A searing look at Richard Pryor's comedic genius

There were times during the stand-up routines Richard Pryor performed between his near-death, in June 1980 from self-immolation, and his actual death, in December 2005 from a heart attack, when he alluded to how high the odds for his success, indeed for his very survival, were stacked against him.

By that time, his audiences had come to know, though his scathing, revelatory life's work, the troubles that Pryor had seen -- and, to a considerable extent, caused for himself. Still, having such troubles thoroughly rendered by Scott Saul in his absorbing, incisive biography Becoming Richard Pryor helps us understand just how formidable those odds were. And how tribulation and turbulence combined to forge the ribald, intense and mercurial artist deemed by fellow funnyman Bob Newhart "the single most seminal comedic influence in the past 50 years."

Drawing on more than 80 interviews with family, friends, colleagues and competitors, Saul provides an enriched perspective throughout his account of Pryor's life. He traces the comic's combative, independent spirit back to Peoria, Il., and his beloved grandmother Marie, a pistol-packing, switch-wielding powerhouse who ran a successful brothel while providing her imaginative, if unruly grandson with "a profound sense of personal dignity, one that would resonate in his comedy."

If such values were the foundation for Pryor's art, further stimulus came from the movies and TV shows he watched growing up, especially those with Sid Caesar, Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis and other practitioners of antic, rubber-faced slapstick.

These and other forms of entertainment did more than stimulate his budding muse. They offered young Richard access to his own private world, one without the heart-rending racism and sordid crime he would encounter in the streets or the hair-trigger behavioral tics of his father Buck, an ex-boxer-turned-pimp whose mood swings were as violent and unpredictable as his son's would become.

Pryor never graduated from high school, though a couple of teachers encouraged his yen for showmanship so much that even though he entered the army in 1959 he left the service a year later (after serving time in a stockade for stabbing a white GI).

It would take many more years for Pryor to fulfill his ambition. He started in Peoria-area "Chitlin' Circuit" nightclubs catering to African-American audiences, then moved to New York City. There, he aimed to duplicate the racial-crossover success of another black up-and-comer named Bill Cosby with his own goofy variations on Cosby's anecdotal, jazz-infused style.

As Saul writes, Pryor would appear on the Ed Sullivan, Merv Griffin and other TV shows giving his own inflection to Cosby's formula: "the 'cool guy' who always seems on the verge of a crackup." As the years went on, real-life crackups always stalked Pryor and, at times, most especially in the 1980 incident, overtook him. (He set himself afire in a suicide attempt, he told Barbara Walters, but he may have been freebasing.)

By the end of the 1960s, galvanic socio-political upheaval had broadened Pryor's perspective, causing him to break away from Vegas gigs and other traditional show-biz venues and develop his own radical approach to comedy. His politically edgy, richly detailed and lyrically obscene routines seemed to vault high over Cosby, Redd Foxx and other black comedy precursors. Pryor had a "swirling, centrifugal energy" that pulled audiences into both his trenchant observations of black life and, as time went on, his own private demons of self-destruction.

Saul is almost as unsparing in citing those demons as Pryor was on-stage; his accounts of Pryor's physically abusive behavior towards wives and lovers can sicken.

But with skill and insight, Saul shows how both the best and worst of Pryor could merge into a great body of work unmatched by anyone who was ever paid to make people laugh.

We may never get a more thorough, balanced and intelligent account of how that work came to be – and what it cost to achieve it.

Becoming Richard Pryor

By Scott Saul

Harper, 587 pp.

4 stars out of four

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