Activist on Scalia Death: “You Know They Murdered Him, Right?”
(Virginia Pilot) – Dick Gregory is a cowboy. Scratch that; he’s a turtle. No, make that a butterfly.
In the span of a few minutes, the 83-year-old activist, social critic and comedian redefines himself with metaphors that best capture the elusiveness he’s maintained in a career spanning 60 years.
Gregory, who will headline at the Funny Bone Comedy Club in Virginia Beach on Wednesday, is calling from Washington, D.C. Immediately after hello, he asks a cryptic question that catches you off guard: “You know they murdered him, right?”
You ask for clarification. Gregory is referring to the recent death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
“They said they found him with a pillow over his face,” Gregory says, sounding as though he’s whispering into the phone. “That place where he was, it’s a place where money folks go and do their freak stuff. One of the most powerful people in the world and he ain’t got no bodyguard, man?”
He lets the question linger for a moment before abruptly brightening his tone. “Well, anyway, so everything’s good? You sound good.”
Much like his recent commentary and stand-up routines, Gregory’s conversation these days skitters, loops and drops off in many different directions. He’s sometimes hard to follow as he remixes bits of history, folklore or a random article he just read in a newspaper into something that sounds like an acerbic rant or botched Beat poetry.
“I read a thousand dollars of newspapers from around the world, man,” Gregory says. “I’m one of the few people that know but ain’t supposed to know that (President) Kennedy didn’t die in Dallas. He was a vegetable. He died in April of ’71. Everybody knows that.”
Journalists get his professional history all wrong, Gregory says. Back in the late ’50s when he was starting his career in Chicago, he broke ground for black comedians. The quick-talking guy from St. Louis was among the first black comedians to eschew the shuck-and-jive routines of so many who had come before him. Gregory’s riffs were observational, often touching on the absurdities of race.
As Jim Crow laws in the South forced blacks into a caste system, Gregory, along with other black comedians such as Bill Cosby and Godfrey Cambridge, found fame among hip white liberal audiences. Hugh Hefner hired Gregory to work at the Playboy Club in Chicago. Around the same time in the early ’60s, he appeared on the “Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar,” Gregory’s first network TV appearance.
But Gregory says it was black audiences then and now who supported him.
“It was just talking stuff on the corner, man,” Gregory says of his start in comedy. “I’d just look for stuff to talk about. Then I go into a nightclub and I refused to do the same show over and over. I could stand up there flat-footed and talk for six hours. These people came to be entertained; I came to work. Then all the white folks from downtown came in. Black folks came to see me when I wasn’t funny.”
His early routines more or less revolved around one theme.
“I was talking about how crazy white folks are,” Gregory says. “I didn’t go out to insult. I always dissected the newspaper like that.”
Gregory still does, albeit much more disjointedly and with more than a few dashes of vinegar. But over the years, as urban comedy greatly extended his straight-no-chaser observational approach from the early ’60s, Gregory also became known for his political activism. He was prominent in the civil rights movement, often participating in marches and giving speeches. In 1968, Gregory ran for president of the United States as a write-in candidate for the Freedom & Peace Party, a splinter group from the Peace & Freedom Party, a party that emerged out of the civil rights and anti-war movements.
In 1984, Gregory ventured into weight loss products and founded Health Enterprises Inc. It was his way of addressing health disparities in the black community. He made an appearance in the 2012 documentary “Soul Food Junkies,” denouncing the fat-and-salt-heavy diets of traditional black Southern fare.
But when he hits the stage these days, or wherever there’s a microphone, Gregory ponders and riffs on “the truth folks don’t see.”
“That’s what I’m looking at,” Gregory says. “I don’t watch entertainment, you hear me? That’s play stuff. When America goes to war, do they call soldiers or comics? Comics and entertainers ain’t nothing.”
You ask, “But aren’t you an entertainer and a comic?”
“No, no. See, the reason they don’t deal with me is because I don’t have to be validated by anybody,” Gregory says. “We run around in mythology. I know the truth, man.”
http://pilotonline.com/entertainment/arts/comedy/dick-gregory-tells-his-truth/article_6590a12d-4ce5-5963-a7f9-59aa1981bc02.html
No comments:
Post a Comment