Richard Pryor’s wife, Jennifer Lee Pryor, just ripped comedian Bill Cosby. Pryor said Cosby was “just a f–ing hypocrite and dirty on the inside. It was a well-kept secret that Bill f—ed everything that moved.” Not so well-kept anymore. Pryor drew a contrast between Cosby and her late husband that aims at the recent Cosby revelations. Pryor, she said, was “dirty on the outside, but he was a good person…clean on the inside.” Pryor was speaking on the great Alison Rosen podcast.
The late genius comedian Pryor long represented the opposite of Bill Cosby in the American cultural consciousness. Until Cosby’s recent fall from grace, Cosby was the straight-and-narrow good guy (if a bit of a scold) whereas Pryor was the wild side of life–all unchecked urges, drugs and dereliction fueling his brilliant, sometimes savage comic viewpoint. It’s not that the image of Pryor was wrong, but the prevailing image of Cosby was apparently a great hoax perpetrated by a master deceiver–that played upon our desire to be deceived.
