Friends & Fellow Twainiacs, Here is today's NY Times coverage of the first Mark Twain Award at the Kennedy Center last night. It seems designed as a citation for standup comics, alas. Not that Pryor doesn't deserve it, but I always think of SLC as a writer first rather than a humorist, and certainly not a standup comic. Kathy O'Connell Hartford Advocate October 22, 1998 Laughs Mix With Pathos at Richard Pryor Tribute By IRVIN MOLOTSKY [W] ASHINGTON -- A laughing group of comedians and actors who have been inspired in their work by Richard Pryor gathered on Tuesday night at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to pay tribute to him. Robin Williams brought all the loose ends together when he recalled the Mark Twain observation that sorrow is a greater source of humor than happiness. But the laughter far outweighed the sorrow. The performers' acts served to remind the audience that Pryor, whose health problems include multiple sclerosis, was a pioneer among comics in creating characters who spoke in the true voice of the streets, obscenities and all. Many of the words heard during the tribute were probably coming from a Kennedy Center stage for the first time, and many cannot be repeated here. But the Comedy Central cable channel taped the event for showing on Jan. 20. The event was to honor Pryor as the first recipient of the Kennedy Center's award for humor, the Mark Twain Prize. Pryor sat in a box, but he was so weak that he could not rise to acknowledge the loud applause from the audience in the center's concert hall. "I'm glad to see you up there," said one of the entertainers, Morgan Freeman, who echoed another hallowed Twain remark by adding, "Reports of your death were greatly exaggerated." At a party after the show, Pryor, 58, was unable to rise from his wheelchair and was barely able to say, in a low moan, "Thank you," when James Johnson, the chairman of the Kennedy Center, gave him the award. "Like Mark Twain, you made us laugh and also think," Johnson said. Williams said at the party that Pryor had been alert to the tributes paid him. "He lights up," Williams said. "You can see it." In his own appearance at the concert hall, Williams came onstage, saying he was scalping tickets to the hugely popular van Gogh show at the National Gallery of Art. "I've got two tickets to van Gogh," he said. "Check it out. Two tickets. Two hundred bucks and you'll see 'The Potato Eaters.' " He refused to take a check. When his turn came, Freeman recalled yet another Twain observation, that he would rather see a taxidermist coming toward him than a tax collector. "The taxidermist isn't going to take more than your skin," Freeman said. The comedian Damon Wayans said in his routine that he had drawn inspiration from Pryor, to a point. "I wanted to be just like him," Wayans said, "except for the drug habit, the failed marriages and the guns." Whoopi Goldberg also cited Twain in her remarks, saying: "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. Oops, I repeat myself." The comedian Chris Rock said that Pryor had come on the scene "between the two great plagues, disco and AIDS." Another comic, Richard Belzer, recalled one of his worst stage experiences, having to follow Pryor's act at the Improv in Manhattan. "It's like having to paint a picture next to one by da Vinci," he said. The comedian and social activist Dick Gregory was on hand, not as a performer, but as a friend of Pryor's. "It must have thrilled him to be there and look down on it," Gregory said. "It had to do a lot for him, to see that, to feel that." Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company