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A compelling memoir from Elizabeth Pryor, daughter of the late comedic legend Richard Pryor, grapples with her biracial identity, her relationship with the n-word, and the complexities of her father’s love.

The day of her father’s funeral in 2005, Elizabeth’s mother, Maxine Pryor, gave Elizabeth a leather briefcase with a warning. “Don’t let anyone know you have this,” Maxine told her daughter.

The briefcase in question belonged to Elizabeth’s father, the late comedic legend, Richard Pryor. As the third born of Pryor’s seven children, and the product of an interracial relationship, Elizabeth frantically searched through the briefcase, looking for proof that would affirm both her position in her father’s life, as well as her Blackness. While she found notebooks of Pryor’s early standup routines, setlists, and other notes, Elizabeth failed to locate the affirmations she sought. Disappointed by her lack of her discovery, she took the briefcase home where she refused to open it for fifteen years. After a viral TED talk where Elizabeth discusses the complex history of the n-word and its use, she revisits the briefcase looking for how her father grappled with this word in his comedy and discovers something that upends everything she thought she knew about her father’s legacy, and her place within it.

The Will Be No Laughing in This House is a compassionate, humorous, and triumphant family story about the complicated expressions of a father’s love, a mother’s desire to share that love, and a daughter’s determination to understand exactly what that love means in a landscape riddled with racism, addiction, and self-loathing.

Elizabeth Pryor is the Associate Professor of History at Smith College and the award-winning author of The Etymology of [N-Word]: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North and a 2016 monograph entitled Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War. Her TED talk on the n-word inspired her memoir There Will Be No Laughing in This House—a meditation on biracial identity and her relationship with her father, comedic icon, Richard Pryor. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and on the Advisory Council for the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic.