Comedian and activist Dick Gregory who committed his life to social justice through both satire and sincerity, died on Saturday at the age of 84.
Gregory was born in St. Louis in 1932 as the second of six children. After graduating from high school, he attended Southern Illinois University on a track scholarship. Halfway through his education, he was drafted into the Army in 1954. In the military environment, he was recognized and reprimanded for his inclinations towards humor.
During his service, Gregory won a talent show with a comedy routine. After the Army, he left school to pursue stand-up comedy in Chicago. Gregory’s comedy career took off in early 1961 after he filled in for Irwin Corey at Playboy’s night club in Chicago. He was subsequently signed by Hugh Hefner for three more weeks.
The indirectness of the social critiques in his jokes allowed him to appeal to a larger, white audience. This made Gregory’s charisma on the stage all the more subversive. In one of his most well-known jokes, he recalls eating at a restaurant in the South where a white waitress said, “We don’t serve colored people here.” Gregory responded, “That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.”
“Dick Gregory was unafraid to analyze and describe the world as he encountered it, and through that, as a Black man in America engaging the world, he was able to articulate what so many of us have felt,” said Dr. Greg Carr, chair of Afro-American Studies at Howard University and a friend of Gregory.
Carr said that Gregory’s jokes came from a place of love, fearlessness, and genius. Carr said that Gregory never crossed words with anyone and that he would speak to his audiences and his students until the point of exhaustion.
“Gregory was a perpetual student. He was always reading,” Carr said. “His intellectual capacity was honed to precision with a lifetime of deep study.”
