Digby gets his tribute to Richard Pryor off to an appropriately iconclastic start.
If you would like to have a surreal experience akin to the effects of downing ten shots of cheap tequila, tune in to FoxNews as they eulogize Richard Pryor. Apparently he invented dirty words. (It’s going to come as a helluva surprise to Lenny Bruce — not to mention Redd Foxx.) He rejected the comedy of the good comedian, Bill Cosby, and went down the “wrong path” that led us to where we are today with all this R rated badness. One of the commentators said that when he went on TV in the mid 70’s he “wasn’t ready for prime time.” (Actually, prime time wasn’t ready for him.) Another said that “every black comic owes him something.”
(Is it possible that right wingers are all actually zombies who died sometime before the 60’s and have been walking among us as the undead ever since then? I just don’t know what else can explain their terminal cultural obtuseness.)