Candid and crazy, Pryor knew how to reach the heart of his audiences

People who say humor springs from pain likely got it right in the case of Richard Pryor. Sometimes you just have to laugh. Pryor looked at the world, saw that much of it was ridiculous and made a living off giving other people a clue.

Most comedy does that to a degree, but Pryor did it to the nth degree, no topics barred, no truths candy-coated. And he was deep, too.

"You go down there looking for justice and that's just what you find: just us."

Good comedy ought to stop a person from sleepwalking through life, if only for a moment. Comedy takes ordinary life and blows it up way out of proportion so you have to take a look and see the warts you've been missing. Pryor did that well.

Plus, he was funny enough to make a person fall on the floor laughing. And unlike most folks in the public eye, he didn't pretend to be anybody but who he was. He laid into society's craziness, and put his on the table, too.

I hear his echo in lots of modern comedy routines, but I've yet to hear his equal.

He was a trailblazer who changed the very nature of comedy in the United States. Keenan Ivory Wayans said Pryor could do every kind of comedy — political, social, scatological, storytelling, one-liners, physical comedy. And he could do it all at once.

When he died last weekend, obituaries listed comedians who said they would not have had careers if not for Pryor. Could there have been a Margaret Cho or a Chris Rock?

Pryor did have influences, though. Redd Foxx was already doing that nasty, blue stuff; Dick Gregory was doing political comedy; and Bill Cosby was telling stories with universal hooks.

For a while Pryor tried to be Cosby. I imagine if he had come from a neat, middle-class family that would have been his fate, but he had seen life from a different angle.

His grandmother ran brothels and that's where she brought him up because his mother and father had other things going on. Pryor was molested when he was 7.

He didn't have a chance to embrace innocence, so he talked about life beneath the layers of lacquer that civilization places over the basics of human nature. His humor struck a nerve with so many people because it was stripped down to stuff we could all understand.

There are ideas, realities and truths that are fundamental, but that aren't discussed in public forums except in the circumspect ways. Sometimes they are political or social. They have to do with hierarchy, with, sex, race, religion, bodily functions.

You can print only some of the truth in a newspaper, and you dare not speak it on the campaign trail. Even in the pulpit, truth is invited only when it is dressed nicely.

But people who make us laugh have permission to push things further. It's OK. It's just a joke.

Listen to Mark Twain:

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure."

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." You chuckle, then you have to think.

"I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he says — 'Yes; the little ones does.' "

"Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about."

Core truths don't change over time.

Sometimes the country gets so truth-averse that the only way to find some light is through comedy.

"Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously, and the politicians as a joke, when it used to be vice-versa." That was Will Rogers, but he could have been talking about the attraction of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, which got popular because it seemed closer to reality than real news programs.

Pryor's broad truths were universal, but the specifics were purely Pryor's world, the world of poor people, and of black people, of people most Americans knew nothing about. Still know nothing about.

People were surprised to discover a whole other side to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and thoroughly misunderstood it.

We need another Richard Pryor, or two.

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.

His column runs Thursdays and Sundays and is found at www.seattletimes.com/jerrylarge.