Free Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul Page A

cartoonish to them. At some Saturday matinees, he would sit through as many as twenty-five cartoons in a row, reveling in the antics of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Mickey Mouse, and the Road Runner. He studied their poses and facial expressions with the eye of an artist and would delight himself by drawing goofy cartoon characters on sketch pads. Each tilt of an eyebrow, each curve of a lip, made such a difference—a lesson the future comic internalized in his own facial muscles. Once, he went around for days imitating the Road Runner.
    Though Richard generally identified with leading men, there was one glorious exception: the character of Little Beaver, the Navajo orphan who served as Red Ryder’s loyal, spunky sidekick in a series of Republic westerns through the 1940s. Little Beaver had a compelling backstory, one that offered easy entrée for a black boy feeling cornered by his own family. Beaver was the grandson of an Indian chief, an outsider by birth, but gave up his claim to chiefdom so that he might stay at the side of his surrogate father, a solitary Anglo cowboy so charmed by Beaver’s pint-size moxie that he adopted him as his ward. With his trousers always falling down, Little Beaver was a child stuck in a man’s world, but he was also an indispensable presence in it, rescuing Red Ryder time and again with his sly intelligence. (In one film, he procures a skunk to foil a villain.) The granite-faced Ryder cared for Beaver and needed Beaver, in ways that may have felt delicious to a child beaten or ignored by his own taciturn father.
    Yet Richard’s infatuation with Little Beaver also set him up for a pointed lesson in the foolishness of openly confusing fact and fantasy. After losing himself in the Red Ryder serials, he grew convinced that Little Beaver had to be behind the screen, waiting to meet him. Once, when the picture ended, he went to the back of the theater and discovered no trace of Little Beaver, or even the actor Bobby (later Robert) Blake, the white boy who played him. Instead, he came upon an angry crew, who chased Richard from the premises. It was, Richard said, “one of my first big traumatic experiences”: the discovery that characters were not real just because he ached to believe in them.
    Around this time, Richard fell into his first performance as a comic. In his memory, his first stage was the brothel’s backyard in the mid-1940s; his first prop, a pile of dog poop. He was wearing a spiffy cowboy outfit his grandfather had given him and was sitting on the edge of a brick railing, looking for all the world like a miniature version of his heroes John Wayne or Lash LaRue. Then he threw himself on purpose off the railing, and his family broke out in laughter. A few more falls, and the laughter didn’t stop. The comedian-in-the-making conceded that his routine was over and ran to his grandmother, but along the way, he slipped on the pile of dog poop. Again, roars of laughter. Eager to please, he did what any attention-craving child would have done: he repeated his pratfall, dog poop and all. “That was my first comedy routine,” he said. “And I’ve just been slipping in shit ever since.” If comedy was partly the art of self-humiliation, early on Pryor realized he had a knack for it.
    His elementary school became his first public stage, though he grew to have qualms about his audience there. At home he was in the violently controlled dominion of Marie; at Irving School, he was in a white-oriented world where the realities of his life were unmentionable, if not unimaginable, for his teachers and fellow students. Richard was one of a minority of blacks at Irving: the school drew predominantly from the white working-class population of Peoria’s valley, families that lived paycheck to paycheck and looked anxiously at the influx of blacks to Peoria during its wartime boom. If his white classmates knew anything about black life, it was most likely refracted through the cartoon versions of it