“You gotta say this for whites—their self-confidence
knows no bounds. Who else could go to a small island in the South Pacific where
there's no crime, poverty, unemployment, war, or worry—and call it a 'primitive
society'?”—Comedian and civil-rights activist Dick Gregory (1932-2017), quoted
in Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s
(2003)
Remembering a great comedian whose later years were
best summed up by the title of his 2001 memoir: Callus on My Soul. Now, he has gone, in the words of the epitaph of an
earlier great satirist, Jonathan Swift, “where savage indignation can lacerate
his heart no more.”
