Pryor’s Legacy of Truth

Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post remembers Richard Pryor as a “preacher of truth.”

“Comedians, critics and scholars are almost unanimous in citing Pryor, who died Saturday morning at 65, as the creator of modern stand-up comedy.”

“Those who took the ghetto world Pryor created as a literal representation of reality were as misguided as those who would look for literal, three-dimensional space in a Matisse or a de Kooning. Pryor was an artist, not a journalist; he exaggerated, flattened, telescoped, stretched and technicolored ordinary reality until it told a heightened truth.”

There are many articles of adoration for Pryor and his comic achievements. I enjoyed Pryor’s humor and still do to this day. Sure he did cocaine, but so did the President. And like the President, he turned his life around and became one of the most valuable social commentators of our time.