"I woke up in the ambulance, right? And there was nothin' but white people starin' at me. I say . . . I done died and wound up in the wrong motherfuckin' heaven. Now I gotta listen to Lawrence Welk the rest of my days."Pryor changed stand-up comedy forever.
He changed the dialog on race in America forever.
He was a man on fire, sometimes literally.
He died Saturday of heart attack after struggling with MS for many years. He was 65.
2 comments:
How sad to witness the death of so many icons of our culture; Richard being just one of the many bright lights to be extinguished in recent months and years.
I think the one that will really fuck me up, though, is when Bill Cosby leaves us. He is staring to get old (like, almost as soon as his son died...sad too) and in some strange way he was such a father figure to me, in many of the ways my own father was not.
I wonder what meaning these figures will have to our children? As little as those of our parents' youth, I suppose. Hmmm.
I can't believe that Pryor dying would mean to today's youth when Jack Benny dying meant to us!
But maybe I'm deluding myself.
I was introduced to Pryor as a teenager. My parents loved him and bought his albums and we would watch his tv show and his first concert movie together. And I gotta say he was a huge influence on me and how I think about the world.
Funny, isn't it? That we feel a kinship to people that we've never met, that in fact we do not know at all, however much we may feel that we do.
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