Richard Pryor A Notorious Word And Me From Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

Richard Pryor A Notorious Word And Me From Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

From Arroe Collins Like It's Live by Arroe Collins

June 11, 2026 · 11 min

About this episode

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor discusses her memoir about her father Richard Pryor and the complexities of the N-word.

Part memoir by the daughter of the iconic comedian Richard Pryor, part exploration of the historical and contemporary use of the N-word, this hybrid book peels back the curtain on the life of Pryor and exposes the complex history and legacy of the most perplexing word in the American lexicon, a word he helped popularize.When a white student quoted a line from Blazing Saddles, blurting out the N-word in the middle of class, Professor Elizabeth Pryor froze. In that moment, she was shockingly confronted with not only the most notorious slur in the United States, but the line quoted by the student was one her father - the iconic comedian Richard Pryor - had written.The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. After the incident in her classroom, Professor Pryor dove into her research to better understand the history of the word, and processed it with her students, eventually emerging as a leading scholar on the n-word as witnessed in her popular Ted Talk, "Why it's so hard to talk about the N-word."The more she learned, the more Elizabeth's own memories of the N-word rose to the surface. Growing up the Black and Jewish…

People in this episode

Host: Arroe Collins

Guest: Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

Topics covered

  • memoir
  • N-word
  • comedy
  • race
  • identity
  • history

Keywords

  • Richard Pryor
  • N-word
  • memoir
  • Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
  • comedy
  • race
  • identity

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Ted Talk

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