I was kicked out of school because of my attitude. I was not assimilating. So I went to work, taking any jobs I could get.

The remark frames Pryor’s early life as a clash between institutional expectations and an unruly, nonconforming temperament. “Not assimilating” suggests more than poor grades: it implies resistance to fitting into social rules—an experience that later became central to his comedy, which often exposed how schools, workplaces, and polite society police behavior and identity. The pivot from expulsion to “any jobs I could get” underscores a self-made trajectory: formal structures reject him, so he learns through labor and survival. Read as autobiography, it also foreshadows Pryor’s stage persona—raw, defiant, and shaped by working-class realities rather than credentialed respectability.