| This week, The New Yorker devotes its Archive Issue to comedy, a topic that the magazine takes very seriously. Before The New Yorker’s first pages even reached newsstands, its founding editors envisioned the publication as a source of “gaiety, wit, and satire”—though they made clear that it would also be “more than a jester.” Highlights of the issue include a cover by Charles Addams, the creator of the Addams Family; favorite Shouts & Murmurs from across the decades; and writerly snapshots of famous comedians as they experience the successes and setbacks of their craft. Among the most influential of those performers was the standup comic and actor Richard Pryor, whose ascent was surely like few others’. The son of a sex worker, Pryor grew up in a brothel run by his grandmother, using humor to fit in at a school where he was one of the few Black students. Later, as his career began to flourish, Pryor was confronted with a difficult choice: cater to white audiences by adapting to their expectations, or act on the faith that he could bring them into his world. The resulting approach “reinvented” standup, Hilton Als observed, in 1999, despite the array of challenges that Pryor faced: controversial material, persistent drug abuse, and, eventually, degenerative multiple sclerosis. His impact was unmissable in the generation that followed, including in the personas cultivated by Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, and Martin Lawrence. And yet, Als writes, no one could eclipse him. “The enormous territory he carved out for himself,” Als notes, “remains more or less his own.” | 
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