Print
Email
Share
CHICAGO — Dick Gregory did not think he would live to see an African-American president.
“It caught everyone by surprise,” said the 77-year-old comedian and civil rights activist. “If two white dudes were running in 2000, and one wins and the other one stole it, you almost think that would happen to a black.”
Then again, Gregory said he isn’t so sure he can consider President Barack Obama’s a “legitimate” win: “The reason is, Bush scared white folks so bad with the war and the economy,” he said, “they forgot they wasn’t supposed to vote for a Negro.”
Gregory will share his wit and wisdom in “The Color of Funny: Dick Gregory on Race, Comedy and Justice,” a Chicago Humanities Festival forum, at 5 p.m. Nov. 8, at Northwestern University School of Law’s Thorne Auditorium.
“There’s just nothing like Dick Gregory,” said Stuart Flack, the festival’s executive director. “He represents such a long slice of American history and American social criticism and all the different forms that it took. With someone like Dick Gregory you have an unbroken line from the mid-‘60s into today.”
The event, featuring journalist Laura Washington questioning Gregory, was a rapid sellout.
Before flying to Houston for a comedy appearance earlier this month, Gregory, speaking from the Washington, D.C., home of one of his 10 children, shared some of what has been on his mind.
Longevity, for one thing.
“Bob Hope lived to get 100,” Gregory said. “But I think that was because Jesse Jackson, for 40 years, kept saying ‘Keep hope alive!’”
Gregory was ranked No. 81 on a Comedy Central list of the 100 greatest comedians, just below Sinbad (78) but just above Howie Mandel (82). He thinks he should have been higher, he said with a laugh, before adding, “But since it don’t affect your pay ...”
The country has produced, to his mind, three comedic geniuses: “One was Mark Twain, and you shouldn’t mention these other two within the same year you mention Mark Twain, he’s so far ahead of everybody.”
Pause, pretend a year has passed. The two others? “Lenny Bruce and then Richard Pryor.”
Gregory thinks he learned his style — he calls himself a “humorist,” a storyteller, as opposed to a “comic,” who delivers jokes — the same place Aretha Franklin learned to sing.
“I didn’t like Bob Hope. I thought he was corny. There was no TV, and the radio, I thought, was kind of stupid. How stupid you gotta be to listen to a tap dancer on the radio?
“So where did I learn my comedy? It dawned on me: It was the black church. The black minister. The black minister don’t go to church on Sunday to be a comedian. That’s just part of it. Here’s a person that does not have Hollywood writers. You hear a new script every Sunday. And funny, and funny.”
Born in St. Louis, educated at Southern Illinois University on a track scholarship, Gregory started his comedy career and his family in Chicago. He moved here in 1956 and raised 10 children with wife Lillian in Hyde Park, before the family moved to a Massachusetts farm in 1973.
“Chicago was just a great proving ground,” he said. “In New York, you had to be tested and proven. You know, they had an attitude. But in Chicago, just bring it to me, man.”
The difference? “Chicago is the only town in America, and New York is the only city in America. When you’re in a town, you have more leeway. You can take your time.”
It took Gregory five years to break the color barrier in nightclubs.
“As a black comic, we were hustlers. Now, I don’t mean that (to be) derogatory. It’s like, if I’m not able to sell my oranges in a store, then I get me a little stand. I’m hustling.”
He was discovered by Hugh Hefner, who booked him to play Chicago’s Playboy Club.
“Back then about 93 percent of all nightclubs were owned by the mob and they didn’t have the (fortitude)” to hire a black comic, Gregory recalled. “They’re supposed to be so bad. Here, this little Hefner comes through and said, ‘Come on in.’”
In a January 1961 appearance at the Playboy Club, according to documentarian and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” executive producer Robert Weide, Gregory told this joke to an audience that included many visiting white Southerners: “Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ I said, ‘That’s all right. I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.’”
He was a hit that night, would go on to be booked on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show” and make a national name for himself.
President John Kennedy’s assassination, he said, taught him an important lesson about the limits of humor.
“At one time I thought that nothing took the place of laughter,” Gregory said. “Then when Kennedy got shot I realized there was nothing laughter could do. It was music. That’s the only thing that got us through.”
Gregory, of course, became as outspoken a civil rights activist as he was a comedian.
And he has lived to see what he believes is genuine change.
Southern Illinois University, in a town where he worked to integrate local businesses, brought him back to Carbondale recently to be homecoming parade grand marshal.
“I think about how I aggravated them white folk down there,” Gregory said. “To be down there and hear them old white folks (say), ‘Welcome home, Mr. Gregory.’ Wow, man. Have I died and gone to heaven?”
Overseas, recently, he said he was asked whether the election of Obama had been the point of the struggle.
“That would have been an insult,” Gregory said. “We weren’t out there, black folks and white folks, going to jail and getting killed, for a black president. We were out there fighting for the least amongst us to have the right to vote. Out of that came a black president.”
