So Funny It Hurts to Laugh

"You all know how black humor started?" he asked on his "Bicentennial" album. "It started in slave ships. Cat was always over there rowing. Dude say, 'What you laughin' about?' Said, 'Yesterday I was a king.' "

He officially renounced the N-word after a trip to Africa where, as he related in his autobiography, he watched the Africans in his hotel lobby in wonder. "The people here, they still have their self-respect, their pride. . . . There are no niggers here."

A few years later, he declared there were none at all.

"Now we are free, and that brings about a responsibility," he said at a commemoration for Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington. "We are free to starve to death . . . If you do better your condition, don't forget to look over your shoulder, reach out your hands and pull someone else along with you!"

By the time he won the first Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the Kennedy Center, he could only listen to the tributes from so many comics who had followed him.

Damon Wayans told the audience, "I wanted to be just like him, except for the drug habit, the failed marriages, the temper and the guns." Pryor, who believed that God had given him his talent and, just as formidably, had given him his disease, is now facing his maker.

But if anyone's got a chance of forgiveness by raising an almighty roar, it's gotta be him.

Maybe he could tell the Big Man the story of when his mother gave him $20 for an errand and he lost it. Sitting down on the sidewalk, he began crying. When a stranger asked him what was wrong, young Richard told the story. The stranger was so touched, Pryor said, he gave him the money. After a pause -- allowing the audience to feel the poignancy -- Pryor concluded with this: "[bleep], I was out there every day," playing the same scam.

If anyone has a shot at getting God to laugh, it has to be Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III, who once said, if it wasn't for comedy, "I could be in Peoria parking cars."