Free Republic

Reo Speedwagon - Roll With The ChangesDecember 31, 2012 | reospeedwagon0910

In addition to performing his own material, the icon was famously a writer for Richard Pryor.Paul Mooney, the pioneering comic, writer and actor, has died, his rep, Cassandra Williams, told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 79. Mooney died Wednesday at 5:30 a.m. at his home in Oakland, California. “Thank you all from the bottom of all of our hearts …you’re all are the best!…… Mooney World .. The Godfather of Comedy – ONE MOON MANY STARS! .. To all in love with this great man.. many thanks,” family posted on Mooney’s Twitter account Wednesday morning. In addition to performing his...

Stir Crazy, which was released on Dec. 12, 1980, is a mess of a film, but well worth remembering for two reasons. The first is the comedic synchronicity of stars Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, and the second is that it was the highest-grossing film domestically (adjusted for inflation) ever made by a black director until Ryan Coogler's Black Panther in 2018. That director was Sidney Poitier, the so-called Jackie Robinson of the film industry. Raised in poverty in the Bahamas, he served a stint working with psychiatric patients during a teenage Army enrollment in World War Ii. Poitier eventually...

Comedian Ricky Gervais openly mocked celebrities after a group of them released an anti-racism PSA that makes current issues in America all about them. The PSA (seen below) will actually make you feel physically uncomfortable watching it as Hollywood’s best and brightest put their white guilt on display for the world to see. The two-minute video features celebrities vowing to “take responsibility” for a host of things they feel have contributed to racism in America. “Every not-so-funny joke, every unfair stereotype,” actor Justin Theroux laments. Racially charged jokes are going to be eliminated. There goes the career of Chris Rock....

LEXINGTON, Va. -- Mark Rush could not name the last movie in the past 10 years that gave him a belly laugh -- or made him snort or chuckle or laugh out loud, at least for any extended period of time. "The last side-splitting movies I saw were 'Caddyshack' or 'Blazing Saddles,'" the politics and law professor at Washington and Lee College said. "That was way too long ago." Rush and I were talking over dinner at the Red Hen, a farm-to-table restaurant that made headlines earlier this year for its unfortunate decision to refuse service to White House spokeswoman...

Richard Pryor hilariously portrays what the first U.S. President would be like (1977). Featuring: Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Paul Mooney, Tim Reid, John Witherspoon, Sandra Bernhard, Vic Dunlop, Edie McClurg, Marsha Warfield

BUFFALO, N.Y. – A collector credits a hunch with helping him land one of just 100 sheets of stamps recently issued by the United States Postal Service featuring a corrected version of its rare and famous error, the 1918 "inverted Jenny." Art Van Riper bought the stamps in Waverly, N.Y., after reading that the Postal Service had printed a new batch of inverted Jenny stamps celebrating the 95-year-old edition that, by mistake, featured an upside-down biplane. He also read that, as a way to draw more people into stamp collecting, the Postal Service randomly distributed 100 sheets featuring the plane...

BOOK REVIEW & DISCUSSION: Ain't Got No Cigarettes: Memories of Music Legend Roger Miller By Lyle E Style "It's an endless story about Roger. He was one of the cleverest people I've ever met in my life." (Waylon Jennings) This is my own review of Ain't Got No Cigarettes, the first Roger Miller book ever published. My review is based on reading the book (twice) and having several discussions with Lyle E Style, the author. He may stop by later to answer questions (as his schedule allows). This one is a must-read, folks. And for you radio personalities who...

The portrait of Abraham Lincoln hanging in the entranceway is one of the only hints of the building's lost history. Bellevue Place, a grand structure with a limestone facade and towering windows, was once a sanitarium for women - and in the summer of 1875 a Cook County jury declared Mary Todd Lincoln insane and sent her here against her will. The building is now an apartment complex, and the details of Lincoln's stay have been lost in the passage of time. But current residents say they often wonder about the former first lady. "To think she walked up these...

Defense Rests In Yates Retrial (AP) HOUSTON -- The defense in Andrea Yates' murder trial rested Tuesday after her best friend tearfully told jurors that the woman who drowned her five children in the bathtub "misses them terribly." Debbie A. Holmes, who met Yates about 20 years ago when both were nurses at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, said she still visits Yates and writes her letters. Yates, 42, is being retried in her children's 2001 bathtub drowning deaths because her capital murder conviction was overturned by an appeals court that ruled erroneous testimony might have influenced...

(AP) HOUSTON A psychiatrist testified Friday that she warned Andrea Yates not to have any more children after she tried to commit suicide twice within months of having her fourth child in 1999. "I could pretty much predict that Mrs. Yates would have another episode of psychosis," Dr. Eileen Starbranch told jurors in Yates' second murder retrial. Starbranch said Yates suffered from postpartum psychosis, which she said causes a mother to have delusions and lose touch with reality, making it much more severe than postpartum depression. Yates drowned her five young children in a bathtub in June 2001, 6 months...

Mary Todd Lincoln Was Institutionalized After President's Death (AP) SPRINGFIELD, Ill. A historian has discovered letters written by Abraham Lincoln's wife during her stay at a sanitarium years after her husband's assassination. It was believed Mary Todd Lincoln's son had burned the letters to hide details of mother's mental health. But historian Jason Emerson came across photographed and handwritten copies of the letters in an attic last summer in Maryland. Eleven letters were from what have been called Mary Todd Lincoln's "insanity years." Emerson writes in the current issue of American Heritage magazine that the documents contain no major revelations....

[snip] Amazingly, Pryor matured on this issue, making me sing hallelujah. In 1979, he flew to Kenya. It was a trip recommended to him by his psychiatrist after his wife Jennifer hauled him out of a house full of hookers and drugs. After touring Kenya's national museum, Pryor sat in a hotel lobby full of what he described as ''gorgeous black people, like everyplace else we'd been. The only people you saw were black. At the hotel, on television, in stores, on the street, in the newspapers, at restaurants, running the government, on advertisements. Everywhere." That caused Pryor to say:...

Remembering My Friend Richard Pryor Armstrong Williams Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005 It was January 1983 when I came face to face with Richard Pryor at Washington's Dulles airport. He was in town to give the first straight speech of his life, to memorialize the death and contributions of the great civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was an intense moment; just a few months earlier the Jester had come close to death after free-basing cocaine in the basement of his California home. When he arrived in Washington, one could readily see where his face had been burnt...

snip.... It's a comedy album photograph of a nearly naked Richard Pryor, dressed in a loincloth, with bones through his nose and beads around his neck like a stereotypical African bushman from an old "Tarzan movie." But there is a glare on the comedian's face on 1968's "Richard Pryor" album that seems to say, "I'm here and I'm going to change your thinking about race relations in every way possible." That's what Pryor, who died Saturday of a heart attack at age 65, did for people all across America in the 1970s, his breakthrough decade and a time when the...

Richard Pryor's world was filled with prostitutes, pimps, winos and those others of undesirable ilk. This past Saturday Richard Pryor left this life and bequeathed to our culture as much darkness as he did the light his extraordinary talent made possible. When we look at the remarkable descent this culture has made into smut, contempt, vulgarity and the pornagraphic, those of us who are not willing to drink the Kool-Aid marked "all's well," will have to address the fact that it was the combination of confusion and comic genius that made Pryor a much more negative influence than a positive...

Some time in 1979, shortly after I had done The Big Fix for Universal, the studio called to ask if I would like to write a movie for Richard Pryor. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Pryor was at the top of his game then, acknowledged by many to be possibly the greatest standup comic of all time. Not only that, he was a cultural icon of extraordinary proportions, the very voice of black America, "Daddy Rich." What more could a Jewish white boy who grew up on Miles Davis want than to work with this man?...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Richard Pryor, the caustic yet perceptive actor-comedian who lived dangerously close to the edge both on stage and off, has died, his ex-wife said Saturday. He was 65. Pryor died of a heart attack at his home in the San Fernando Valley sometime late Friday or early Saturday, Flyn Pryor said. He had been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system. The comedian was regarded early in his career as one of the most foul-mouthed comics in the business, but he gained a wide following for his expletive-filled but universal...

Iconic comic genius, Richard Pryor is dead today at 8:35 after a 19 year battle with multiple sclerosis. Born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor, on December 1, 1940 the multi-talented star was pronounced dead of a cardiac arrest at 8:00 am at a hospital near his home. He is survived by his wife Jennifer Lee Pryor and his six children; Richard Junior, Elizabeth Storder, Rain Kindlin, Kelsey, Steven and Franklin Mason, and his three grandchildren. Funeral services will be private with a memorial service by invitation

Breaking...