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By
Nona
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ R.P. - A Tragicomedic Genius ~
This week’s awardee will hands-down win the mournful distinction of having had both the worst luck and the worst judgment of any Dead Rebel profiled so far. He was born poor and black in Peoria, Illinois on December 1, 1940, to his whore mother and pimp father. He was raised by his trash grandmother - also in the pimp business - while his mother worked her ass off (literally) on her back. Old Grandma Pimp was an abusive witch, but our rebel was devoted to her - mostly, he later admitted, out of fear. It goes without saying that this environment provided him precious little protection, and he was summarily molested by two different men during the course of childhood.
His early indoctrination into the sex-industry world taught him two terrible habits that would haunt him all his life; hitting women, and abusing himself with drugs and drinking. But another survival reflex he learned, on the other hand, was what would make him world famous; humor.
All animals have a fight-or-flight instinct, but it could be argued that the human race has a third primal reaction to threat that distinctly separates us from animals; the laugh reflex. When confronted with circumstances too awful to contemplate, some of us won’t fight or flee, but instead laugh. It is to this instinct that this Rebel’s humor directly speaks. He could make pain and horror funny like nobody else, and laugh with us all about what a world of shit this is.
Life appeared to be more than happy to provide him with plenty of material for this sort of comedy. He spent the first several years of his career in a puddle of flop-sweat, as agent after producer after director insisted that they needed a new Cosby, that his stand-up was too rank and raw to play to mass audiences (ie, white middle class TV viewers who adored the clean-cut pseudo-caucasian Cosby on “I Spy”). When, with help from Cosby himself, actually, he realized that he could only bring The_Funny by using his own style, he found club after club that wouldn’t allow him to do his routine. He was too rough even for the swinging sixties. Eventually he picked up steam, achieved fame and then moved on to notoriety, both for his raucously vulgar humor and for his fractured personal life. He was bad with money and worse with substances, infamously setting himself on fire at the height of his fame in a cocaine-induced psychotic break. And then there were the women; black or white - it didn’t matter. All that they needed to be was as broken and crazy as he was, to provide nim with the proper blend of dysfunctional symbiosis and handy punching bag. One of them, Jennifer, divorced him after only a few years, then tried again, once more unsuccessfully, a couple of wives later, but still remained a lifelong companion – tellingly, and by his own admission, she was the most abused of all of his five wives.
He kept pouring his money into drugs and running around the club-scene, so he spent most of the 80's making movies that were formulaic and way beneath his level of potential, in order to keep a roof over his head, and drug and alimony money in the bank. He fathered six children, also an expense, and floundered in his well-intentioned efforts at parenting.
He cleaned up a great deal, going to therapy and attempting to sober off, after several lackluster years of work, but his life was so tumultuous that it overtook and surpassed his art, and after a time he became one of those stars who remained hugely famous simply by being who they were. He tried to make an autobiographical movie, but his life would not stop to let him off, and the result was half-assed. Before he could adequately get back on his feet as a legitimate comedian, he fell victim to a degenerative disease; multiple sclerosis. Over the course of the next fifteen years, he grew progressively weaker, with the devoted Jennifer caring for him and keeping him company everywhere he went. It was a tediously cruel way to end such a chaotic and fractured life.
To a point, he martyred himself to the ideal of tragicomedy. His name is synonymous with innovation and universality in comedy. His influences are keenly felt in the few and far between truly Funny People at work today, and as weakened and debilitated as he was late in his life, he still made an especially vibrant eminence gris at seemingly endless tributes that were heaped on him as he slowly died. Life never cut him any slack and he could never do anything the easy way, but when people wanted to appreciate him, fete him and honor him, as tiresome as it probably was to do so by then, he still showed up, mugging with his indelibly sweet face till the end.
He could afford to be magnanimous, after all. He knew damned well that there was only one Richard Pryor.
