more. His three offensive words (beginning with “M,” “N,” and “P”) included a racial slur and two profanities. Pryor had to be himself and that meant using the honest, foul language of his life to make his experiences universal and funny.
    Later, he explained in his autobiography how he’d renounced the use of the “N” word after visiting Africa and noting the people’s self-respect. But he also joked, “I went through all the phone books in Africa, and I didn’t find one goddamned Pryor.”

THE MORE THE MERRIER
    Starting in the late 1960s, audiences began getting more Pryor, and in more places. He landed roles in more than 30 films during his career. Among them was his role as Gus Gorman in 1983’s Superman III , for which he earned rave reviews and a hefty fee of $4 million—$1 million more than Christopher Reeve, Superman himself. In 1974, when the western spoof Blazing Saddles was
released to critical acclaim, movie audiences experienced a new side of Pryor: screenwriter.
    Pryor’s television career was equally robust. He proved himself to be extremely versatile, able to capture the hearts of a wide spectrum of audiences, even children, as a host, an actor, and a comedian. Few will forget his 1975 Saturday Night Live appearance, where he and Chevy Chase left audiences’ mouths agape as they exchanged racial slurs in a skit called “Racist Word Association.” And as a writer for hits like Sanford and Son , The Flip Wilson Show , and two Lily Tomlin specials, Pryor earned recognition and continued to gain respect.

A LIFE WORTH LIVING
    Throughout his career, and even posthumously, Pryor has been honored repeatedly for his accomplishments: comedian, actor, director, screenwriter, author, host, animal-rights activist, husband, and father. He earned two platinum albums, five gold albums, five Grammys (for his recorded performances), an