Comic legend Richard Pryor used the n-word a lot throughout his standup routines that he as soon as said, “I said it over and over like a preacher singing hallelujah.”
Yet one of the most infamous examples of his skill to wield the n-word as a comic book weapon took offstage. It occurred when he challenged a White journalist who used the slur — not as soon as however twice — throughout an interview that aired on prime-time tv.
The trade befell in 1979 when ABC’s Barbara Walters interviewed Pryor at the peak of his fame. He had turn out to be a TV and film star after releasing a number of Grammy-winning standup albums. During the interview, held at Pryor’s house, Walters requested the comic about his repeated use of the racial slur.
“When you’re onstage, you talk about — see, it’s hard for me to say — you talk about n***ers,” Walters stated, saying the total phrase.
“You just said it. You said it very good,” Pryor instructed Walters as her movie crew erupted in nervous laughter.
Walters regarded visibly flustered, and Pryor added with a sly grin, “This is not the first time you said it.” Walters insisted it was the first time — earlier than utilizing the full slur once more with out hesitation.
It was a basic Pryor second. He deftly turned a critique of his racial humor round and compelled a White individual to confront uncomfortable truths about their very own ease in voicing a racial slur. And he obtained laughs doing it.
But there was a hidden witness to that trade: Pryor’s daughter. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, then 12, sitting simply out of the digital camera’s view and watching in astonishment. She says her father had instructed her to by no means enable a White individual to use the n-word, however right here was a White girl dropping the slur in his face.
“I don’t know if there’s anyone … appearing Whiter than Barbara Walters in that moment with her bouffant hair style hair, pink lips, pink clothes and daintiness,” Elizabeth Pryor tells NCS at the moment. “And she’s here with my father using the n-word and he calls her out for it. I wasn’t sure what’s going to happen.”
That second would tackle much more that means for Elizabeth Pryor than she may notice at the time. She went on to turn out to be a scholar finding out the n-word. But it took her years earlier than she realized that her obsession with the time period had something to do with her well-known father.
This is the journey she recounts in an engrossing new memoir, “Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me.” The guide is a backstage take a look at some of the most publicized occasions in Pryor’s life: His tumultuous relationship with girls (he was married seven occasions), his drug habit, his determination to surrender utilizing the n-word after touring to Kenya, and his eventual loss of life from a coronary heart assault at 65 after battling a number of sclerosis.
It’s additionally an account of her struggles rising up as the daughter of Pryor and Maxine Pryor, a Jewish girl, when interracial relationships have been nonetheless taboo.
“He struggled to show up as a parent, and I never felt funny enough, or creative enough, or Black enough to be his daughter,” she writes in the guide.
The memoir is also a examine of the historical past of the n-word. Today Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor is a professor of history at Smith College in Massachusetts, the place she makes a speciality of the examine of a phrase that’s been called “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets.” She gave a TED Talk in 2020 titled, “Why it’s so hard to talk about the n-word.”
Her father, although, made the n-word the centerpiece of his comedy on albums akin to “That N***er’s Crazy” and “Bicentennial N***er”. He didn’t use the slur to shock, however to show racism and reveal aspects of Black American tradition unknown to most White Americans. One commentator stated Pryor’s humor was “the most poignant and penetrating comedic view of African-American life ever afforded the American public.”
Pryor was not the first Black comic to use the n-word. Dick Gregory, the comic and civil rights activist, used the slur as the title of his 1964 autobiography and in some of his routines. And enslaved African Americans used the n-word in work songs and oral narratives to indicate power and ingenuity.
Still, some Black folks have lengthy insisted that nobody ought to ever use the phrase, regardless of circumstances.
In her guide, Elizabeth Pryor writes that “the n-word could be poison or antidote, depending on who controlled the mic.” She says her father made a “superhero out of a slur.” He “tamed it like a lion in the ring, and invoked it to empower the very people it was meant to hurt.”
Elizabeth Pryor talked to NCS about what her father was like offstage, why she waited years earlier than listening absolutely to his comedy albums and what she thinks of Black hip-hop artists who use the n-word at the moment. The dialog was edited for brevity and readability.
My father was actually well-known in the Seventies—a groundbreaking comic and a family title. In some methods, he began changing into as well-known for his off-stage foibles or demons as he did for his stand-up. I used to be a younger teenager when all of this was occurring—like 12, 13, 14— and folks would simply at all times ask me these overly acquainted questions: Do you already know him? Are you shut? How usually do you see him?
These questions felt like they have been invalidating my relationship with my father. And after the accident (Pryor nearly killed himself in 1980 after he set himself on hearth whereas freebasing cocaine), folks at all times would ask me questions, like, does he nonetheless do medication? It simply felt safer and simpler to not say sure.
I believe it was in 1980 when my father was on a drug-and-alcohol spiral. At the time I didn’t know this, however he made a suicide try by pouring liquor on himself and lighting it on hearth. He burned two-thirds of his physique and the complete factor was very dramatic (Pryor ran out of his home, engulfed in flames, earlier than police tracked him down). He’s in the hospital for six or extra weeks.
There have been so much of public jokes about it, the place folks would take a match, mild it, bounce it and say what’s this? It’s Richard Pryor working down the avenue. And that sort of joke made its manner into my social circles. I’d hear it at events, bar mitzvahs, and boys would make these jokes in entrance of me. It wasn’t even that I used to be embarrassed of my father. I by no means felt embarrassed of my father. I used to be proud of him. I felt embarrassed of the scrutiny.
I used to be too younger when he began. It was actually in the final decade as I used to be doing this work. I’m finding out the n-word as a result of a White pupil stated the n-word in my classroom, quoting a line from “Blazing Saddles” — a film my father co-wrote — and I turned undone. And as I began doing this instructing and studying extra about this phrase, my father’s title was like in every part that I learn as a result of of his subversive use of the phrase.
The extra that I turned entrenched in that work, the extra it turned unattainable to disregard that if I used to be actually going to be a scholar of the n-word, I had to turn out to be acquainted with his work. So I began listening and I used to be like, oh, all people’s been proper about him. He is a groundbreaking genius.
He was quiet. I used to at all times get the query — is he humorous at house? And he actually wasn’t. He was down so much, however even when he wasn’t down, he wasn’t cracking jokes. But he was a magical individual. I spent most of my time rising up with my mom, however I may say issues to my father that I may by no means say to her, and he would get it.
I used to be the final one to know. Even as I used to be lecturing about Richard Pryor (she chuckles), I nonetheless didn’t get that this was legacy. This was inheritance. This was ancestral. When I began saying no when folks requested if I used to be associated to him, that was greater than only a no. It was additionally variety of a compartmentalizing of that relationship.
I fought for him at the finish of his life, and he died a really lonely loss of life from a really debilitating, continual sickness. The final years of his life have been type of clouded by that. And possibly that is an instructional drawback, simply probably not understanding how the private and skilled come collectively. But as I obtained deeper and deeper — that is going to sound ridiculous — however after this dialog, I’m going to really feel nearer to him. That’s been occurring to me. I simply really feel him so strongly now.
There’s a scene in the guide when your dad stored saying, ‘Nobody is going to love you,’ and it took you awhile to comprehend he was speaking about himself. What does that say about him?
I believe my father felt actually lonely. In the previous notebooks of his I discovered, and I don’t know this for a reality, however I really feel fairly assured that in the ’60s, he was not in Alcoholics Anonymous or a 12-step group or something like that. But even in that pocket book, he has lists of his hangups. He’s haunted by his personal conduct and haunted by his childhood.
I’m certain he was insecure about whether or not the folks with him even beloved or noticed him or knew him. I bear in mind sitting in rooms with a bunch of males, and they simply laughed at every part he stated. I’m not speaking about on the stage, however simply in his lounge.
That was such a strong, affirming second for me. It’s on the heels of all my very own ache round the phrase already in my life at like 14 or 15 years previous. (Pryor says she was known as the n-word by classmates as an adolescent.) I felt actually proud of him even with out fairly understanding then the impression of the journey to Africa. The epiphany for him round the phrase is entrenched in his expertise in a spot the place Black individuals are doing every part, and with out the watchful eye of White surveillance. He’s in a position to see there isn’t any use for the n-word right here. It doesn’t make sense there. I used to be so proud of that perspective.
I’ve not thought of one but. We dwell in an period the place there’s a surrogate phrase that stands in for the phrase: the n-word. It doesn’t should be stated. I don’t suppose something is misplaced when it’s not stated.
In order for this society to work (a society based mostly on White supremacy), there needs to be a dehumanizing perception that there are a bunch of folks which might be static, and can not, it doesn’t matter what, transfer out of this class. The n-word just isn’t an actual factor. That is an invention of Whiteness to raise Whiteness. It doesn’t exist in actuality (scientists say there’s no biological basis for race; all people are members of the identical race).
The n phrase — the precise phrase I’m talking of right here — feels prefer it’s an assault on enslaved folks. It’s an assault on Blackness simply because of Blackness. But actually the phrase takes off as a slur when Black folks begin changing into free. It’s actually an assault on Black prosperity, social and financial mobility, political mobility. The phrase is used in opposition to luminaries like Frederick Douglass when they’re rising out up their enslavement. That’s actually when the phrase takes off to be the phrase that we all know it to be at the moment.
This is the place you get the Malcolm X quote (in his speeches the civil rights chief usually stated, “What does a White man call a Black man with a Ph.D.? A n***er with a Ph.D”).
For me, the query is at all times somewhat misguided. It’s a misdirect. The purpose that the n-word works for hip-hop artists, and for folks like my dad, and for Black energy writers earlier than him, is as a result of it resonates as a form of subversion and protest as a result of of the inequality and social injustice that exists in the nation.
So the query to me isn’t actually, ought to hip-hop artists begin or cease utilizing the phrase? But actually, how can we create a society the place the phrase doesn’t imply something, the place it doesn’t resonate? And when that occurs, it won’t be in hip-hop. It received’t be leading edge. I believe an artist who’s attempting to use this to precise the variety of subversion that hip-hop artists and poets and others do is completely entitled to take action.
Have you ever puzzled what your father would possibly say onstage in an period of Trump and MAGA?
I imply, he was already doing it 50 years in the past. I don’t even need to think about, proper? People usually ship me clips about “just us” (In one of Pryor’s routines, he says Black folks go to courts searching for justice and that’s what they discover: “Just us”). Its painfully related. That’s a bummer. So, to the query of what would he do at the moment? I believe I’ve an concept.
John Blake is a NCS senior author and creator of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”