Something He Said: Rhino Issues Vinyl Box of Classic Richard Pryor Albums

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Not long after honoring one of the finest stand-ups in box set form, Rhino's doing it again, with a surprise release of a vinyl set devoted to the work of Richard Pryor.

I Hope I'm Funny: The Warner Albums (1974-1983), available today exclusively through Rhino's official web store, is a 7LP box collecting six albums that captured the boundary-shattering comedian at his arguable peak. A bit more laser focused than either Rhino's 2000 box ...And It's Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968-1992) or the Shout! Factory set No Pryor Restraint: Life in Concert, this box showcases Pryor at his most incisive, fearlessly tackling race, politics, sex and other topics in a way few stand-ups could touch as gracefully. Scott Saul, author of the biography Becoming Richard Pryor, handles the liner notes in this set.

After working much of the '60s as a Cosby-esque observationalist, Pryor legendarily had an on-stage epiphany at The Aladdin in Las Vegas in 1967, asking the audience (and himself) that age-old question: "What the fuck am I doing here?" He'd sharpen his material to razor points in the years to come, first chronicled on a self-titled album for Reprise. (The album was later expanded on CD by Omnivore, and reissued on vinyl with some earlier works by Stand Up! Records in 2023.)

Pryor's breakthrough album, 1974's That Nigger's Crazy, almost didn't happen: Laff Records, an indie label that released Pryor's Craps (After Hours) in 1971, tried to block its release, and the original label that did release it, Partee Records, briefly shuttered when its distributor, Stax, was beset by distribution woes. Pryor took it to Warner Bros. after a year and began a fruitful partnership for the next decade. 1975's ...Is It Something I Said? featured favorites like "Just Us," an uproarious riff on prison cribbed from friend and writer Paul Mooney, and the debut of a philosophical storyteller character named Mudbone. It became his only non-compilation to earn a platinum plaque from the Recording Industry Association of America. Follow-up Bicentennial Nigger, released a year later, was a gold record and earned Pryor his third straight Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.

By this point, Pryor was a bona-fide star, making the jump from stand-up to film (including a co-writing credit on Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles and roles in films like Car Wash, Silver Streak and The Wiz) and television (famously guest hosting the seventh episode of Saturday Night Live a few years before having his own brief variety show on NBC). As such, his stand-up and recorded output would slow: after 1978's Wanted/Richard Pryor Live in Concert (a double album that was placed in the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry), there were only two more albums for Warner, both tied to stand-up films. Live on the Sunset Strip (1982), his fourth Grammy winner for Best Comedy Album, included some raw material about Pryor's infamous cocaine freebasing incident two years earlier that left him running down a Los Angeles street on fire. A year later, having kicked his drug habits, he released Here and Now. Pryor would keep a considerably lower profile after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the late '80s, but his legacy still loomed: he was awarded the inaugural Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the Kennedy Center in 1998 and was lauded as the greatest stand-up of all time for many years before and after his death in 2005.