RACISM is no laughing matter. But ridicule can erode it. Until Dick Gregory broke into the mainstream,American black comedians had only two choices, playing to black audiences, and being the butt of white performers’ jokes.
That changed at the Playboy Club in Chicago in January 1961. The young man took the incorrect bus,and ran 20 blocks in shoes cold-proofed with cardboard to get to his first large smash, only to be told to collect his fee and disappear. The audience was a conference-load of frozen-food industry types: male, and Southern and white. An uppity black man would be jeered,or worse.
But he was well prepared. A jealous redneck kicked in his front teeth when he was nine, as punishment for merely touching a white woman’s leg as he shined her shoes. His mother, and a hardworking housemaid,kept the vital family telephone hidden in a cupboard: welfare cases weren’t allowed such luxuries. But amid the hunger and humiliation, she had taught young Dick that laughing was a better way...
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Source: economist.com