Civil rights activist and comedian Dick Gregory, who passed away on Saturday at age 84, will be missed.
Gregory was the first black comedian to perform at white clubs in the 1960s, and he also took to the front lines of civil rights protests (on one occasion, jailed for five days) and later with hunger strikes (against the Vietnam War, apartheid, and police brutality, to name a few causes). He is cited across the board as an inspiration for comedians like Trevor Noah, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Paul Mooney, Chris Rock, and innumerable others. (Check out an in-depth obit over at The Root).
His mixture of that humor and activism is illustrated by a few examples in the New York Times:
Some lines became classics, like the one about a restaurant waitress in the segregated South who told him, “We don’t serve colored people here,” to which Mr. Gregory replied: “That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Just bring me a whole fried chicken.” Lunch-counter sit-ins, central to the early civil rights protests, did not always work out as planned. “I sat in at a lunch counter for nine months,” he said. “When they finally integrated, they didn’t have what I wanted.”
You can view one of his early performances before a predominantly white audience from 1961 here [scroll 15:30], in which he jokes: “[Baseball] is a great sport for my people. That is the only sport in the world where Negroes can shake a stick at a white man and it won’t start no riot.”