Richard Pryor built his stand-up comedy career around the n-word. He used it extensively during his shows. Two of his comedy albums that won Grammy awards have that word in their titles.
In 1979, Pryor went on a three-week trip to Africa. As he was sitting in the airport waiting for his flight back to America, he had an epiphany, and vowed to stop using the word in his comedy. On his 1982 album “Live on the Sunset Strip,” which also won a Grammy, he said:
“It’s dead. That word’s dead. We men and women. We come from the first people on earth. The first people on earth were Black people.”
Pryor and that word are the subjects of “Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me,” written by his daughter Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor and released in June.
Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor is a professor of history at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and it was a discussion in one of her classes that prompted her to begin studying the n-word and its history. In her class, a white student quoted from the 1974 Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles, a movie Richard Pryor co-wrote. The line that included the n-word, and the student said the actual word.
“Time stopped. The room started to spin,” Pryor writes early in the book. “All at once, multiple thoughts fired through my mind. A white student said the n-word in my classroom. She wasn’t calling anyone a name. She was simply trying to connect to my lecture by repeating a funny line from Blazing Saddles. She was also quoting a joke that I had no doubt was written by my father. Somehow that made the situation even more disorienting.”
In addition to her scholarly research into the n-word, Pryor has also presented a TED talk, “Why it’s so hard to talk about the n-word.”
Throughout the book, Pryor talks about the often-troubled relationship between her and her parents, who were never married. Richard Pryor was married seven times to five women, but never to Elizabeth’s mother, Maxine Silverman, who was white. Elizabeth writes about a time when she was 12 and had just returned to her mother’s house after spending time with her father. They got into a heated argument, and Silverman said, “You’re exactly like him, Elizabeth.”
“I am,” Elizabeth shouted back, to which her mother replied, “You’re a (n-word),” but saying the actual word. “She said it like she meant it,” Elizabeth writes. Richard never spoke to Maxine again.
The book is a fascinating look at the private life of one of the best comedians ever. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff. She writes about the other women in her father’s life and how she became friends with some of his other children. She writes about the incident in 1980 when her father set himself on fire, either while using drugs or as an attempt to take his own life. She writes about multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 1986 and his death in 2005.
Something We Said is Pryor’s second book. Her first, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War, was published in 2021.
