Comedy legend Richard Pryor had a regular bit where he talked about his father's death. "I'd like to die the way my father died. My father died f**king," he'd say. "My father was 57. The woman was 18. My father came and went at the same time." For years, according to Pryor, the woman couldn't get anyone to have sex with her. Then one day she apologized to Pryor for killing his dad, to which Pryor said there was no need to apologize. His father had died having sex: "That's called recycling."
Pryor's joke is infamous. Yet guess what? No one, to my knowledge, ever tried to fact-check it. No one fretted over whether the woman had really been 18, whether, in fact, she didn't have sex for years after that, whether Pryor's father had actually died during sex and whether, as Pryor suggests, the woman got pregnant. And you know why nobody checked all that? Because doing that would have been stupid. It would have missed the point of the joke, misunderstood the difference between literal and figurative communication and missed the power of comedy to make us think.
