Cognitive Thrift 66 – Richard Pryor
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/15
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You mentioned comedy. One prominent example: Richard Pryor His circumstances seem to indicate what you’re saying. He had terrible circumstances, but had tons of original thoughts.
Rick Rosner: Yea – it helps to have – sometimes it helps to have an unusual background. I think he grew up in his aunt’s whorehouse.
Jacobsen: His grandmother’s whorehouse. He was born with a prostitute mother and a pimp father. His mother abandoned him. His father beat him. His grandmother beat him.
Rosner: Some kind of dictatorial do-gooder could have shut down that whole lineage at some point for being or having anti-social and criminal tendencies or something, and then we wouldn’t have a Richard Pryor.
In a more pastoral sense, nobody was going to sterilize Charles Darwin’s family for any reason, but just in terms of having a different background leading to great thoughts. The guy goes on a five-year sea voyage and sees a selection of animal life and geologic formation that pretty much no one had – it’s not that anybody had seen that stuff before, but nobody was ready to see the stuff they saw in the way that Darwin was – without the constant goading for five years of novelty. Who knows if he would’ve come up with his theories?
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