Two things we know about Richard Pryor for sure: he is the funniest man in America, and, after Muhammad Ali, he is the baddest person anywhere. “Bad” here does not mean rotten or no good. It means being so extraordinarily good at doing something that for someone to call you the greatest, or anything like that, does not quite measure up to describing how incredible you are. Only the word “bad” will do. For instance, not long ago we saw Pryor performing at the Felt Forum, in Madison Square Garden, and he said things that are usually considered uncomplimentary about blacks, whites, and women, and the audience, which was made up of blacks, whites, and women, laughed and laughed.
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He was in town the other day, and around dinnertime we stopped by his suite at the Regency Hotel for a chat with him. Before we had a chance to say hello, he stuck a finger out and showed us a ring he was wearing and said, “Look at this ring. It’s nice. Ain’t pimpy at all.” We looked. It was a slim, plain gold band decorated with three delicately set diamonds. Then we looked at him. We had never before seen him close up, and noticed that he is quite handsome. He is tall, slim (he was dieting, he said), with a boyish face that is especially nice when he smiles. He was wearing tapered gray trousers, a mottled black-and-white sweater, and brown mules. In his room with him were a woman he introduced as his girl friend; his manager; his valet; and his jeweller.
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We spent three hours with him, and during that time this is what happened: he bought a gold necklace with a heart-shaped, diamond-studded pendant for the woman he had introduced as his girl friend; he bought a gold ring for his manager and a gold ring for his valet; he wrote a check for sixteen hundred dollars to his jeweller; he ordered a dinner of sweet-and-sour fish from Greener Pastures, a health-food restaurant not far from the hotel; he picked up his spinach with his bare hands and said with a British accent, “I like my spinach squeeze-dried, don’t you?”; when the telephone rang, he spoke into his mules; during dinner, he watched “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite” and mimicked Walter Cronkite many times; after dinner, he disappeared for a while with a copy of U. S. News & World Report. When he was not mimicking Walter Cronkite, these are some of the things he said: “I am now a vegetarian. I was standing at the corner of Forty-second Street, and this man came up to me and said, ‘Rise, and go forth and be a vegetarian.’ One thing I can say—I was lucky he didn’t pick my pocket. Vegetables are funny. They have a great sense of humor. You drop their seeds in the ground and they rub around in the dirt and then they grow up and you can eat them. Politicians are always doing things to Negroes. One will be standing on his head, another on his ass, and another on his foot. Politician to Negro: ‘Look, buddy, this is what I can do for you.’ Negro to politician: ‘Man, will you take your foot off my mother?’ I’m trying to figure out things to sell to the Chinese. They don’t dig Joe DiMaggio. How about an album of Mao’s greatest hits? I was born under the sign of funny. I haven’t met the other people born under that sign yet, but I think a couple of them became scientists. You know how I get to be funny? I go to sleep for about a year. I wake up with cobwebs all over my face. I roll them up in a large ball with milk and sugar, eat it quickly, and then I start laughing. People say, What’s so funny? I tell them. They start laughing. Then I have lunch. Some of the things I say are true, some are not, but it all happened.” ♦
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