Making white people listen

Or, Dick Gregory's three-part strategy

If you want to meet your audience where they are and your audience is on the wrong side of the issue, where do you go?

That was the central challenge of Dick Gregory’s early career, and the comedian met it by staying unflappably cool, calm, and clever. As one of the first Black standups to perform for white audiences, his wordplay actually effected change. In his autobiography, he explained how he did it.

First, there was the context. If a white audience came to a Black comedy club, the jokes were barely necessary. “A white man will come to the Negro club, so hung up in this race problem, so nervous and afraid of the neighborhood and the people that anything the comic says to relieve his tension will absolutely knock him out. The harder that white man laughs, the harder he’s saying ‘I’m all right, boy, it’s that Other Man downtown.’”

From that observation, Gregory saw that when he ventured into a white club, he would encounter either pity or hate. Neither would be good for a laugh.

His strategy was speed and self-awareness. He went in fast, before they could assess the situation. He made sure to act “like a star who isn’t sorry for himself.” And then he’d stick to this structure:

1. A joke about himself that had nothing to do with race:

“Just my luck, bought a suit with two pairs of pants today … burnt a hole in the jacket.”

2. A joke about society as a whole:

“They asked me to buy a lifetime membership in the NAACP, but I told them I’d pay a week at a time. Hell of a thing to buy a lifetime membership, wake up one morning and find the country’s been integrated.”

3. A joke about his audience (here, specifically about blackface):

“Wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing if all this was burnt cork and you people were being tolerant for nothing?”

From there, he could talk about anything. “Now you’ve got them. No bitterness, no Uncle Tomming,” he wrote. His one caveat was to avoid sex: “If you mix blue and topical satire, that white customer, all hung up with the Negro sex mystique, is going to get uncomfortable.”

Dick Gregory performed at the Playboy Club in 1961, giving Hugh Hefner his civil rights cred. He was the first Black comedian to be invited to sit on the couch on The Tonight Show, allowing Jack Parr to help break a small barrier. Those moments are often painted as the majority dutifully acknowledging a minority in their midst. The difficult work Gregory did before he could play those venues — and the ingenious way he did it — is easy to overlook. Sixty years later, it remains easy to forget that we still demand Black voices carefully calibrate their messages for white ears.

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That’s the 49th issue of Get Wit Quick, a weekly review of effective rhetoric. Dick Gregory wrote the foreword to the essential collection African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today. As Gregory said in 1961, when his hometown of St. Louis honoured him even as he couldn’t get a hotel room: “They gave me the key to the city and then they changed all the locks.”