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  THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT

  Through it all, Pryor found refuge in the one thing that consistently brought him happiness: performing. Starting with a role in a local production of Rumpelstiltskin at age 12, Pryor showcased his comedic gift at every opportunity. But it wasn’t until 1963 that his career as a stand-up comedian really started to take shape.

  Initially, he was influenced heavily by Bill Cosby, whose performances revolved around clean, funny, family-oriented stories. Pryor performed his Cosby-esque comedy routine to receptive audiences in New York City and quickly made a name for himself. Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, and Merv Griffin all invited him to appear on their shows.

  Despite his success, Pryor found his family-style comedy to be predictable, repetitive, and unauthentic. He reached his breaking point in the middle of a sold-out performance at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, when he walked off the stage, feeling restricted by the conventional atmosphere of the upscale Las Vegas hotels of the time. From then on, he became the Richard Pryor the world knows now: a bold, risk-taking performer who would forge new paths for all comedians who followed.

  DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

  Pryor moved to Berkeley, California, in 1969 to regroup. During the next few years, the company he kept—people like African American writer Ishmael Reed and the cofounder of the Black Panthers, Huey P. Newton—and the counterculture he observed helped him to grow both as a person and a comic.

  Pryor no longer just delivered jokes. Instead, he acted out life as he saw it, bringing real and often taboo topics to the public for the first time: race, sex, drugs, poverty, discrimination, and violence. Mixed-race audiences howled as he paced the stage spewing profanities while slipping in and out of his many personas, including crowd favorite Mudbone, the drunken philosopher. Pryor talked about the ugliness inside people and brought it out for examination; then he’d defuse the animosity and ill will with laughter. His humor was color-blind, and through exaggerated characters and animated, often sexually explicit monologues, Pryor softened the edges of hard truths so that no topic was off limits, not even his private life.

  ROUGH STUFF

  Pryor wasn’t afraid to spotlight his personal demons, of which he had many. From cocaine addiction, tax evasion, and repeated domestic violence charges to serious health issues, his willingness to make himself the object of laughs made it possible for people whose lives bore no resemblance to his to relate to him. After he shot his car full of holes, he joked about how bad drugs were if they could make you do that. After he set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine, he joked about what he had learned: “When you run down the street on fire, people will move out of your way.”

  His raw, raunchy style of stand-up was clearly not for everyone, but it left many wanting more. His three offensive words (beginning with “M,” “N,” and “P”) included a racial slur and two profanities. Pryor had to be himself and that meant using the honest, foul language of his life to make his experiences universal and funny.

  Later, he explained in his autobiography how he’d renounced the use of the “N” word after visiting Africa and noting the people’s self-respect. But he also joked, “I went through all the phone books in Africa, and I didn’t find one goddamned Pryor.”

  THE MORE THE MERRIER

  Starting in the late 1960s, audiences began getting more Pryor, and in more places. He landed roles in more than 30 films during his career. Among them was his role as Gus Gorman in 1983’s Superman III, for which he earned rave reviews and a hefty fee of $4 million—$1 million more than Christopher Reeve, Superman himself. In 1974, when the western spoof Blazing Saddles was released to critical acclaim, movie audiences experienced a new side of Pryor: screenwriter.

  Pryor’s television career was equally robust. He proved himself to be extremely versatile, able to capture the hearts of a wide spectrum of audiences, even children, as a host, an actor, and a comedian. Few will forget his 1975 Saturday Night Live appearance, where he and Chevy Chase left audiences’ mouths agape as they exchanged racial slurs in a skit called “Racist Word Association.” And as a writer for hits like Sanford and Son, The Flip Wilson Show, and two Lily Tomlin specials, Pryor earned recognition and continued to gain respect.

  A LIFE WORTH LIVING

  Throughout his career, and even posthumously, Pryor has been honored repeatedly for his accomplishments: comedian, actor, director, screenwriter, author, host, animal-rights activist, husband, and father. He earned two platinum albums, five gold albums, five Grammys (for his recorded performances), an Emmy, a Writer’s Guild Award, and the first annual Mark Twain Humor Prize, to name a few. For his devotion to animal rights, particularly the protection of baby elephants from circus life, he was honored by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

  Pryor turned every obstacle into a springboard. Through severe drug addiction, a suicide attempt (the freebasing incident, according to his interview with Barbara Walters), seven marriages to five different women, six children, repeated run-ins with the law, and living with multiple sclerosis for nearly 20 years, he still managed to become one of the most beloved characters in show business. His contributions to the art of comedy continue to be celebrated long after his death at age 65 on December 5, 2005.

  “I went to Zimbabwe. I know how white people feel in America now: relaxed. Cause when I heard the police car, I knew they weren’t coming after me!”

  —Richard Pryor

  THE LET YOUR FINGERS DO THE TALKING AWARD

  Rudest Hand Gestures

  A picture is worth a thousand words, but a hand can say so much more.

  IN YO’ FACE

  People have many ways to show their displeasure with someone else: a withering look, a frown, a choice word or two. Then there are the hand gestures. Nothing is worse in terms of rudeness than an in-your-face flick of the hand that says what the lips haven’t. Here are our least favorite hand gestures.

  DIGITUS INFAMIS

  There was a time, not too long ago, when the “F” word was one of the rudest things one could ever utter in the English language. Very few words topped it for effect and impact. Nowadays it’s commonplace (though not quite to the point where we can print it here). The correlating hand gesture has similarly become increasingly used in public. That doesn’t stop it from being rude, though. For a long time, people have been rightly offended by it, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

  Who was first offended by it, though, is up for debate:

  • Some accounts of the gesture’s origin trace it back to 423 BC, when a Greek playwright named Aristophanes included it in one of his works. A modern translation of his play The Clouds features a character giving the finger to Socrates, who calls him a crude buffoon in reply. But scholars debate whether it was actually included as a stage direction.

  • Other sources trace it back to the ancient Romans, who are said to have called it the digitus infamis—the infamous finger. They may have used that term, but there’s no way to know which finger they were talking about.

  A third, persistent story is based on the fact that British soldiers in the 1415 Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years War used longbows made of yew. When they were captured, the French would cut off their middle fingers, making the English unable to use the bow. English soldiers who were not captured supposedly began showing their middle fingers to the French to show they could still pull the bow.

  That story goes to an even further extreme by claiming that the soldiers bragged they could still “pluck yew.” Hogwash, linguistic historians say. The longbow-using soldiers at Agincourt were mostly Welsh mercenaries, and it’s unlikely that any of them would ever utter the phrase “pluck yew.” It’s also unlikely that the French had a plan to cut off the fingers of captured soldiers. It’s a fun story, though.

  However, none of the bird’s origin stories offer a realistic explanation for why the gesture is primarily one used by Americans. The obscenity is universal. Many cultures use a finger as a phallic sy
mbol: in Iran, an American “thumbs up” is equivalent to flipping the bird, and Sri Lankans use their index finger. But the middle finger is uniquely American. Movies, television, the Web, and global travel have helped to spread the American version, but for the most part, foreign countries already have their own rude hand gestures and are sticking with them.

  Whatever its beginnings, and regardless of how common the “F” word has become in popular culture, flipping the bird remains a top insult . . . and a good reason to keep your hands at your sides before they get you into trouble.

  TALK TO THE HAND

  This way of saying “Don’t bother speaking” gained popularity in the early 1990s, when it was a staple on daytime talk shows. It quickly exploded in common usage. At first, it required the actor not only to extend the arm and put the hand facing up, palm toward the recipient, but also to say the words “Talk to the hand.” (The expanded verbal version included “because the face isn’t listening” or “because the face does not understand.”) Nowadays, the hand motion alone is sufficient, but a scowl or a head tilt can always be added for extra emphasis.

  The palm-outraised hand has been used for decades to signify “stop.” There’s a notion that “Talk to the hand” originated on The Jerry Springer Show, but there’s no proof of that. Certainly, guests on that show, which was one of the most popular daytime talk shows during the 1990s, used the phrase a lot and helped to popularize it.

  Wherever it began, “Talk to the hand” has earned a distinction as one of the rudest hand gestures. Author Lynne Truss even wrote a book about rudeness in popular culture and titled it Talk to the Hand. She wrote in the book:

  I chose it for the title because it’s the way I’ve started to see the world. Nearly 60 years ago, George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the future was a boot stamping on a human face forever. I see it as a forest of belligerent and dismissive palms held up to the human face instead.

  FLICKING THE “V”

  When you raise your index and middle fingers and face your palm out, you’re either making a peace sign or a “V” for victory sign. If that palm is facing back at you, you’re doing the British equivalent of flipping the bird.

  The origin of the rude “V” sign is unknown, but it, too, is often thought to have originated at the Battle of Agincourt. Not true, say scholars. Its first recorded use is somewhere around 80 years after that battle. It probably began along with the bird and evolved separately. At least that’s the current theory.

  More than a few Americans don’t know about this little cultural difference or that it extends beyond England to Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. President George H. W. Bush didn’t know when he traveled to Canberra, Australia, in January 1992. From his limo, he gave people on the street the “V” sign, but he faced his palm the wrong way. Oops!

  He’s not the only one. The rude “V” sign’s close relationship to the positive peace and victory signs has spelled trouble for quite a few politicians several times. During World War II, Winston Churchill made the incorrect gesture at cheering crowds. Rumor has it that aides told him that he was doing the victory sign wrong and he corrected himself from then on. A picture of Margaret Thatcher flicking the “V” circulated back in the 1980s as well.

  So there you have it. There are more than a few ways to say something rude with your hands, and they are usually different from culture to culture. So when in doubt, keep your hands to yourself.

  “PROFANE” WORDS

  “All hockey players are bilingual. They know English and profanity.”

  —Gordie Howe

  “Profanity is the common crutch of the conversational cripple.”

  —David Keuck

  “If profanity had an influence on the flight of the ball, the game of golf would be played far better than it is.”

  —Horace G. Hutchinson

  “In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.”

  —Mark Twain

  “Grant me some wild expressions, heavens, or I shall burst.”

  —George Farquhar

  “Many a man’s profanity has saved him from a nervous breakdown.”

  —Henry S. Haskins

  “I knew the profanity used up and down my street would not go over the air...So I trained myself to say ‘Holy Cow’ instead.”

  —Harry Caray

  THE YELLOW TIDE AWARD

  Science’s Ducky Helpers

  They’re not just for the bathroom anymore.

  THE SCENE

  In January 1992, a storm tossed a cargo ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On its deck, a crate of children’s bath toys was journeying from China, where they were manufactured, to the United States, home of the company that sells them—plastic turtles, frogs, but mostly rubber ducks.

  The cargo ship survived the storm not too much the worse for wear, bit it lost about 29,000 passengers. The storm tossed the giant steel containers holding the plastic toys overboard, smashing open their doors on the high seas. The ducks and fellow fauna survived the fall and made their way into the ocean, where they began a long journey around the globe.

  The amazing thing about their trip is how many of them ended up in so many different places. If so many items of like weight, shape, and size were set adrift in one spot in the ocean, why didn’t they all wind up in the same place?

  THE TRAVELING TOYS

  By October 1992, the first ducks had washed up on the shores of Alaska. Within years, others appeared as far away as Hawaii and Massachusetts. Some of the ducks traveled along the Bering Strait, got ensconced in ice, and wound up in Iceland. And in the summer of 2007, more than 15 years after they first hit the waves, more plastic ducks came ashore in Great Britain. They had lost their distinctive yellow coloring, but otherwise were in perfect working order.

  DRIFTING AWAY

  More than just a fun story, the ducks proved invaluable to science thanks to Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a former oceanographer for Mobil Oil (tracking icebergs so tankers could avoid accidents). In 1991, just a year before the ducks were set adrift, Ebbesmeyer read a news story about shoes washing ashore from Oregon up to the Canadian coast. The shoes came from 21 containers that had fallen off of a ship during a storm in the Alaskan peninsula a year earlier; some 61,000 had gone overboard. When he read about their reemergence, Ebbesmeyer was intrigued. When the ducks went overboard in 1992, he knew he was on to something with great potential for scientific study.

  In 1996, Ebbesmeyer formed the Beachcombers’ and Oceanographers’ International Association and set up a Web site called beachcombersalert.org to ask for help from people worldwide in tracking the movements of the rubber ducks and other objects lost at sea. With the help of his global team and other scientists, Ebbesmeyer made many discoveries about the oceans and the way they move, which led to even more information about shipping and transportation, our understanding of weather and climate, and biology.

  SEPARATE WAYS

  Cargo getting washed overboard from ships is not a rare occurrence. It’s estimated that about 10,000 containers are lost each year. As of 2007, only about 1,000 of the 29,000 ducks, turtles, and other plastic toys from the 1992 spill had been recovered. Many of the ones that are unaccounted for probably disintegrated over the years, but the ones that have been found have appeared all over the world: on both coasts of North America, Japan, Scotland, Hawaii’s Lanai Island, and many other places. Based on the data he’s collected, Ebbesmeyer has been able to predict the toys’ journeys with remarkable accuracy, but he says there’s still much to be learned from them about ocean currents and movements. For now, though, we’re proud of how much our rubber duck friends have helped with scientific discovery.

  THE SOLDIER OF FASHION AWARD

  Military-Inspired Fashions

  Here’s our 21-flush salute to the military for giving us

  so many fashion staples.

  FUNCTIONAL FASHION

&n
bsp; The “military look” in fashion comes and goes—epaulets, braid, and gold buttons adorn everything from evening dresses to T-shirts. And khakis are always in style. But people sporting military-inspired attire may not be aware of the practical military and battlefield origins of some of their favorite fashions. For example, thick loops of fancy braid weren’t put on coats to make them look pretty—the braids were there to protect a soldier’s shoulders from sword thrusts. And rows of silver buttons might be stylish today, but their original purpose was to act as spare ammunition.

  Even though military style comes and goes, there are quite a few items of clothing with military origins that have become standard issue . . . er, attire.

  BUTTONED UP

  Cardigans—sweaters that typically button down the front—are a fashion staple and wardrobe basic for men and women. For this legacy, we can thank 19th-century British military officer James Brudenell, who was famous (or infamous) for leading the bloody Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. During the battle, Cardigan and his men charged their Russian adversaries, made some headway, but took many casualties and eventually had to retreat. For his efforts, Brudenell was named “the Hero of Balaclava” (despite some allegations that he hadn’t properly supplied his troops) and was celebrated throughout England. The knitted waistcoat he wore became a fashion staple called the “cardigan,” because he was also the 7th Earl of Cardigan.