Saturday, December 10, 2005

R.I.P Richard Pryor

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Anyone that knows how sick Richard was knew this day was coming, but it's sad all the same. Ask a cross-section of today's standup comics, male or female, who influenced them to hit the stage, and I'll bet you that at least 90% will have Pryor on their individual lists.

Hey, props where props is due...Lenny Bruce kicked in the door on using "blue" language on stage, but Rich was a foul-mouthed poet.

As a Radio Broadcasting student doing my work experience at 97.5 FM here in Winnipeg, I had the (sort of) privlage of cleaning out their stacked record library. I was lucky enough to get to keep a few albums, one of which was Pryor's Wanted. Two slabs of non-stop, gut-busting laughs. So fuckin' good. The good folks at Rhino put out a box set with all of his Warner Bros. records, which I recommend you cop.

2 comments:

TRoyal said...

As a proud owner of said set, I can say that it's one of the best box sets, DVD or music-wise, ever produced.

Unknown said...

Allan - yeah, Richard Pryor was the MAN back in the day. Everybody'd be immitating his jokes.