Revolution Televised.pdf

18 Reading the Roots of Resistance
I put down my knife and fork, and I picked up that chicken, and I
kissed it. 41
A similar story was often told on the streets of black America, although
there the story often ended with kissing the chicken’s ass. 42
Here, Gregory removes a bit of the edge to the story but keeps it
within the mode of the trickster. 43
Gregory’s success at the Playboy Club launched his career within
mainstream America. Within a year he was featured in Time and
Newsweek and on many television shows. Although he avoided the
sexual content of other Chitlin’ Circuit acts, Gregory still expressed
the social satire and ironic observations of traditional African
American humor. Rising in popularity during the 1960s at the time
of vocalized black political activity, Gregory focused on topical
humor and moved from more observational jokes, as demonstrated
by the aforementioned performance, to sharp social satire.
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.”
Reagan is “Nigger” spelled backwards. Imagine, we got a backward
nigger running California. 44
Gregory became more of a social activist, giving up his career as a
comedian to follow these political causes. However, he paved the
way for many of the older comics previously ignored by mainstream
white society as well as many new black comics.
It is this transfer from the black underground to the mainstream
that is often perceived as selling out, yet African Americans have
always made some compensations because of America’s hostile racial
climate. As Gregory shows, there were ways of using the mainstream
for one’s own purposes. By finding entry into mainstream
society, he was able to express to those white audiences the frustration
of the black person in the United States and influence some
social change. For this reason, it becomes necessary to observe the
hidden transcripts apparent in these performers’ works and take
them into consideration when making any assessment of African
American cultural production. For our purposes here, and for an
understanding of African Americans on television, it is relevant
to realize that many of the black performers on 1960s and 1970s