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Fire metaphors are ghoulishly appropriate for a man who, in June 1980, was lucky to be alive with third-degree burns over much of his body. Even so, fire images would be in consummate bad taste if 1) Pryor thought there were such a thing as bad taste, and 2) he had not used a recitation of the event and its aftermath as the climax of Sunset Strip. In the days after Pryor was found in shock a few blocks from his Northridge, Calif., home, his attorney declared that he had accidentally ignited a glass of rum with a butane lighter. Few believed it. Stories from the rumor mill are darker and more credible for a man who had made habitual use of cocaine part of his onstage act. They said that Pryor had been "freebasing"—mixing coke with ether to produce a more concentrated substance, a high with a mule kick—when the ether exploded.
Amazingly, Pryor pulled through; within two months he was telling Barbara Walters and a national TV audience how he had died and been born again. More amazingly, and even more typically, he was able to focus the laser of his art on this suicidal immolation. "Before I go to bed," he tells his Sunset Strip audience with a straight face and in the voice of aggrieved reason, "I like to have some milk and cookies. This night I had some low-fat milk, and I mixed it with some pasteurized, and I dipped the cookie in, and ..." Then comes the confession: "Ten million mothers freebase—and blow up!" And then, the memory of his favorite coke pipe, talking soothing self-destruction to him: "Me 'n' you're just gonna hang out in this room together. We'll talk it out." And the futile attempts of friends like Actor Jim Brown, and even some of his drug suppliers, to save him from his habit. And of the accident, and his anguished scamper across the lawns of Northridge: "I did the 100-yard dash in four-point-three." And his admission to the hospital—"I was all steam and smoke"—and his excruciatingly painful recovery.
And finally .. . but it would not be proper to reveal Pryor's punch line to the grim joke life played on him; and there are words best left to R-rated movies. Pryor uses them all, relentlessly and with relish. For him—as for Lenny Bruce, the pioneer of Savonarola satire, and Pryor's only true antecedent—profanity serves to give both a salty rhythm to his sentences and a Joy Buzzer shock to his more refeened listeners. It remains for his fearless comic acuity to tell him precisely how much gutter imagery his audience can take. As box office returns show, more and more moviegoers are taking him in huge, healthy doses. Pryor has always been big with the hip and in Harlem. Now he knows his comedy can play in Peoria.
In fact, Pryor was playing in Peoria—on the streets of that central Illinois city—from the time he was born there in 1940. Like many other comedians, Richie was the little kid with the big sassy mouth in a tough neighborhood. Pryor has minted much comic revenue from images of his youth: the whorehouse his grandmother ran, his father's satyric appetite, his own early awakening to the pleasures of the flesh, the sniper fire of racism. Some of this currency is counterfeit (his family, as he says in Sunset Strip, was not poor), but all is dross for his alchemist's mind.