Richard Pryor’s “demons”
“He fought his demons.”
So said Rain Pryor in regards to her father, the late comedian Richard Pryor, in an interview with Bill Handel on a recent “The Bill Handel Show”(KFI 640am, Los Angeles), in a publicity interview for her new book, Jokes My Father Never Taught Me: Life, Love, and Loss with Richard Pryor. Unfortunately, both she and Handel (who is a long-time recovering addict) used the term “demons”repeatedly. The term, a euphemism for “drug addiction,”serves only to confuse the uninitiated by suggesting the idea that demons cause psychotropic drug addiction rather than addiction causes demons. Instead of educating, it misguides.
Richard Pryor was married six times. His daughter describes him as misogynistic, mercurial, unpredictable and violent. She describes life with her father as one of “sex and violence, punctuated by rare moments of family happiness,”which is typical even in the more extreme environments in which children of addicts cope. Addiction probably ran in his family: his father was a pimp and his mother a prostitute. He was a brilliant comedian and, at times, spoke openly about his addiction.
Pryor died of cardiac arrest in December, 2005 after a 19-year battle with multiple sclerosis. He was called a genius by some; a self-destructive madman by others. But let’s not obfuscate, just because he could be brilliant and, even if only occasionally, a decent family man. He was an addict and his brilliance kept him in the limelight, helping to keep him from getting sober until the mid ‘90s, when his body began giving out from MS