“This is a perfect time for Richard Pryor,” says Jennifer Lee Pryor, the late comedian’s widow. “I’m just very excited and happy that we’re getting this out there.”
She’s referring to an ambitious new box set from Rhino, bringing together seven of Pryor’s seminal comedy albums from his years at Warner Records.
Among the reissues on Richard Pryor — I Hope I’m Funny: The Warner Albums (1974-1983) are albums like …Is It Something I Said?, Wanted/Richard Pryor Live in Concert, Live on the Sunset Strip and Here and Now.
Several took Grammy Awards for comedy album of the year.
A fearless and searingly funny supernova of comedy, Pryor changed the face of stand-up by infusing social commentary — on racism, yes, but other societal ills like personal trauma and addiction — into his masterful comedic storytelling.
“There was never one before him and never one after,” Dick Gregory, another legendary comic, once said of Pryor to an audience at Yale. Gregory deemed Pryor one of three American geniuses of comedy, along with Lenny Bruce and Mark Twain.
Among the routines captures in the box set are “Wino & Junkie;” “Mudbone Goes to Hollywood” (Mudbone was a popular Pryor character); and on 1982’s Sunset Strip, the retelling of the devastating freebasing incident that left Pryor severely burned over half of his body.
The Warner Albums (1974-1983) includes liner notes by Scott Saul, a professor of English at UC Berkeley and the author of Becoming Richard Pryor (Harper Perennial), considered the definitive Pryor biography.
Though he suffered in his later years from multiple sclerosis, Pryor died in 2005 at 65 from a heart attack. Jennifer jokes that her late husband would be “rolling over in his ashes” if he were alive to witness the current state of affairs in the United States.
“I’m seeing such a decimation of all the progress that’s been made in all ways and the hate right now — the racism, antisemitism, misogyny, all manner of bigotry,” she says. “I just think Richard’s voice is so relevant more than ever.”
The all-vinyl set is available Thursday from Rhino Records.
