Jerry Seinfeld calls Richard Pryor “the Picasso of our profession”. He tops Comedy Central’s all-time greatest 100 standups chart, and was the inaugural winner of the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. So what makes him so special? It boils down to the moment, one night in 1967, when Pryor had what he later called his “epiphany”. Walking on stage at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, he was a Bill Cosby wannabe: clean-cut, mainstream, non-horse-frightening. But that night he eyeballed the sell-out crowd, addressed himself to the microphone – “What the fuck am I doing here?”, he asked the audience – and strode straight offstage. He couldn’t stomach the dishonesty any longer. From then on, Pryor would speak from the heart – even (or especially) if that led him far from the usual terrain of standup comedy.  That’s his influence: together with Lenny Bruce, he is the patron saint of standup as truth-telling, and to hell with the consequences. For Pryor, that meant total, transgressive frankness about racism, sex and pain: subjects on which, as a black American raised in a brothel by a violent father, he was well qualified to speak. It also meant using his own voice, the jive-talk of black urban America, liberally spattered with “nigger” and “motherfucker”. It had its own musicality – it’s no coincidence that his performances get compared to jazz, nor that he’s frequently sampled in hip-hop – but also the brand of bluntness that reveals how mealy-mouthed the rest of us are by comparison.  An earlier Pryor biographer claimed that “to ask which comedians Richard Pryor influenced is not a serious question. The answer, of course, is all of them.” That’s overstating the case, but his influence is profound, not least in that standup is now dominated by acts who talk intimately about their own lives and who seek to flaunt fearlessness in the face of taboos. Bill Hicks, Chris Rock, and Doug Stanhope, who makes bleak, confrontational comedy from the wreckage of his own life, are his obvious descendants. As is our own Reginald D Hunter, who also uses the N-word provocatively in his show titles. Even man-of-the-moment Russell Brand, whose combination of lurid drug tales and anti-establishment mischief-making is classic Pryor. In short, the ghost of Pryor haunts the stage of any comic who sees tragedy as comedy’s bedfellow, to whom authenticity is just as important as hilarity, and who is performing not only to make people laugh, but to make them listen.
An epiphany in Las Vegas moved the comedian’s act on to a whole new plane – and his influence lives on with the likes of Chris Rock, Doug Stanhope and Russell Brand