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Pryor is solo now, and soaring—on-and offstage. He was moved by the 25,000 get-well cards he received after his 1980 accident. Now he lives in Hawaii, commuting to the mainland for work. John Badham, who directed Pryor in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, finds him "gentle and mellow now." He cites Pryor's renunciation, in Sunset Strip, of the word nigger, which Pryor had legitimized as a term of defiant pride but now finds demeaning. Stan Shaw, who co-starred in Bingo Long and helped Pryor through the hospital siege, sees reason for optimism. "He is no longer self-destructive," Shaw says. "He is over the drugs. If people are lucky, they grow—and Richard is lucky. You'll see more of this new Richard Pryor in his work. He has a very special gift, and finally he realizes it. John Belushi didn't survive. But Richard did. I think he was destined to stay here with us."
Can we agree and grant some unforced sentiment to this volatile genius who is no longer too tough for tears? We can at least hope that Pryor will harness his gifts to do even stronger work in a longer life. "When they bury me," he told Playboy in 1979, "they better dig the hole deep, because I may get out of that too." He has already done so. Incorrigible, indestructible, irrepressible, irreplaceable, Pryor is like the boy described in Sunset Strip by one of the comedian's favorite characters, the old black man called Mudbone. "That boy," Mudbone muses, smiling in spite of himself, "he could make you laugh at a funeral on a Sunday Christmas Day." Now look decades ahead, to the end of Richard Pryor's life, and see that impish boy standing over an un-get-outable grave. Watch as the boy looks up and smiles. Listen as his voice rises over the mourning: "Preach, Richard, preach!"
—By Richard Corliss