Richard Pryor began his career as a stand-up comedian in New York City when he was 23. Throughout the early 1960s, he performed regularly at nightclubs like Manhattan’s Café Au Go Go, sharing the stage with other emerging comics, including George Carlin and Lily Tomlin. He steadily honed his craft, drawing inspiration from the likes of Bill Cosby, Dick Gregory, and, eventually, the ever-controversial Lenny Bruce. In his 1995 autobiography, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences, Pryor credits a prostitute with playing him a Bruce album for the first time; he’d never heard anything like it before.
Pryor spent the rest of his life thinking that nobody, including himself, had ever made an album as “brilliantly funny” as Lenny Bruce had. It wasn’t until he’d released his own fourth album in 1974 that Pryor felt that he’d found his groove and created something comparable to Lenny’s work. It sold over 1 million copies and became the breakthrough Pryor had been waiting for over a decade. However, his hero, Bruce, had died eight years earlier and never got an opportunity to hear a Pryor album in his lifetime.
The two comics only briefly crossed paths one time, outside of the Cafe Wha? in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and it’s not likely Bruce knew who Pryor was at that point. As Pryor was wrapping up his set for the evening, a fan came running in from the street. The stranger excitedly informed everyone that Bruce was standing outside, taking pictures with people. Not about to miss an opportunity to catch a glimpse of the man he called “the brightest and bravest of all,” Pryor rushed out front to see what was going on.
By the time he got outside, a crowd had formed near a police officer who was sitting on top of a horse. A large group of people was laughing at something, but it wasn’t immediately clear to Pryor what was happening just yet. Finally, he spotted his idol running around with somebody’s camera in his hand. And as he laid eyes on the one and only Bruce for the first and last time, Lenny bent over and…snapped a bunch of pictures of the horse’s penis.
Reflecting on the experience, Pryor lamented that he never got to see Bruce perform live. Still, all things considered, he could very well have gotten to witness something even more remarkable: The one time a cop didn’t arrest Lenny Bruce for making people laugh.
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