48 Fun Facts About Richard Pryor

In which Illinois city was Richard Pryor born and raised?

Richard Pryor was born in Peoria on 1 December 1940 and grew up there; the city unveiled a bronze statue of him downtown in 2015.

Which future star was an unknown ensemble player on The Richard Pryor Show in 1977?

Robin Williams. The series was cancelled within weeks, but its bit players did better: inside a year Williams was starring in a sitcom of his own.

Pryor was the first recipient of which award in 1998?

The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize. Pryor's written reply kept his old edge: he felt great, he said, to be honored on a par with 'a great white man — now that's funny!'

Which Mel Brooks comedy did Pryor help write?

Blazing Saddles. Pryor co-wrote the 1974 western spoof and was in line to star as Sheriff Bart, but he was turned down and the role went to Cleavon Little.

With which actor did Pryor make four films, starting with Silver Streak in 1976?

Gene Wilder. Silver Streak turned Pryor from a supporting player into one of Hollywood's hottest box-office draws, and the pair went on to make three more comedies.

What business did Pryor's grandmother run, in which he grew up?

A brothel. Pryor later wrote that the relatives, neighbors, working women and winos he lived among there inspired a lifetime of comic material.

Pryor played the Piano Man to which Motown star's Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues (1972)?

Diana Ross. She had never acted in a film before, yet the part brought her a Best Actress Oscar nomination, and the Piano Man was Pryor's first big screen role.

Which singer rocked a terrified young Pryor 'like a baby' before he opened for her?

Nina Simone recalled that Pryor, opening for her at the Village Gate, 'shook like he had malaria' and she rocked him in her arms night after night.

Which comedian was Pryor's initial model before he found his own controversial voice?

Bill Cosby. Pryor said he made a lot of money copying him but felt like a robot comic repeating the same lines, which is why he tore up the act in 1967.

What did Pryor do on a Las Vegas stage in 1967 that ended his clean-cut act?

Walked off. At the Aladdin he caught Dean Martin staring from a front table, realized he no longer knew who he was up there, asked the sold-out room what he was doing there and left.

What was the title of Richard Pryor's 1995 autobiography?

Pryor Convictions. In the memoir, written with Todd Gold, he finally admitted that the 1980 fire he had long passed off as an accident was something he did to himself on purpose.

To which Californian city did Pryor retreat around 1970 to immerse himself in the counterculture?

In Berkeley, Pryor fell in with Black Panther Huey P. Newton and novelist Ishmael Reed, and rebuilt his act around race and street life.

For which comedian's 1973 TV special did Pryor share an Emmy as a writer?

Lily Tomlin. Pryor also acted in the special: in its sketch 'Juke and Opal' he played Juke, an addict trying to get clean who drops into the diner run by Tomlin's Opal.

Which small label, claiming it still owned Pryor's recordings, tried to block his 1974 breakthrough album?

Laff Records. The fight ended with Pryor free to leave, but Laff kept his old tapes, and every time he had a new hit it rushed out another album of leftovers, right up to 1983.

On New Year's Day 1978, an angry Pryor emptied a gun into what?

A car. The shooting got him arrested, and on stage Pryor turned it into one of his best-known routines: his wife was leaving him, he explained, so he shot the car.

Which documentary of a 1972 Los Angeles concert intercuts Pryor riffing on race?

Wattstax. The benefit concert marked seven years since the Watts riots, and a then little-known Pryor supplies the film's biting running commentary between the songs.

Pryor was the first Black host of which show, in its debut 1975 season?

Saturday Night Live. NBC was so wary of what Pryor might say that it ordered a five-second delay on the live show for the night he hosted.

Which comedian played the interviewer opposite Pryor in the famous 1975 'word association' sketch?

Chevy Chase. His job interviewer trades ever-uglier slurs with Pryor's applicant; Paul Mooney said he wrote it after his own grilling by the show's bosses, though Chase also claims a hand in it.

The Richard Pryor Show was scheduled against which hit sitcom in 1977?

Happy Days. NBC put the provocative comic on at 8 p.m. on Tuesdays against two of TV's biggest family hits, and after fights with the censors and low ratings the show was gone in four episodes.

On his short-lived 1977 variety show, Pryor played which figure in a famous sketch?

The first Black President. Pryor would not tone the series down for NBC's censors, who were watching it closely, and it was cancelled after only four episodes.

After a 1979 trip to which country did Pryor swear off using a racial slur in his act?

After a 1979 trip to Kenya, where he said he saw no one he could call by that word, Pryor dropped the slur, as he explained in Live on the Sunset Strip.

Which 1980 comedy, grossing over $100 million, was Pryor's biggest box-office hit?

Stir Crazy. It took just over $100 million in North America, and the tough-guy strut that Pryor's character puts on to survive jail gave the country a catchphrase: 'We bad!'

Which Oscar-winning actor stepped behind the camera to direct Pryor's biggest hit, a 1980 buddy comedy?

Sidney Poitier. Famous for serious dramas, he spent the 1970s directing broad comedies, among them Uptown Saturday Night with Pryor in a small part, and stayed off screen for this one.

Which part did Pryor play in the 1978 film musical that featured Michael Jackson?

The Wiz. Pryor's mighty wizard turns out to be a frightened fraud, hiding behind a fearsome mechanical front.

Pryor joked that his 1980 fire began when he dunked a cookie into what?

A glass of low-fat milk. His bedtime milk and cookies blew up, he claimed, when he mixed low-fat with pasteurized; then he dropped the cover story and gave his freebase pipe a wheedling voice of its own.

Who replaced Pryor at the last minute in Mel Brooks's History of the World, Part I after the fire?

Gregory Hines. The Broadway tap star had never made a film, and stepping in for the burned Pryor days before shooting gave him his screen debut and the start of a movie career.

Which NFL great did Pryor hire at his film company, Indigo Productions, then fire?

Jim Brown. Pryor had promised Indigo would open Hollywood's doors to minorities, so dismissing Brown and three other Black staff within months brought an angry response from the NAACP.

In which superhero sequel did Pryor play computer programmer Gus Gorman?

Superman III. Pryor was offered more than any Black actor had ever been paid before he had even read the script, and he later admitted he thought the film was terrible.

Which role, later played by a younger comedian, was written with Pryor in mind?

Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places. The script was developed for Pryor and his regular screen partner, but after his 1980 burns the part went to a newcomer making only his second film.

What was Richard Pryor's short-lived 1984 CBS children's show called?

Pryor's Place. A comic famous for his profanity spent a season of Saturday mornings among Sid and Marty Krofft's puppets, playing to children.

In Brewster's Millions, how much must Pryor's character spend in a month to inherit ten times as much?

$30 million. The catch is that Brewster must end the month with nothing to show for it, and he can't tell anyone why he is burning through the money.

Pryor directed and starred in a 1986 film based on his own story, titled Jo Jo Dancer, what?

Your Life Is Calling. Jo Jo is a comic who has burned himself freebasing, and as he lies in hospital his other self walks back through the life that put him there, urging him to change it.

Which 1989 crime comedy united three generations of Black comedy stars: Redd Foxx, Pryor and its writer-director?

Harlem Nights. Its writer-director had always wanted to work with Pryor, his greatest influence, yet the script he wrote for his idols won that year's Razzie for Worst Screenplay.

Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979) is usually credited as the first what?

Feature made only of stand-up. Shot in Long Beach with no props or sketches, it became the standard that concert films are judged by and prompted other comics to make their own.

Which campaigning group gave Pryor its Humanitarian Award in 1999 for his work against animal cruelty?

PETA. Pryor spent his last years as an animal-rights campaigner, pressing KFC over the way its chickens were treated and speaking out against the use of elephants in circuses.

What is Richard Pryor's old storyteller character from Tupelo, Mississippi, called?

Mudbone, the rambling old storyteller from Tupelo, Mississippi, first appeared on the 1975 album Is It Something I Said? and returned in Live on the Sunset Strip.

With which disease was Pryor diagnosed in 1986, leading him to use a mobility scooter?

Multiple sclerosis. Pryor joked that MS stood for 'More Shit', and he went on writing and performing through the 1990s while getting about on a motorized scooter.

Pryor's final film role, a garage boss, came in which 1997 David Lynch film?

Lost Highway. Once one of Hollywood's biggest box-office draws, Pryor signed off with a few quiet scenes as Arnie, a garage owner who runs his repair shop from a wheelchair.

In the 1978 drama Blue Collar, Pryor plays a man who works on the line in what kind of plant?

Car factory. Pryor would give only three or four takes and then start changing his lines without warning, which made the Detroit shoot an ordeal for first-time director Paul Schrader.

Which actress helped Pryor learn to read while they dated in the late 1970s?

Pam Grier. She wrote that Pryor had been learning his film lines by ear, so she taught him to read and put him on a health regimen, until the drugs won out and she left.

Which of Pryor's daughters wrote the 2006 memoir Jokes My Father Never Taught Me?

Rain Pryor. She also turned her childhood, Black and Jewish and largely spent with her Jewish grandparents, into a touring one-woman show called Fried Chicken and Latkes.

Pryor's widow scattered his ashes, as he had wished, off Hana on which Hawaiian island?

Maui. It was his own wish, and the documentary I Am Richard Pryor closes on his widow finally carrying it out, years after his death in 2005.

Which magazine ranked Pryor first on its 2017 list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time?

Rolling Stone. It placed him above George Carlin and Lenny Bruce because, it said, he had become the unfettered spirit who 'turned stand-up on its ear'.

Which jazz trumpeter did the young Pryor open for and befriend at New York's Village Gate?

Miles Davis. Pryor wrote in his memoir that the lesson he took from Davis was 'Listen to the music inside your head, Rich.'

For a guest role on which medical drama did Pryor earn a Primetime Emmy nomination?

Chicago Hope. Pryor played a patient living with his own illness, in a 1995 episode that also featured one of his daughters.

Which 1977 health scare did Pryor turn into a famous routine in Live in Concert?

Heart attack. He was 36, and in the routine he wakes in the ambulance, sees only white faces staring down at him and decides he has died and 'wound up in the wrong heaven'.

Which TV interviewer got Pryor to talk frankly about his childhood in a 1979 network special?

Barbara Walters. Asked who had believed in him and cared about him as a boy, Pryor answered with his own full name: Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor the Third.

In Greased Lightning (1977), Pryor played Wendell Scott, a Black pioneer in which sport?

Stock car racing. Scott's one win at NASCAR's top level, in 1963, was first credited to another driver; hours later, with the crowd gone, officials handed him the prize money but no trophy.