By Tig Notaro
I’m equally as surprised as you might be that I’m writing this introduction. I was flattered and honored when I was asked but also unsure. Why me? Why not a comedian more obviously influenced by Richard Pryor? Someone whose edge and social and political outspokenness have more often been compared to him? With some doubt creeping in, my mind began searching for the dividing lines between us—to beat the critics to the punch, I suppose—and I found many.
First off, I’m not a black drug addict raised in a whorehouse (to the best of my knowledge). I’m on my first and hopefully only marriage, and I have two young twin sons with no chance of any surprise arrivals. The medication I’m on that helps keep my cancer in remission makes it impossible for me to become pregnant any time in the future. As does the fact that I’m inching towards fifty years old and only have eyes for my wife. And there won’t be a stork showing up at my door to drop off a teenager claiming I’m his mommy, unless I’ve forgotten getting pregnant, following to term and giving birth, and I do feel like I’d recall that.
It’s not just our differing lifestyles but our sometimes starkly contrasting comedy styles that also strikes me. Even though he was many things, Richard Pryor is most often remembered first for his obscenity, and for the most part, I’m considered a “clean” comedian. When I step on stage people are not witnessing a coked-up live wire. As long as I promise to keep my shirt on, my show is mostly considered kid-friendly. It’s not that I can’t enjoy vulgar humor. Some of my favorite comedians work dirty, or “blue,” as they call it in the business. Their work has never drawn me in because it’s dirty, but because they own their filth. (Richard Pryor and Sarah Silverman come immediately to mind, as do Joan Rivers and Eddie Murphy.) For vulgarity to work for me, it has an intellectual payoff, even if the payoff is silly and ridiculous, otherwise I find it unfulfilling; just a lack of something.
Some of the only parental supervision I had as a child was when we sat down as a family to watch the Tonight Show. I loved the excitement of a live show and how anything could go wrong and usually did and how Johnny Carson smirked through it all. Then HBO became available in our home and I had a ticket to the dirtiest show in town. I was probably a third grader peeking over my big fourth-grade brother’s shoulder to see our next obsession when I first laid eyes on Richard Pryor. He was unlike any of our other obsessions. He wasn’t The Beatles or The Rolling Stones or soccer or even Redd Foxx, who we watched religiously on the show Sanford and Son. He certainly wasn’t like the squeaky-clean comics I’d been watching on The Tonight Show, whose dirtiest jokes were often over my head. What? What? I always asked, anytime the adults were laughing and was always met with some form of: It’s not for children. I’d also thought the point of comedy was for people to tell jokes and get laughs, and that watching and listening to someone funny meant having the experience of thinking: That’s funny. That’s funny. That’s funny. So was that. But with Richard Pryor it was: Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. That’s funny.
My brother and I sat silenced before him, mouths agape. He elicited a very high-pitched cackle from us, the kind of laughter we only had when joking around with people our own age, when part of the thrill of the joke was that no adults were around to hear us. I don’t think it matters that my brother and I were in elementary school. We were still having the right reaction to Richard Pryor, especially in the late seventies. He was saying and doing things I hadn’t seen anyone say or do before. He spelled out the raunch, and it helped me begin to understand a lot of things I wasn’t allowed to understand or have access to yet.
People speak to you at different times in your life and from different angles. It didn’t occur to me until a few chapters into this book how much Richard Pryor spoke to me as a child. It is him that I think of when I think of my childhood in podunk Spring, Texas. I can go right back to looking up at him from our family room floor, my hands on my thighs, laughing that high-pitched cackle and so absorbed in the places he’s taking me that I forget I’m surrounded by forests, pastures, and a new home every now and then. I laughed that way because Richard Pryor could tap into a child’s sensibility. Or he’d kept some part of his child’s sensibility alive. And good or bad, I think what he really did for me, was make it seem okay to not grow up. Subconsciously, I thought, Oh, you know, there’s really no pressure to act like a responsible person. He’s getting by fine. I think he also corroborated my existence as the class clown. Even in kindergarten I’d known my place was under the table, quietly tying everybody’s shoelaces together with yarn, or putting bunny ears behind someone’s head during circle time. Why? Because I didn’t have a solid joke book yet. I was a hack. A five-year-old hack.
By elementary school, the class clown was my identity, same as it was for Richard Pryor and many other comedians. Most class clowns are not all fun and games; they aren’t just “distracting” but distracting, hiding, escaping, and seeking what they lack—attention, admiration, love, acceptance, a good feeling. By the time I entered junior high, I needed to distract myself from many things, including the fact that I feared I was stupid because of what my performance at school seemed to be suggesting. After I failed my second eighth grade and had been given a pass to ninth (out of sympathy, I suspect) school had become the place I made appearances only to entertain people. Many times my teachers. And many more times to the chagrin of my teachers, who sent me to the vice principal’s office. Unlike other school officials, Ms. Copeland never reprimanded me for my stunts; instead, she asked me how my day was going, and to my surprise and maybe hers, we soon became friends. Each time I was sent to her office for being “bad,” we talked about my life, her life, life in general, and looked at pictures of her farm and colts; sometimes I cried and sometimes we sat in her office until six in the evening. I needed Ms. Copeland the same any kid whose home threw them more questions and secrets than answers and security, and who had been largely given up at school, needed an adult who saw them. Ms. Copeland saw me, and instead of finding me “distracting,” “foolish,” or “difficult” she found me interesting and full of hope. As a ninth-grade dropout, I can’t tell you what she saved me from, but that’s because she saved me from it. What I can tell you is that when I signed my withdrawal papers on her large desk, I realized I was scared to let her down. I finally understood what it felt like for kids to want to impress their parents. Well, it was too late. I’d already signed the papers.
Richard Pryor had a teacher or two who noticed him as well, who could handle him “with kindness and patience” and who encouraged his talent and wit and most certainly saved him from something he never got the chance to know about, either.
A friend of mine pointed out that he also dropped out of school in ninth grade, which is something I guess a person can miss when a ninth-grade education seems normal. Going back to reread that section of this book, it hit me how different even the similar parts of our lives were. I was a Caucasian girl with a greasy bowl haircut who got up and left school the moment it really sunk in that no one could really keep me there. Ms. Copeland and a few other teachers encouraged me to keep in touch. By his own account, Richard Pryor was kicked out of school by a teacher, thrown onto the ground and told, “Don’t come back.”
Discovering you’re not stupid after all is no small thing, and I’m sure Richard Pryor would agree. Two weeks before I tried stand-up at an open mic for the first time, I was a twenty-five-year-old dropout with a GED and no job that had ever fulfilled me in the slightest (beyond childcare). Then I got up and told some jokes to strangers and got the feedback that I was a “smart comic.” A similar thing happened to Richard Pryor, when during his first attempt at telling jokes on stage, he took a moment to notice the audience reacting well and thought, “…so, shit, I wasn’t stupid.” There are a lot of negative connotations to being a class clown. Being shamed for your behavior can cloud your ability to see your strengths. I never once considered that my quips and pranks were how I shined. It was all so baffling. I had been a foolish and failing class clown, then a dropout barely getting by, and then I committed full-time to clowning and was suddenly being referred to as an intellectual. I had respect. It was a new light to see myself in. As a clown.
I didn’t watch Richard Pryor’s early, Bill Cosby–colored stand-up until many years after I’d become a standup. It was like witnessing someone who had been discovered and yet had not discovered himself. Watching a comic who hasn’t yet found their own voice often reminds me of watching a job interview, seeing someone on their best behavior but not loosened up enough to actually excel. Someone wanting not only to seem “good,” but to securely get their foot in the door. This can get them in the door, meaning amongst the company of comedians, but if they got there by doing a passable impersonation of a well-known comic, then they’re going to fall by the wayside and people will only be talking about them to say they’re derivative. It’s inevitable to be influenced by other comedians as a comic, and you can usually watch someone and piece together a couple of clear influences, but when a comedian is speaking with their own voice and from their own point of view, they have the chance to grow. Any artist’s career is about constant change. An endless spring-cleaning of your heart and soul. The jokes that make it to stage might be considered a strong set and seem to define our view of a comedian, but what’s happening below the surface—the shifts and sometimes slips in thinking, the cracks in old thoughts, the invisible but strongly felt forces that shape the points, some of them destructive—are constantly in motion. All the time.
“I imagined what I looked like and got disgusted. I gasped for clarity as if it was oxygen. The fog rolled in. In a burst of inspiration, I finally spoke to the sold-out crowd: ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’”
With that, Richard Pryor walked off stage, mid-set. It’s ironic that his agent, hysterical at what he’d done, screamed, “You’ll never work in this town again!” Because that Richard Pryor—the one who’d become successful by borrowing cleaner, mainstream acts and toning down many of his natural instincts—never did return. He fled to Berkeley and hung out with revolutionaries, drug dealers, artists, and intellectuals, and “indulged in every thought that popped into [his] sick head” and then returned as the Richard Pryor who we all think of when we hear his name. He had he found his voice. And voices.
When I lost the audience and myself in front of them I wasn’t a seasoned performer. I’d been in LA five years and didn’t know how to acclimate to my surroundings. I had the whole stage and hardly any freedom of expression. In fact, I was so trapped by my own mannerisms, I might as well have been hiding behind those of someone else. I also made a swift exit out of LA but went back to Denver, where I had lived before and where I knew the comedy scene was less populated and I could get more stage time to grow out of the box I was trapped in. It’s hard to do a disappearing act just when the world is starting to be curious about who you are and what you have to say. It takes conviction and a boundless passion for your art to take a step back from it and examine whether you’re doing it in the way that’s true to yourself. Many might’ve considered it a step back when I moved to Denver, but I’ve come to know it as a necessary side step, because when I returned to LA, I was several leaps ahead of where I had been. I can’t say that I reached the ultimate artistic freedom that Richard Pryor found in Berkeley, of being able to say, “I never thought about what I did until I did it,” but maybe I wasn’t doing the right drugs and mingling with the “characters” he “got tangled up with.” For sure I wasn’t. He “hung out with a coke dealer named Haywood” and I hung out with a local tempeh dealer in the meat substitution section of the natural food store, where I worked. But I had given myself the freedom to experiment and fail, and I came back with a much broader repertoire of what my voice could be, and with that, a finer understanding of where that voice was coming from.
I never met Richard Pryor, but in 2001 I sat fifty feet away from him at the fifteenth annual American Comedy Awards with Lucy Lawless, who was there to present an award and invited me as her date knowing I was an aspiring comedian. We’d become fast friends at our job, where she was a warrior princess and I answered the phones and took out the trash. All night, I kept glancing Richard Pryor’s direction. He was in a wheelchair next to a woman who I guessed was his wife. It had been fifteen years since he had been diagnosed with Multiples Sclerosis and probably that long since I’d watched him in anything on television. He looked like someone who had been plucked from a nursing home, tossed into a leather jacket, and driven to a glitzy Hollywood event. It was jarring. On one level, I was seeing that an icon was just a person, which was something I’d already had to accept about my date, Xena, when months into working as a production assistant for her hit show, I’d walked in on her spoon feeding her baby infant some mush. On another level, I was seeing Richard Pryor—the epitome of the physical comedian, the person who could disappear effortlessly into his characters, as if he somehow took in their spirits and kept them living within him—and he was slumped slightly in a wheel chair. Even from fifty feet away, he looked propped up and vacant. Like a marionette whose strings had been snipped.
My Largo set in 2012, which became my album Live, has been compared to Richard Pryor’s Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip—his painfully honest, painfully funny album about his drug addiction and the night he caught himself of fire. That night of my set at Largo, I walked on stage for the first time with almost nothing planned but the brutal truth, and told everyone I had cancer and also mentioned I’d broken up with my girlfriend while fighting a deadly bacterial infection and then had my mother die tragically. Blurring comedy and tragedy and confession—areas of Pryor’s mastery—changed my career and my life, forever.
Before Largo, I feared friends and fans and the public in general would start disappearing when I shared my cancer diagnosis along with my life’s recent string of monumental blows. The whole if you have it, then they can have it psychology. I’d feared that talking so bluntly about my sexuality might pigeonhole me. But I experienced the opposite. Ten-fold. I was truly shocked to see the audience so touched, to hear their laughter. Getting those laughs was being told I was okay on some level. So was getting to share the gravity of my situation. Even though I was the one doing all the talking, there was an emotional exchange between three hundred strangers and a sense of us all collectively processing our own humanity and mortality. There was crying and laughter of all kinds, and gasps and shouts of disbelief, and the truth was not mine alone, anymore.
Now, we’ve finally come to a time when the dark, tragic truth is not something women are expected to keep to themselves anymore. I’ve been very vocal during the current #metoo revolution, and it’s an interesting time to be reading a memoir of a comedy icon who, had he lived, might be put under a far harsher light considering how several other comedy icons who’ve long held the stage and a place in our hearts and minds are being buried alive by the testimonies of women. I must admit, while reading this book, I was bothered by the number of times Richard Pryor appeared unfazed by his cheating and heartless ways of leaving women—some as new mothers, alone with his children. Having been through my own “pregnancy and birth,” I don’t understand the “no big deal” attitude about all the chaos he inflicted on his supposed partners. Especially on children. Even when seeming to acknowledge his shortcomings he misses (or can’t see) them: “I didn’t excuse such behavior,” he says about his part of his relationship with his wife Jennifer Lee Pryor. “In all honesty, I didn’t even think about it. From as far back as I can remember, I saw men handle their women with a certain roughness.”
“Their women.” That’s possessive—something even a ninth-grade dropout can point out.
To me, he came across as trying to pass off vile behavior as endearing, which made me sad. But he was raised in violence. He was an addict who was rarely able to stay on the wagon. These are not excuses, only explanations.
I asked myself if I thought Richard Pryor would have changed by now, 2018? His awakening in Africa gave me hope. His reckoning with never wanting to use the word “nigger” again seemed to be the same shade as a reckoning that might have one day come with how he treated and talked about women. Many comics grasp tightly to their language, their image—their egos—afraid of what it would mean to change, but that was not Richard Pryor.
I also asked myself if I thought Richard Pryor could be capable of something worse than what he’s already admitted to. Each day another man is publically revealed to be hiding terrible truths behind a persona that suggested the opposite. More and more disbelief has entered a scene that’s finally asking us to believe. Though he got cut short from telling us much more of his story, I want to believe Richard Pryor has already told us everything terrible that there was to know about himself. I think it’s significant that throughout this book and his life, he openly admitted to shameful and immoral acts that others are going great lengths to disguise; some disguising their vile acts with their edgy acts for years and collecting laughs—because getting laughs really is a way to be told that you are okay.
And while many of today’s shocking headlines revealing the violence and sexual assault perpetrated by previously well-respected men are only coming out in sputtering truths, after the fire has been placed directly under their feet, Richard Pryor needed no prompting. He shared his darkest, most shameful secrets, completely unprovoked. He lit his own fire.