← Settle In with PBS News
Settle In with PBS News
Elizabeth Pryor on comedy, race and her father's legacy
00:34:15
Historian and Smith College professor Elizabeth Pryor has spent much of her career studying the history of the N-word. Her father, legendary comedian Richard Pryor, made the word central to his work before renouncing it altogether. In this episode of...
Loading summary
Transcript63 lines
- [00:00]
A
He literally told me I had to punch somebody out if they ever call me the N word. And I was like, had two little pigtails and those little bobbles on the end, you know? And I'm like, no.
- [00:13]
B
Our guest today is historian and Smith College professor Elizabeth Storter Pryor. And today we're talking about her new book, something we Richard A Notorious Word, and me. Elizabeth Storter Prior welcome to settle in. It's great to speak with you.
- [00:27]
A
It's nice to be here. Thank you.
- [00:29]
B
So your book, it's part memoir, it's part history, it's part cultural criticism. When did you come to realize that the story of one specific word was also the story of your relationship with your dad?
- [00:41]
A
I mean, it was certainly a journey. I mean, the whole book has been. But really everything kind of collided in my classroom. So I'm a professor at Smith College, and I was teaching a history course on the Civil War, and a student in the class asked, have you seen Blazing Saddles? And this is the 1974 satirical film that was co written by my father and Mel Brooks. And I thought the student was trying to out me as my father's daughter, honestly, at that moment, and she wasn't. What she was trying to do is connect to my lecture. And in just a few moments from then, she quoted a line from the film, one that I'm certain was written by my father that had a disparaging word for people of Chinese descent and. And the N word. And she said them. And I just froze in that moment. And it did. It sent me on like a journey of discovery of my own history with the word of my, you know, my intentions as a teacher in the classroom and the history of the word.
- [01:49]
B
You say that you thought that she was trying to out you as your father's daughter. We should say at the time, it was not commonly known that Richard Pryor was your dad.
- [01:58]
A
I certainly didn't talk about it. I don't know if people knew or not, but I did not talk about it in. Certainly not in public and not that often in private.
- [02:08]
B
Why's that?
- [02:11]
A
You know, there were so many intrusive questions when I was growing up. My father was as famous for his comedy as he was for his demons. And people would ask these questions that were hard for me to digest as a young person. Did you know him? How often did you see him? Were you close? And I, you know, after he had this horrible incident where he set himself on fire in a suicide attempt and burned two thirds of his body. And people were saying, making it a joke. I just, when people asked, I started to say no when they asked if I was his daughter.
- [02:58]
B
You describe yourself as the. As an historian of the N word, also the daughter of a man who forever changed how that word functioned in American culture. Did those two identities ever conflict?
- [03:11]
A
I mean, not for me, because I think it's important that, that to note that my father was using the word in a really subversive, very black way. I mean, he was trying to use it as a form of protest to make America reckon with their racism. And he was building in making it public in the way that he did. He was building on these black power luminaries who had done it in the mid to late 60s. And so. So the word he was using to me was very different than the word that I started out studying, which was, as some people will say, like the word with the hard, er, which was the racist version that, you know, is associated with so much racist violence in the United States. So there wasn't a conflict for me, but I saw the way they, they weave together. As I started to dig more deeply into this research, those two words, the
- [04:13]
B
idea that he used that word as a form of protest, how exactly did he do that as an artist?
- [04:19]
A
Well, you know, coming up on stage as a black man and speaking the word, but also putting it in the title of two of his Grammy award winning albums and using it for both to mock white racism, which he did do when he was portraying cops or whatnot. But also the way that black people for centuries had used it in their living rooms to sort of be in conversation with white racism, to reclaim the word. And he repeated the word that he heard growing up. And by not, you know, leaning into respectability politics like that, you know, we have to be a certain way on stage so white people think this about us. My father was really being quite groundbreaking in opening up, you know, what a poor black household actually looked like in his experience in segregated from segregated Peoria.
- [05:30]
B
In my understanding of him, when you talk about respectability politics in terms of comedy, the name that comes to mind is Bill Cosby. Early Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor, as I understand it, his early work, he started as a clean comic because when he surveyed the landscape of successful black comedians, Bill Cosby was really number one. And so this is true of so many creatives. Until you find your own voice, you tend to copy what works. And that's sort of, that's where he started. How did he ultimately find his own voice and his own sense of Authenticity.
- [06:04]
A
I mean, that was. He was very ambitious and always was. And Bill Cosby was like who he wanted to be for a long time. And in the summer of 67, he was on a stage in Las Vegas and looked out and was basically, you know, doing this kind of vaudevillian kind of shtick. I mean, still. He still talked about race. He really did, and racism, but he did it in a way that was very palatable. And he looked out in the audience and said, you know, my own grandmother who raised him would not be welcome in this audience and I don't want to be doing this shtick anymore. And he walked off the stage and he started delving into. He went up to Berkeley, California. He, you know, not to the university, but to the nightclubs and meeting writers and hanging out with them and learning about, you know, black power and politics and history. And he started to bring that into his act.
- [07:07]
B
Right. I mean, I was struck by, in watching your father's work, that he wasn't just making audiences laugh, he was forcing them to confront racism and violence and addiction and questions of masculinity. All of these difficult truths wrapped up in a standup comedy act.
- [07:25]
A
Yeah, I mean, not many people can get away with doing that. And I think part of what made him so brilliant is that he was so vulnerable and kind of welcoming and open hearted, even as he's talking about this really difficult stuff. So he disarms the audience and then comes in and says, oh, but I'm not going to let you get away with anything. I am going to be talking about racism. I am going to be talking about police brutality right now.
- [07:55]
B
And he does this book in particular, though it could have been a traditional memoir, you could have written entirely about your dad. Why did you choose to use the N word as the thing that fuels the narrative in this book?
- [08:10]
A
Well, it's actually sort of the opposite. So I didn't intend to write a book about my father really at all, or myself, but I was doing a study on the. The N word. And, you know, I had this incident that happened in my classroom. I wanted to figure it out. I started becoming really interested in how to teach racism in my class, especially around racist language. I became interested in the history and they're just. I couldn't do anything without running into my father in this work. It's just he was in the things I read, in the things I studied, but also in my own memories. So I went back to the first meaningful conversation I ever had with him when I was seven years old. And it was about the N word. When two boys called me the N word at school, it just wouldn't leave me alone. It insisted.
- [09:07]
B
And he said to you, don't ever let anyone call you that word.
- [09:12]
A
Yes.
- [09:12]
B
I'm not sure if you were allowed to watch his stand up when you were seven or eight years old, but the idea that he's saying, don't let anyone call you that word, and yet he's using that word on stage, I mean, was that a contradiction you had to navigate, or were you completely unaware of the work that he was doing?
- [09:27]
A
Well, I mean, I had seen him on stage by that point, and when I was six, I saw him perform. And I remember the way he had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand doing people who spoke this word. He's always doing characters and doing characters that were speaking the N word and it wasn't. I just knew in my heart there was a difference between the word that he was trying to highlight and the racist word that I was called at school. But it was hard to figure out. Like, he was like. Told me I had to. He literally told me I had to punch somebody out if they ever call me the N word. And I was like. Had two little pigtails and those little bobbles on the end, you know, And I'm like, no. And then also went up on stage and, you know, he had a gold record that was on the wall, and it was. That N word's crazy, you know, so this was. So. It was hard to figure out, as was my dad in many ways, which is part of the story.
- [10:38]
B
The other remarkable thing about your father's work was his audience. I mean, he had black folks and white folks sitting alongside each other, laughing alongside one another at the same joke. Yet he never softened what he had to say. How does that strike you?
- [10:52]
A
My favorite. For anybody who's not familiar with Richard Pryor Live in concert, his 1979 concert film is the thing to start with, to watch, in my opinion. And he has, you're right, a black and white audience there. But what is so different is that he is. White people are being brought into a black world like he, you know, so black and white people have been together before, but always, you know, on white people's terms. And here he is doing a very black show and, you know, welcoming white people there. You're welcome to be here, but just so you know, I'm not going to tone it down. And neither. Neither is my audience, and they didn't. He makes a joke at the beginning like that. Like that white people were being, like, trampled over by black people with their tickets still in their hands, you know, at the. At the beginning of the show. So he's, like, acknowledging that there's a tension here. Right. Having people in the audience. But he. I think it is this vulnerability, this honesty that he leads with and focusing on himself. So he's not exactly. He is calling people out, but he's not doing it in a way that he's not trying to shame people. He's kind of highlighting, you know, what the realities are of the world that he was living in.
- [12:20]
B
Yeah. You know, I guess we should make clear to younger audiences in particular, that these days, to say a comedian was authentic and was vulnerable, people might hear that and say, well, any good comedian is authentic. But you have to understand that before Richard Pryor, most comedians were doing safe, observational humor. And what was so different about Richard Pryor was that, yes, he was vulnerable, and he was using his own experiences and letting that be the window through which people could come into his world. Was vulnerability his greatest gift, do you think?
- [12:54]
A
I mean, as I watch him, he's so charming, and I know that that charm is centered in his willingness to be open in that way. I also think a lot about his addictions and that vulnerability without having, you know, a solid grounding of, you have to be very strong. And I don't know if he had the strength off the stage. Like, he must have agonized and be. Been in a lot of pain because it's really hard to flay yourself open like that. But he did, and it is. It's so. I mean, imagine in the 1970s, a black comedian who goes on stage and talks about all the things like sex and being raised in a brothel and having a violent father and questioning his masculinity, like you said, like calling making fun of himself a macho man, he says. And, like, do you know, being real in a way that kind of disregards how white people are going to judge was very new, and I'm glad that people take it for granted today because of the work that my father did.
- [14:14]
B
Yeah. How about the work that you do in teaching about racism and teaching about the N word? How have you seen that change, especially in the last two or three years in the. In the latest Trump era and all that has come with it? How has that changed the work that
- [14:30]
A
you do about four years ago for the first time? So Smith College is an incredible place to teach. I feel really lucky to teach there, and I can teach pretty Much anything I want as my electives. And about four years ago, I had this. When all these attacks on critical race theory were at their height, I had this moment where I second guessed my syllabus. I've never had that before, where I was like, do I wanna put this on? I'm worried that this will be challenged or questioned in a way that's a very uncomfortable feeling when we're supposed to be living in a world of academic freedom. Right. And so it has changed. I mean, we have the support of the college, but I don't know how far that goes. As we've seen at different universities.
- [15:30]
B
Have you seen a difference in the students and their expectations of you and what they are inclined to talk about in the classroom?
- [15:40]
A
So I teach a course, the history of the N word. And the last time I taught was pretty much a disaster. It's been a great class. And part of the it was a disaster is there were members of the class that didn't have the kind of basic education in certain racial questions that they would have had 10 years earlier. And that really became a sticking point in the class. So I think there are a lot of students who come to us now that don't have access to the kind of education that students had, you know, five, six, 10 years ago.
- [16:24]
B
Yeah, that's interesting. So when you're teaching a class like that, you're assuming a certain baseline, but I imagine what you discovered was that there was no baseline, right?
- [16:35]
A
There wasn't a baseline. So, you know, students would say, you know, why the double standard? Which felt like part of the kind of question that we had. We came in, you know, people were already interested in talking about something else about the N word. And it was really. They were a lot of hard conversations in that class.
- [16:57]
B
In reading the book, your father, after he visited Kenya, he made a decision to stop using the N word altogether. What was behind that? Was it a rejection of his previous work or just an evolution of the man?
- [17:10]
A
I mean, I think honestly there's a lot of different answers to the question. The answers that he gave on stage in 1982 was that he'd gone in 79 to Kenya and he had this diasporic opinion where he was in a black world where black people were doing the small jobs and the big jobs of the whole country. Black people were all that he saw. And in that context, outside of the United States and its anti blackness, the N word had no meaning because the N word is in direct conversation, the version that black people use. It's in Direct conversation with white racism. So without that present, he felt like it just had no place, the word. And he didn't even think it. Not only didn't he say it, but he didn't think it. He said he was never going to call another black man the N word. But when I look at some of his earlier work, I see that these questions were arising for him before that I think a lot about, as a comparison, like Gary Coleman from. He's this actor from this sitcom in the 80s called Diff'rent Strokes. And he was adopted by a black kid, adopted by a white family. And he has this brother. And every time he has a question or something comes to him that he doesn't understand, he says, what you talking about, Willis? And I can only imagine that Gary Coleman probably was confronted with that phrase all the time, everywhere he went. And I think about my father, who has the N word emblazoned on his albums, and how he must have become a person who many people felt free to say the N word to, because when he disavows the word on stage in 1982, one of the things he said is, and I don't want white people coming up to me and telling me jokes, N word jokes. I don't like it. And so I wonder if the word took on a life of its own for him. And there's also a special he did in 1977, Richard Pryor special. And he has this really beautiful. It's a comedy variety show, and he has this really beautiful sketch, not comedy, with Maya Angelou, and she plays the wife of a drunk who's my father and talks about how he used the N word. And he said it was used as affection, but that he started to use it against himself and against her and against his people. And it brought to mind that my father was already grappling with the kind of. The weight. I mean, the weight of being a person who brings this word out in the open that he can no longer control.
- [20:11]
B
You know, that is, as you well know, that's a through line throughout black comedy from Billy Kersan's to Richard Pryor to Dave Chappelle. It's like, who is this joke for? And am I being laughed with or am I being laughed at?
- [20:25]
A
Right? And I think that that must be such a hard question, because you're making the jokes for certain people and then other people take it their own way. In an interview recently, somebody said to me, you know, Richard Pryor's most famous for being nasty. They said. And I was like, I don't think that's true, but it's interesting that that's somebody's impression, you know, of my father. Like, he said bad words, right? Or he talked about sex too much. He was raunchy, which he was. But if you really listen to his comedy, that's not it at all. He's really going deep.
- [21:08]
B
You describe your own relationship in the book to the N word as one of both connection and distance. As the daughter of a black father and white mother, how did that shape your understanding of race and belonging as you were growing up?
- [21:22]
A
The N word was so hard for me because it. Every time I've heard it, and maybe even still, it always represents for me something that I'm not a part of. Now. I don't want to be a part of the white racism that's wielded against other people, but that's certainly. And I've never thought of myself as white, even though my mother was. But I'm clearly not meant to be part of society when that word is being, you know, hurled towards me or other black people. But when it's used as camaraderie as it can be among some black people, I also feel, you know, a sense of, you know, not fitting in, because that's never been my word. I went to white schools. I was, you know, mostly raised by my white mother, white neighborhoods. And it's just not authentically part of my black experience. And so there is a way in which it always, always signals to me, you know, a kind of outsiderness. And I think that's part of the biracial experience. I really love TikTok, and I really admire young people on TikTok today who embrace their Jewish black identity. And they're like, don't mess with me. Like, yes, I am all black. Yes, I am all Jewish. Here's my experience. But I had no pioneer leadership to help me figure that out. And so I was in a world that told me very often, you know, I wasn't Jewish, even though I very much am, my mother's Jewish, and. And some people, often white people, telling me I wasn't really black. And so trying to find my own way around all of those messages and all of the unconscious racism. And if you've read the book, you know, some of the kind of horrible racism that I've confronted even in, you know, my most intimate relationships, it was very confusing. And I'm glad that there are a group of people who, you know, have a solid foundation and understand their identity in a way that I had to spend my, you know, whole life trying to figure out.
- [23:46]
B
And in compounding things, there's this moment in the book that I think a lot of readers will fixate on. It's when your mother calls you the N word. You were 12 years old and you write that after that there was no way back. Looking at that now as the adult narrator of your life, as opposed to being a 12 year old at the time, what do you understand about that moment now that you could not have processed back then?
- [24:11]
A
My mother liked to go low in an argument. And for her, in that moment, that's the lowest thing she could think of
- [24:22]
B
to say to a 12 year old.
- [24:23]
A
To say to a 12 year old, right. Really being able, I think, as a white person, to divorce herself from, you know, the deeper questions of the long term impact it would have on me. And for me, honestly, even harder than making sense of that moment, which I still am trying to do, is the fact that my mother never apologized for it. So we never were able to come together really after that. It put like a little hard rock between our relationship. And I don't know that I always knew this was what the rock was, but I always knew when it came down to it, this was not a person. As much as I knew she loved me, and she did. And as much as I loved her, I did. I knew that there was a place that was deep and foundational that I could not trust her. And that, I think, also shaped my relationships with everybody. And I was surrounded by a lot of white people and it really shaped all of my relationships going forward.
- [25:50]
B
I'm sorry that happened.
- [25:52]
A
Thank you.
- [25:53]
B
In writing about your father, you say that when he was good, he was very, very good. And when he was bad, he was horrid, present and magical one moment, unpredictable and scary the next.
- [26:04]
A
Yeah.
- [26:05]
B
How do you write about a father like that, honestly, without either sanding down the edges or erasing the tenderness? Like, how did you navigate all of that and what was that like growing up with him?
- [26:22]
A
You know, one of the gifts, if you will, of this writing this book was that a lot of my memories were locked in time. So like you say, how do you reckon with that? Not as the 12 year old, but as the, you know, as the mother, as the historian, you know, as the wife. How do I make sense of that moment? And I had that with all of the moments and memories of my life, especially around my dad. The end of my father's life was pretty brutal. He was. He had multiple sclerosis. And I was once told by a doctor that he had it most acute of any living person that that doctor had seen.
- [27:08]
B
Really?
- [27:08]
A
Yes.
- [27:08]
B
Wow.
- [27:09]
A
And so it was very hard. There wasn't. You couldn't really communicate with him. And it put, like a band, like a filter over our entire relationship. So writing this, I was reminded of the tenderness that. That tenderness. I was so distant from it because of the brutal ending. So how did I write it? I mean, I really thought about this a lot because there's a version of the story that I could tell that would have been like a Mommie Dearest version, because my father could be very cruel. And I didn't want to be too Pollyanna about it either. So I was very conscious of this the entire time that I was writing it. But what I wanted to celebrate was the fact I wanted to celebrate this magic of my father. I didn't want to erase this real tenderness this way that he could, when he was good, that he could really connect in a way that even as close as I was in living with my mother all the time, she just couldn't. Right. It's a superpower, and I wanted to talk about that, but also be real about who he was.
- [28:35]
B
How did you emerge from all of this intact? It's really remarkable.
- [28:41]
A
Thank you. You know, I do a half an hour meditation every morning, and it was. I would. This never had to happen to me before, but I would just cry through the entire meditation. And I. I feel like this process has kind of been a gift. When my dad died in 2005, I just was like, oh, well, we had a nice run. It's done. I'm very unsatisfied with how the relationship ended, but, you know, so are a lot of people. And there's something. This moment in the classroom where my student raises blazing saddles, I now feel like was a haunting. And that, you know, 15 years, 20 years after my father passed, I get to feel closer to him than I did in those last years of his life. And I continue to feel closer. People keep asking me such deep questions that I have to go into and unpack and not see him anymore. Just as a child, you know, as a child sees their father, but see him as the man that he was, which was flawed, but also, you know, pretty incredible and also hurting. He had his own trauma, and just to be able to kind of reckon with that, I feel like he's coming. He's coming into life like he's inflating as a person instead of being two dimensional as he can be.
- [30:15]
B
In my childhood memories, near the end of his life. You write that you would sit and read Frederick Douglass aloud, and that's one of the most moving passages in the book. What do you think those moments meant to him?
- [30:30]
A
I know he loved them because he would kind. I mean, it was. I. When I tell you, he didn't speak. He did not speak. Getting out any sound was, you know, just took a lot. And he would cheer. He would go. He would, like, go, ah. You know, he would. He would really. He was rooting for Frederick Douglass. It was. It was cool. And I didn't even know at the time because I wasn't familiar with his work yet, what a historian he was. Like, how he actually really loved it. But I wanted to share a part of me, and sharing a part of me was sharing the fact that I was a historian.
- [31:12]
B
History's already, in many ways remembered Richard Pryor, but as his daughter, as a historian, what do you think his biggest imprint is? I mean, there's comedy, but to your point, he was a cultural criticism. He was a historian. In many ways, he was a chronicler of black life in America. How do you see his cultural. His cultural impact?
- [31:33]
A
I don't think he's remembered enough, quite honestly. I think that he's remembered as an important comedian. I love that all the comedians worth their salt list Richard Pryor as their number one influence. But what he did was and managed to do was to use his art to make this very profound commentary. And also, you know, like you referenced earlier, like, be real, be truthful about a very unique kind of black experience on stage. And I think he should be remembered for changing the very face of performance, because maybe it's comedy, but maybe there are other places where that authenticity, you know, is, you know, we take for granted now as well. I think he is, you know, a leader in his field, an important American figure. I'm always upset when people are heralding the important activists and from the 20th century. And he's not always on the list. He should be.
- [32:46]
B
Yeah. This book begins with one word, but it ends up asking bigger, larger questions about family, race, memory, forgiveness, America entirely. When readers close this book, what conversations do you hope they're still having?
- [33:02]
A
I mean, all of those. I want it as a jumping off point to have really hard conversations, to know that even though the N word is, you know, part of our, you know, a national, you know, tragedy really represents that national trauma of American racism, that it is a very personal. Has a very personal impact as well. And we can't downplay the way that national tragedy is tied to the way it touches individuals throughout history and even now. Yeah.
- [33:43]
B
Elizabeth Storter Pryor. The book is something we said. Richard Pryor, a notorious word. And me. It's out now. It's a real pleasure to speak with you. Thanks so much.
- [33:54]
A
It's been wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. It's a great conversation, Sam.