Scott Saul’s Becoming Richard Pryor

A Review of Scott Saul’s Becoming Richard Pryor

Becoming Richard Pryor is a long book. And thank God it is. A penetrating portrait of the artist in formation, Scott Saul’s biography charts Pryor’s ascent from his painful childhood in Peoria, Illinois, through his first years as an aspiring comedian, to his most passionate, daring, and crazy period. That is, when he was at his most experimental, honing his talent, and learning to unleash his skills of improvisation to produce such revolutionary albums as That Nigger’s Crazy (1974). With this album, as with his other work from the 1970s, Pryor blew up the world of comedy and remade it in his image. Actorcomedian Paul Rodriguez does not exaggerate when he claims that “there are two periods in comedy in America: before Richard Pryor and after Richard Pryor.” Saul gives us Pryor at his most crazy in another sense. The period of his artistic becoming—from his twenties through his thirties—is also when Pryor was most intimate with self-sabotage. His heavy and long-standing drug use (mostly cocaine), paired with alcohol, led to his recklessness in show business and culminated with his dramatic self-immolation, his tumultuous relationship with his many lovers and wives (many of whom he beat violently), and his acts of fury (he made a man lose an eye in a fight), all of which seemed to be intertwined with Pryor’s desire to invent and reinvent himself over and over again. And above all, his self-destructiveness seems intimately tied to the fierceness of his talent. This is, of course, a story we’ve heard before—that of the self-destructive genius. But Saul lets us examine the particularities of Pryor’s life path, implicitly asking how and why Pryor’s darkness was bound to his fireball creativity. Did it have to be? Situating Pryor within a historical context, Saul gives us fully drawn portraits of the people, time, and places that shaped him while exploring the many phases of experiment, failure, and success that Pryor experienced. He covers some of the same ground as Pryor’s memoir, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences (1995), and the autobiographical film Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986), but he lifts the mantle off the myths that Pryor produced about himself after the fire and when, already suffering from multiple sclerosis, he began to take stock of his