Comedian George Lopez thought he would be the last person to be asked to speak at Richard Pryor's funeral.
But Dec. 17, at a private service before close friends and family members, Lopez paid homage to the funnyman who inspired him to see how private pain could be comic currency.
"I'm the last person I thought would be speaking at his memorial, but I think I'm worthy of it because he inspired me by thinking that my life is worth something," Lopez said Dec. 16, the day the city of Los Angeles designated as Richard Pryor Day. "All the pain I had gone through. I wasn't alone when I thought I was alone."
Pryor died of a heart attack on Dec. 10, days after he turned 65.
Lopez visited Pryor in July and told him jokes and stories.
"He laughed," Lopez said, noting that he wasn't what you would call a private friend of Pryor's. But over the past five years, Lopez became one of Pryor's most ardent protectors of sorts.
In interviews, "I reminded everybody he wasn't dead and that he was alive," Lopez said from his Los Angeles home.
When he was young, Lopez, who will end 2005 with concerts tonight in Tucson and Friday and Saturday in Phoenix, connected with Pryor through Pryor's records and movies. There was something strikingly familiar about their lives, the pain, the dysfunctional families.
"He inspired me to perform," a somber Lopez recalled. "Freddie Prinze was more of an idol, but Richard was more of an influence comedically because he was around longer than Freddie," who died in 1977 at age 22 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Guys like Prinze and Pryor refined the art of comedy, taking it to new levels. Cursing was done not for shock value; it was the language that surrounded them and enabled them to keep their comedy real.
They set the template that Lopez would like to believe he's following.
Ask him if he considers himself a similar role model to comedians coming out today, and the 44-year-old sitcom star almost cringes.
"To tell you the truth, I'm not really that big of a fan of comedians because I don't see a respect that the younger guys have that the older guys have," he explained, comparing the new crop of comedians with the new class of NBA stars. "The young guys who play don't have respect for the game like the older guys do. . . . I think they give themselves much more credit than they deserve."
When he first started out more than 20 years ago, comedians were lumped together regardless of race.
"Back then, you just fit in with a bunch of white guys and you stood out and that's what made it hard to make it," he said. "Now, there are a lot of black nights and Latino nights and tours. . . . It's easy now to go to a Monday night, or Tuesday night or a Sunday night black night. That's easy. That's in your wheelhouse. Go when they don't expect to see you. That's hard."
Lopez squeezes his stand-up dates into breaks from filming his namesake ABC sitcom, which is celebrating its fifth season. When the season ends in the spring, he will have filmed 102 episodes, enough to syndicate and, if all goes as he plans, retire quite comfortably. He said he figures the show has another two full seasons, possibly three. And when the show ends, he said, he can't imagine continuing on the stand-up circuit. But that's the future, and nothing is set in stone.
"I don't know what I'm going to do," he admitted. "I'm fortunate enough to be able to sell a lot of tickets and to make a lot of people laugh.
"I'm just a guy who makes people remember things. There will never be another Richard Pryor, but I think we talk about situations that were painful in our lives, and I think that has value. As long as that is valuable to me and people who want to come see it, I'll keep doing it. But I don't see myself going past the length of the show."
Quick Take
George Lopez in concert
When: 8 p.m. today at the Tucson Arena; 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Dodge Theatre, 400 W. Washington St., Phoenix
Tickets: Tucson — $45-$55 through the Tucson Convention Center box office, 791-4266, or Ticketmaster, 321-1000; Phoenix — $37-$72 Friday, $44.50-$97 Saturday through Ticketmaster.
