A facade of fearlessness

Pryor did not grow up in grinding poverty, but he had a childhood that marked him for life and that he mined repeatedly for his comedy. Born Dec. 1, 1940, in Peoria, Ill., his mother, Gertrude, was a prostitute and cocktail waitress and his father, Buck, who he saw beat his mother regularly, was a pimp and bartender. His grandmother, who raised him from the age of 10, owned a brothel.

Even though Pryor was in some ways fearless onstage — there was nothing he wouldn't talk about, from impotence to his crack addiction — there was sometimes a hint of the skinny little Peoria kid lurking behind his eyes as he performed, watching fearfully for bullies.

He dropped out of school after eighth grade, got in and out of minor trouble, then joined the Army and was sent to Germany. Discharged for getting into a knife fight, he landed back in Peoria in 1960, where he started singing and telling jokes in local black nightclubs. The jokes went over better than the singing, and in 1963 Pryor moved to Greenwich Village, where he performed at fabled clubs like The Bitter End and befriended Bill Cosby and George Carlin. "He had a sort of pain that was fairly evident," Carlin recalled of those early days. Read more...