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Jokes My Father Never Taught Me
Rain Pryor
Life, Love, and Loss with Richard Pryor
Regan Books
November 2006
On Sale: October 31, 2006
Featuring: Richard Pryor
224 pages
ISBN: 0061195421
EAN: 9780061195426
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
The loving yet brutally honest memoir of the daughter of
comedy legend Richard Pryor
Rain Pryor was born in the idealistic, free-love 1960s.
Her mother was a Jewish go-go dancer who wanted a tribe of
rainbow children, and her father was Richard Pryor, perhaps
the most compelling and brilliant comedian of his era.
In this intimate, harrowing, and often hilarious memoir,
Rain talks about her divided heritage, and about the forces
that shaped her wildly schizophrenic childhood. In her
father's house, she bonded with Richard's grandmother,
Mamma, a one-time whorehouse madam who never tired of
reminding Rain that she was black. In her mother's house,
and in the home of her Jewish grandparents, Rain was a
"mocha-colored Jewish princess," learning how to cook
everything from kugel to beef brisket. It seemed as
if Rain was blessed with the best of both worlds, but it
didn't quite work out that way. Life at Mom's was unstable
in the extreme, while at Richard's place Rain was exposed to
sex and drugs before she had even learned to read. "Daddy,"
she told her father one day, sitting down to Thanksgiving
dinner at the advanced age of eight, "the whores need to be
paid." Jokes My Father Never Taught Me is
both lovingly told and painfully frank: the story of a girl
who grew up adoring her father even as she feared him—and
feared for him—as his drug problems grew worse. In
1980 Pryor tried to kill himself by setting himself on fire,
then joked that it had been an accident: "No one ever told
me you couldn't mix cookies with two types of milk!" In his
later years, Pryor succumbed to multiple sclerosis, and Rain
watched in tears as her father became a shell of his former
self. Once, in an unusually introspective mood, Pryor asked
his daughter, "Why do you love me, Rainy, when I can be so
mean?" Jokes My Father Never Taught Me
answers that poignant question and many more. It is an
unprecedented look at the life of a legend of comedy, told
by a daughter who both understood the genius and knew the
tortured man within.
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