So I'm sitting here getting ready to write about comedian Dick Gregory, who died yesterday at the age of 84…and I'm thinking, "Well, he'll finally get some attention and recognition for his pioneering work." And then the news pops up on my iPhone that Jerry Lewis has died…
I don't have a great quip about this but I bet Dick Gregory would have. It would have been something about how the white guys can't let a brother have the spotlight for two minutes unless the cops have him in handcuffs or something.
I put up a picture of one of his records because I knew Dick Gregory primarily as a record comedian. He was also as a man who said things that were often quoted by others, often to the extent that no one knew who'd said them first. He was the one who said the line about how it wasn't true that NASA had selected no black astronauts…"They're just saving them for the first trip to the sun!"
He was important not only because he was one of the first prominent black stand-up comedians but because he didn't primarily play to black audiences the way Redd Foxx and "Moms" Mabley then did. He was also topical and politically astute at a time when the punch line to about half of Foxx's jokes was something like "You gotta wash your ass better." Another pioneer in black guys talking to mixed-race audiences about racial matters was Godfrey Cambridge but Gregory got there first.
I never saw him perform but his records were all funny and clever and very, very brave and they're a great record of what was going on at the time in this country with regards to segregation and the resistance to accepting all races — not just his — as equals. I was just talking on this blog about the death of Elvis Presley pulling focus away from the death of Groucho Marx. Let's make a little noise about Dick Gregory and remind everyone that his black life mattered as much as anyone's.