Richard Pryor's Peoria

Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor was born in Peoria on December first, nineteen forty, in a city that was, in nineteen forty, firmly and deliberately segregated. His father, LeRoy Pryor, was a former boxer and a hustler. His mother, Gertrude, left when Richard was ten. He was raised primarily by his grandmother, Marie Carter Pryor, who ran what the historical record describes as two brothels and a nightclub in Peoria's red-light district by nineteen forty-seven. Richard grew up inside that world, understanding the economics of it, the loneliness of it, and, in some register, the humor available inside it.

He attended seven schools in ten years. Peoria's schools were segregated in practice if not always in law, and Richard moved uneasily through them. By his early teens he had been expelled from school and had largely run out of conventional options.

What saved him, by his own account and by the account of people who knew him, was a woman named Juliette Whittaker, who ran the theater program at the George Washington Carver Community Center in Peoria. In the spring of nineteen fifty-five, fourteen-year-old Richard walked in and talked his way into Whittaker's already-cast production of Rumpelstiltskin. When another actor failed to appear for rehearsal, Richard took the king's role. Whittaker later said he had the cast in tears, not from sentiment but from laughter. She made him the emcee of the Carver Center's talent shows. He performed for crowds of hundreds of kids and found out, in that building, that this was what he was.

He left Peoria at nineteen. He went to New York and then to Los Angeles and eventually became one of the most influential comedians in American history, widely credited with breaking open the language and subject matter of stand-up comedy, making it possible to say true things on stage that no one had said before. He never pretended Peoria was idyllic. He used it his entire career as the specific, honest, embarrassing, loving source of everything he knew.