Humor, Integrated

At Chicago's Playboy Club, where businessmen from all parts of the U.S., including the Deep South, wallow in their shoulder-padded expense accounts, a neatly dressed young comedian talks about the race problem. "Segregation is not all bad," he says. "Have you ever heard of a wreck where the people on the back of the bus got hurt?" And, on sit-ins: "I sat at a lunch counter for nine months," he discloses. "When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted." The audience always laughs and usually applauds the performer, who is just getting started on what may be one of the more significant careers in American show business. With intelligence, sophistication, and none of the black-voice buffoonery of Amos 'n' Andy, Dick Gregory, 28, has become the first Negro comedian to make his way into the nightclub big time.

Gregory's first two weeks at the Playboy were so successful that he has been held over for another three. With dates lined up at San Francisco's hungry i, Cincinnati's Surf Club, and Freddie's in Minneapolis, he has also caught the interest of New York's Blue Angel.

What makes Gregory refreshing is not only that he feels secure enough to joke about the trials and triumphs of his own race, but that he can laugh, in a sort of brotherhood of humor, with white men about their own problems, can joke successfully about the N.A.A.C.P. as well as the P.T.A. Gregory's emergence suggests that there may be a relaxation in the longstanding, well-meant but dreary taboo against "racial" or "ethnic" humor, and that it is once again possible to tell a Jewish, Italian or Negro joke without being regarded as a bigot.

Insight & Farce. Bright but not brassy, Gregory's material ranges everywhere, from the possible ejects of President Kennedy's religion ("Four years of bingo") to the Israeli Abomb: "They want to find out if there's anything that will crack open a stale bagel." But the condition of the colored man is his main theme and night after night he plays it with grace.

He has a few one-liners, as when he calls Man-Tan "instant Mau Mau," and sometimes he lapses into corn, but mainly he tells stories with a sharp point. He says that white people often wonder how colored people, who have such low-paying jobs, can afford to own Cadillacs. Well, first there is that $500-a-year saving on the country club, another $1,500 a year on the Florida vacation--and so on into the driver's seat of a Cadillac.

Some of his commentary has even more insight than humor: "There's no difference between the North and the South. In the South they don't care how close I get as long as I don't get too big, and in the North they don't care how big I get as long as I don't get too close." And some is farcically broad, as when he tells about three white brothers called Ku, Klux and Klan, who once surrounded him in a restaurant saying. "You can't eat that chicken in here; whatever you do to that chicken, we're going to do to you." What did Gregory do? "I kissed the chicken."

Coolness & Skill. Born in St. Louis, Dick Gregory was raised on relief. His chronically unemployed father was separated from his mother, a woman full of humor who always told her son that the family was "not poor, just broke," and taught him the spirited difference. Well-built and athletic, he was a crack miler at Sumner High School, went on to break records at Southern Illinois University. He showed skill as a comic in Army talent contests in the mid '50s, and when he worked as a clerk in the Chicago post office, the foreman told him that if he did not stop cracking jokes about the mail service, he would be sacked. The jokes continued. Gregory was fired, and began work for $10 a night in the Club Esquire, a Negro club on Chicago's South Side.

White, colored or integrated, so few clubs wanted Negro comedians that he was out of work for six months, eventually opened his own place, the Apex Club, in suburban Robbins. It failed. In 1959, when the Pan American games were held in Chicago, Gregory borrowed money and gave an enormous party for team members and guests at Roberts Show Club, a big South Side club. Running through his routines for 2,500 people, he so impressed the owner that he was soon booked there at $125 a week. Other bookings followed in Akron and Milwaukee, led him back to Chicago and the Playboy (still low on the pay scale as comedians go, he is working for $250).

Along the way, Gregory has had occasional hecklers, and once in a rare while the word nigger has come like a bullet to the stage. His reaction is cool. "According to my contract, the management pays me $50 every time someone calls me that," he says. "Please do it again." Explains Gregory about his material: "If I don't handle it just right, the audience will feel sorry for me. And you can't make people laugh if they feel sorry for you." Dick Gregory handles it right, because clearly he is not sorry for himself, as when he cracks about his politics: "To be honest, I'm really for Abraham Lincoln. If it hadn't been for Abe, I'd still be on the open market."

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