Jokes My Father Never Taught Me: Life, Love, and Loss with Richard Pryor

(Paperback)

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A loving yet brutally honest memoir by 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 depicts a disturbing childhood in the shadow of her celebrated father. Rain's memoir is a complicated all-American tale. Her home life was infused with drugs and sex; at age eight she sat down to Thanksgiving dinner with the words, "Daddy, 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 he was nearly killed in a revolutionary suicide attempt. And in his later years, as he succumbed to multiple sclerosis, Rain saw her father reduced to watching the Comedy Channel for hours on end. Rain Pryor's book gives an unprecedented look at the life of a legend of comedy, told by a daughter who both understood the genius and knew the man.

Author Bio

Rain Pryor is an actor, singer, producer, and comedian. She and her father, Richard Pryor, are the only father and daughter ever to have headlined at the Comedy Store on Sunset Strip. As a young girl she was a regular on the hit ABC series Head of the Class, and she starred on the Showtimes series Rude Awakening and has performed in theater productions nationwide. Rain is most proud of the hit one-woman show she wrote and co-produced based on her own life, Fried Chicken and Latkes, for which she was nominated for four NAACP Theater Awards