Religious Roots and a Comic Sensibility

In his 1964 autobiography, Nigger, Gregory recounted a Christmas from his childhood, where his impoverished family had a feast thanks to the charity of their local community. Because others provided her the food, Gregory's mother, Lucille, was able to spend money on “something special” for each of her children; knowing that “Richard” wanted a wallet, she revealed this gift to him separately from the gifts under their Christmas tree. The feast and the special wallet gift overwhelmed young Gregory, and the adult comedian reflected that this gift led him to a prayer of gratitude:

Gregory presented a prayer that emphasized the connection that Jesus, as God, would have made with his own poor youth and that of all poor individuals, given the biblical narratives of the Nativity that detail the insecure accommodations of Mary's delivery in a manger. Gregory then depicted his youthful frustration with the impermanence of goodwill between parent and child that this Christmas gift affords, making God the viewing (and listening) audience for a comedic aside—a conversation in response to his mother's threat that he return to the warm indoors or face corporal discipline. Lucille came out to inquire why her son “look[s] so strange” outdoors. Gregory replies, “Well, I came out to pray, Momma, way out here so they wouldn't hear me and laugh at me and call me a sissy. God's a good God, ain't He, Momma?” Here, Gregory rendered his religious gratitude as a young black male's vulnerable religious expression, explicitly invoking the notion that engagement with the divine in prayer often struck others (possibly his siblings or schoolmates) as a habit indicative of queerness. Later in Nigger, Gregory remarked that, around age nine, “I was the neighborhood sissy” who ran errands for everyone else and always required physical protection provided by his “tough” best friend, Charles “Boo” Simmons. Without appearing to address this apprehension, Lucille affirms her son's sense of God's goodness by responding, “Yes, Richard.” Reflecting further on his youthful religious peculiarity, Gregory wrote that he confided to his mother the religious experiences that often accompanied his prayer:

Lucille's affirmation of Gregory's ongoing communication with God avoids the sense of her own unanswered communications with the divine, who appears not to respond to her appeal for relief from the burden of solo parenting in poverty, despite her affirmation of divine goodness. In the autobiography, Gregory prints a prayer that he suspected his mother made for his father, Presley “Big Pres” Gregory, Sr., to come home. In Gregory's own prayer, the expressed desire for his father's return is to alleviate his mother's nightly grief: “God, my Momma cried herself to sleep so I'm asking You to send Daddy home right away. God, wherever he is let him knock on that door. I'll wait up for him, God, just let him please knock on that door.”Footnote ³²

When Big Pres eventually returned to his family, Gregory angrily refused to greet him. He recalled his father coming to the bedroom and stating, “I'm your Daddy, boy, don't you want to see me?” Gregory replied, “I see you every time I see my Momma on her knees in front of the window cryin’ and prayin’ you'll come. You oughta thank me ’cause I brought you here, yeah, thank me you never get sick ’cause every night I say my prayers I say bless him wherever he is.” Lucille's affirmation of her son's efficacious prayers and communication with God ended up producing resentment in the young Gregory, who now processed that Big Pres's absence from the family had engendered effective, yet overwhelmingly burdensome, pleas to God from himself and his mother.Footnote ³³ Gregory recalled that, upon his return, Big Pres was a very violent and verbally abusive man, beating him and Lucille extensively in a climactic encounter before sobbing and promising never to do so again. In defensive retaliation, Gregory attempted to strike Big Pres with a butcher knife for attacking him and his mother, but Lucille thwarted his effort, and his father left the family again.

Gregory recalled two instances where his mother called him “crazy,” both related to his resentful encounters with Big Pres. When he first relayed to Big Pres that his prayers brought him home, Big Pres questioned his mother, “’Cille, what's wrong with this boy?” to which she responded, “Don't you worry about him, Big Pres, he's crazy.” Gregory stated that this “got me mad, Momma forgetting all her love for me to pacify him.” In their private conversations, Lucille simply assured her son that she had faith in his direct communication with God. With cruel irony, the reflective adult Gregory related his prayers to the domestic violence he experienced, suggesting that he had inadvertently delivered an abuser to his mother:

The ensuing beating captured for Gregory the presence of a godless monster in the faithful home his mother sought to create:

After a beaten Lucille wrested the knife from Gregory's clutches, she attempted to convince Big Pres to stay as he walked out of their home: “No, Big Pres, he didn't mean nothing, Richard's crazy, you know that.”Footnote ³⁴ In his recollection, Gregory gave an account of a relationship with a mother who privately encouraged and assuaged her son's faithful prayer habits.Footnote ³⁵ But in Lucille's efforts to maintain a domestic relationship with a faithless man, she revealed that she may not have regarded her praying son, who claimed to have heard from God, as a sane believer. Gregory reflected on the place of the divine in his childhood, given his father's absence, and his own regret that he attempted to mortally wound his father:

The adult Gregory's evocation of Proverbs 11:29a to make sense of his absent, abusive father accompanied his religious embrace of nonviolent behavior in response to incontrovertible violence. This assertion was undoubtedly a critical one to make in his writing amid the civil rights movement, given the amplified debates over the appropriate forms of resistance African Americans must embrace to respond to Jim Crow's enduring physical and psychological violence against them.

Gregory's summation of these rough experiences during his “broke” childhood signified laughter as a method of physical and spiritual survival. He wrote of his mother's lesson “that man has two ways out in life—laughing or crying. There's more hope in laughing.”Footnote ³⁷ In 2002, he informed later readers of his work, “She would always say, ‘There is freedom in laughter.’ In a racist society, her wisdom never leaves my mind; I guess that's where I truly found my freedom.”Footnote ³⁸ Often teased for his fatherlessness and impoverished home, Gregory wrote that he eventually figured out that other children “were going to laugh [at him] anyway, but if I made the jokes they'd laugh with me instead of at me. I'd get the kids off my back, on my side.”Footnote ³⁹ The result was Gregory's creation of rapid-fire, self-deprecating jokes about his poverty as well as racialized insult comedy directed at his peers, early honing of his comedic voice that reflected the realities of Jim Crow through the 1960s.

Of his religious youth, Gregory reflected his appreciation for the “Negro church” as an institution, even in his mischievous and hustling days with Boo:

In the foreword to Mel Watkins's 2002 anthology African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today, Gregory considered the influence of early twentieth-century Black comedians on his style. He relayed that none constituted a respectable influence: “Amos ’n’ Andy, [Eddie] Rochester [Anderson], and Mantan Moreland were the only black comics that we heard but nobody wanted to emulate them, including me.”Footnote ⁴¹ On the influence of Black preachers, however, Gregory declared that they “are not comedians, but they use humor. Their job is sometimes harder than that of the comics, because you never hear them tell the same funny story twice. They have the same audience every Sunday, so they can't use the same material over and over again.”Footnote ⁴² In an interview with comedy writer Darryl Littleton, Gregory observed the Black preachers of his youth as cultural authorities, scriptural interpreters who synthesized a pastoral knowledge of African American community experiences with an informed sense of African American national affairs (via the Great Migration's modern locomotive networks) to produce relatable comedic insights through sermons:

Oral historian Jenni Matz questioned Gregory on the influences for his comedic material in 2005. Gregory again invoked those who maintained the African American sermonic tradition: “I'm born and raised in Saint Louis. . . . So when I look back now and realize, you know where I got my [influence] . . . it's from the black preacher. You can't find no more humor . . . I mean, here's . . . a minister that have [sic] a different sermon every Sunday for fifty-two weeks. Have no writers. And funny. Phew.”Footnote ⁴⁴

To shift from beholding a Black preacher in a pulpit to a Black humorist in the pulpit would not require a stark adjustment for many Black churchgoers in the twentieth century. Journalist Henry D. Spalding's contemporaneous insight into the humor found in Afro-Protestant pulpits was that it simultaneously fostered a cultural tradition of joking about Black preachers, known as “the preacher tale.” Spalding's analysis revealed cultural expectations that the person who exegetes to Black audiences inhabits a role that anticipates some strategic deployment, and unintentional performance, of humor.Footnote ⁴⁵ An early twenty-first-century example of this continuity in African American preaching traditions is preacher and homiletical scholar Cleophus J. LaRue's inclusion of 110 “oral formulas” in his book I Believe I'll Testify: The Art of African American Preaching. These “one-liners,” which LaRue learned over the course of his life from his adolescence in 1950s Texas to the present, consist of “clichés, colloquial expressions, adages, aphorisms, maxims, and mottos” in addition to “well-known hymns, poems, and other expressions that signify.”Footnote ⁴⁶ LaRue offers these oral formulas as a cultural tradition for African American seminarians to include in their preaching careers. Their use in the preacher's oratory signals to the congregants that they should expect to perceive an accepted truth through humorous reflection. As Tucker noted, Gregory “often grounded his jokes in folk sayings that were well known to African Americans and translated them to the routines in front [of] his predominantly white audiences.”Footnote ⁴⁷

In reflecting on his formation as a comedian, Gregory indicated that he focused on Black preachers as joke-telling sermonizers. African American preachers, particularly in rural Southern churches such as the ones LaRue and Gregory attended in the middle decades of the twentieth century, extended engaging and entertaining storytelling traditions because they worked from a shared repertoire—the King James Bible. On Matz's question regarding the importance of comedians developing a technique, Gregory reflected: “You got [a] different preacher—and they're working out the same Bible. You can't find [a] technique show any better than the ministry. The same Bible. Ten Commandments never change. The King James never change. And yet there's—that work out the same mouth.” Judeo-Christian scriptures provided a stable source material for an oral tradition that fostered antiphonal interactivity with an audience.Footnote ⁴⁸

As an example of the utility of this source material for his stand-up routine, Gregory offered a joke that relied on Jesus's Passion narrative: “Somebody said that if I was going to get the electric chair what would I have for my last supper. I said ‘I wouldn't have a last supper, that first one didn't come out too well.’”Footnote ⁴⁹ In this instance, Gregory's knowledge of scriptural narratives directed his mind toward an irreverent lesson that his audiences would not anticipate coming from the religious teachings themselves, cutting against the theology that Jesus's crucifixion was divinely guided atonement for humanity's sins. As with preachers, Gregory's comedy participated in an oral tradition that relied on an inventive approach to rethinking biblical narratives. Additionally, comedians who utilized religious materials were like preachers in that the latter group, as historian of religion Lerone A. Martin has shown, worked to recast these teachings into modern lessons and circumstances for audiences who may have heard them their entire lives. Although Gregory did not perform the African American folk or “chanted” sermon, with one 1966 JET magazine article describing his message at San Francisco's Glide Memorial Methodist Church as “a brusque sermon on hypocrisy,” his pulpit appearances “employed black dialect, idioms, and memes to preach on topics such as Christian piety, racism, and popular cultural events: everyday black life.”Footnote ⁵⁰ With time, Gregory's civil rights compass expanded to a global advocacy for human rights, connecting everyday Black life and American life in general to the global issues of racism, poverty, and militarism.

Christian Nonviolence, Conspiracy Theo(r/log)y, and Martyrdom in Mass Meeting Stand-Up Sermons

As a show business entertainer who supported civil rights activism, Gregory connected with preachers in the movement and deployed his stand-up artistry for mass meetings in churches. He addressed Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Selma, Alabama, on Friday, October 4, and Saturday, October 5, 1963. The theological message that Gregory imparted to civil rights demonstrators was the teaching familiar to liberal and progressive African American Christians by this point: namely, that such activism represented divine presence in history, a manifestation of God's and Jesus's priority for the poor and disinherited. Gregory conveyed the theological concept that divine justice for Jim Crow violence became manifest in the protest demonstrations and suffrage activism of African Americans:

African American activists were capable of displaying to a white supremacist system a Christianity that reflected the teachings of Jesus. Gregory echoed the Black social discourse that, because of their endurance of suffering, African Americans’ religious existence was both redemptive for the broader nation and instructive for white oppressors:Footnote ⁵³ “Man gave us everything, bless his little heart. Gave us religion and now we got to show him how it work. Gave us the word nigger, now we got to show him who the nigger really is. Now he gon’ be alright one day cause he been around soul too long for none of it to have rubbed off on him.”Footnote ⁵⁴ White racist oppression and denigration of Blacks reflected, for Gregory, a superiority complex, remedied only by the movement's commitment to physical nonviolence—even as Gregory's rapid-fire retorts to hostile whites he encountered in the police forces, counterprotesters, and harassers who called his home telephone following the death of his infant son (the ancestral behavior of modern-day internet trolling) suggested a desire to immediately confront them verbally with the irony of their claims of Black racial inferiority.

Gregory echoed the sentiments of many “sick and tired” African Americans who criticized the inaction of “chicken-eatin’ preachers,” to use Fannie Lou Hamer's label for Black clergy whose involvement in the lives of their parishioners revolved around their own healthy appetites rather than their communities’ social, political, and economic well-being.Footnote ⁵⁵ Gregory's humor in church mass meetings rendered both black and white preachers guilty of denying the charitable concern that was fundamental to the emergence of the Christian religion:

Gregory asserted that white and black American religious leaders deserved “90 percent” of the blame for the dynamiting of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. “When you got a religious leader that's walking the line and pushing it and playing two sides to a middle and afraid to speak up to a local mayor when his boss is supposed to be up there, then there's something wrong with his religion.” The religious moderates, as well as timid religious leadership, not only failed to adhere to divine standards for equality and justice—they also lagged behind society's recreational institutions in welcoming African American patrons, thereby preventing a more substantive social integration: “[I]t's an awful day in the church, people, when a swimming pool will integrate in Atlanta, golf course will integrate in Mississippi, taverns and bars and nightclubs are integrating all over the country, and the churches still haven't opened up their doors. That's a disgrace.” Christian churches, rather than the High Court, should have been responsible for enabling integration in American society: “If we had to wait on our religious leaders, we still wouldn't a had [integration]. . . . Nine Supreme Court justices, that we wouldn't even guaranteed that they had ever gone to church, reached up and got that thing for us. And religious leaders all over this country, they still running and dodging and hiding and Tomming.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In the pursuit of integration, a religiously justified manifestation of equality, religious institutions, and religious authorities lagged behind the rest of society.

At the mass meeting the next evening, October 5, Gregory's speech echoed the sentiment of black and white American Christians involved in civil rights activism that Jesus, if born into this social setting, would involve himself in the struggle against Jim Crow segregation, violence, and disfranchisement. Gregory asked the meeting demonstrators, “What do you think would happen to Christ tonight if he arrived in this town a black man and tried to vote Monday?” He supported the effort to mobilize church folks who were not inclined to see civil rights activism as a religious duty, identifying what he perceived to be an absurdity in their mournful worship of Jesus without meaningful engagement with current social sins: “So amazing how we come to church everyday and cry over the crucifixion of Christ, but we don't cry over those things that's going on around us. When if he was here now he would cry and take those nails again.” Gregory anticipated that, eventually, “the whole world [will] know that this was the work of God.” Consequently, it would be shameful for churchgoers not to support the students leading the civil rights activism of the early 1960s or to prevent their own children from participating, as their work to end Jim Crow had divine direction. Gregory questioned the audience, “When they sit back . . . and sing, ‘Were You There [When They Crucified My Lord],’ I wonder how many of us have to hang our head in shame? How many of us will have to hang our heads in shame?”Footnote ⁵⁷

The bombings of Black churches should have convinced African Americans to commit to movement activism or allow their children to do so. “Had you read about the communists blowing up a church,” Gregory opined, “you would've been upset. This one you scared to even talk about around white folks.” Following this supposition, Gregory provided the crowd a hypothetical theological scenario, wherein Jesus conferred with God in heaven to persuade his father of the longsuffering African American people's divine chosenness:

Gregory concluded the hypothetical divine conversation by proposing that the current moment signaled divine sanction to pursue social change, effective only with collective support and involvement in civil rights activism: “In 1963 He probably nodded His head and gave you the ball. And the best thing for us to do is get ourselves together and either take it or give it back to Him. Take it or give it back to Him.” Because of their demonstrated refusal to engage in large-scale violent retaliation against Jim Crow racial violence, African Americans embodied the nonviolent teachings of Jesus, in Gregory's estimation, and must now become militant in their nonviolence. Unaware of the guiding divine purpose to African Americans as a chosen people but certain of the race's calling, Gregory mused for the mass meeting attendees on the significance of the Black freedom struggle for universal (global) redemption: “For some reason, God has put in your hands the salvation of not just America, this thing is bigger than this, the whole world.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Gregory presented the Passion narrative to the mass meeting in colloquial, racialized form. For the 1963 audience, Jesus became “a guy that hit town that was raising so much hell as far as the white folks was concerned, they didn't know what to do with him. Bugged everybody, that was Christ.” Gregory described Judas as “that punk” who kissed Jesus at the orders of an unspecified “they” who conspired against him. In this meeting, “that punk” was slang capable of signifying criminality as well as submissive gay sexuality because of this disciple's perceivably erotic form of betrayal. This ambivalent description of Jesus's betrayer is potentially in line with Gregory's characterization of his own “sissy” youth, where the humorist as writer or stand-up comic was able to evoke audience and readership laughter from a candid assessment of his childhood sociocultural identity in a comedy environment more than welcoming of jokes targeting queer identities and sexualities.

Gregory embraced the biblical narrative about the conspiracy to get rid of Jesus, and he framed the unspecified “they” who conspired against Jesus as a group who had assessed the ease of assassinating the religious teacher because of his nonviolence: “They said, ‘Baby, we can bump him off tonight. Tell me he don't even believe in fighting.’”Footnote ⁵⁹ Gregory became very well known for the rest of his life for offering and investigating a host of conspiracy theories about the United States government in relation to those who actively opposed its socioeconomic status quos and foreign policy agendas. Ethel Patricia Harris characterized Gregory's embrace of conspiracy theories as a “fanaticism” with “the existence of a systematic plot by the FBI and CIA to destroy him” as its central belief. Writing in the early 1980s, Harris claimed that Gregory's suspicions matched Richard Hofstadter's diagnosis of the “paranoid style.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The assassinations of the friends he made and the figures he came to admire during his civil rights activism, including Medgar Evers, King, Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy, shaped Gregory's anticipation of a suspicious demise for himself as he remained a prominent social activist.Footnote ⁶¹ However, as an alternative to the language of “fanaticism,” I identify the foundation of Gregory's conspiratorial analysis in his encounter with the Passion narrative, wherein he frames Jesus's crucifixion as an assassination, as presented in this mass meeting in the wake of church bombings and attempted murders of activists:

For progressive African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century, Jesus often resonated as a lynch mob victim in antiquity, with Black journalists, writers, and visual artists representing the crucifixion of Jesus in kind with the lynching of Black men.Footnote ⁶³ However, Gregory's Jesus was a politically significant leader who was the victim of an assassination plot. Religious women and men who embraced the call for revolutionary nonviolence in the movement were now to face the prospect of martyrdom for a righteous cause, and Gregory made an appeal for the civil rights activists to take this potential result seriously. Ultimately, Gregory's narrative of early Christian martyrdom framed his assertion to the mass meeting that the moral truth of their civil rights activism would endure beyond their earthly lives, even if cut short by assassination:

A martyr's mentality meant anticipating that “the right thing” would come into being after the “defeat” of the righteous. Gregory referenced the nonviolent student activists who engaged in “kneel-ins”, the equivalent of sit-ins at white, Southern houses of worship, where they often encountered deacons at the church door barring them from entry: “When you walk into one of these white churches and you get put out, there's whole lots of people [who] lose sleep over that.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Gregory offered to the protestors a long-term view of the effectiveness of these religious demonstrations—while kneel-ins did not result in immediate changes to segregated policies of private religious institutions at the local or denominational levels, protestors’ physical presences confronted those whose religious practices indicated their support of racial inequality, despite Christian teachings of spiritual equality. Additionally, if sit-ins at commercial and public spaces did not convince African American Christians that they must confront segregation through nonviolent action, the kneel-ins revealed an urgent need to oppose the active denial of interracial religious fellowship. In concert with the economic, educational, criminal, and social injustices of segregation, Jim Crow prevented the presence of a Christianity in America that represented sincere efforts to realize social equality. Student activism revealed the religious importance of opposing segregation. In Gregory's words, “these young Negro kids have to knock you down and force [freedom] down your mouth, we gon’ do that,” in similar fashion to feeding castor oil to one's children.Footnote ⁶⁶

As late as 2000, Gregory maintained his belief that his first son's death was responsible for sparing him the fate of assassination that befell Medgar Evers, with whom he was supposed to be on June 12, 1963. “If [Richard Jr.] had not died, I would have gone to Medgar's house that night after the rally. I will always believe that they would have killed Medgar, Jim [Sanders], and me that night. I will always feel my son was the sacrificial lamb, who died so I could stay here and be a part of this Movement for the past forty years.”Footnote ⁶⁷ As with his childhood religious practices, Gregory's theology of the civil rights movement reckoned with the grave encounters with human violence and mortality. Reflecting on his “broke” youth, the child's prayers to deliver what became Big Pres's violent presence revealed young Gregory's ambivalent sacred gift and the divine's paternal substitution for a negligent earthly father. Reflecting on his adult activism for African Americans, Gregory embraced the language of substitutionary sacrifice to make sense of infant mortality as he and his wife encountered it alongside the murders of civil rights activists and innocents.

The assassination of King in 1968 serves as the common marker of the end of the civil rights era. In the sports arena, several African American athletes became representatives of the aesthetics of “Black Power,” which followed widespread sentiments that the civil rights movement's plan of nonviolent direct action was insufficient to secure racial equality. Beholding the protest of Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics, Gregory recalled his own humiliating high school track incident. Because his overconfidence led him to party instead of keeping up with his training, Gregory came in seventeenth place at his final track meet:

Anticipating his own Olympic glory, because of the example Jesse Owens (1913–1980) had set for African Americans, Gregory beheld Smith and Carlos as the realization of a divine promise for a subjugated race. Consequently, his own competitive track life simply became integral to this realization, rather than its culmination.

Although Gregory's prospects as a professional athlete did not bear the fruit of race representation and a sports platform to speak on a host of civil and human rights concerns he advocated, the popular stand-up comic still made use of his social platform to engage society to rethink civil and human rights work as religious work. Gregory supported “The Black Manifesto,” a document that James Forman (1928–2005) introduced at the National Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit in April 1969. In “Divine Libel,” Gregory provided several historical and personal anecdotes on the topic of “the strange power of the Bible” in its usage to justify the theft of economic resources, beginning with the white Christian missionary presence in Africa, a staple anecdote of his speeches at colleges and churches during this time:

The “divine libel” would be the legal suit of God—or “the Boss of all Bosses”—against the religious establishment “on charges of defamation of character.” Beyond the history of colonial exploitation, God's libel charges were also to include divine misrepresentation (white European depictions of Jesus), the religious sanction of killing that resulted from believing that a “Christian soldier” is a “Marine who prays,” vast religious property holdings and tax exemptions in light of poverty, and “failing to teach a proper respect for nature, which is the same, really, as teaching a respect for the divine.” Gregory wrote that the manifesto's call for reparations had “no quarrel with the Bible. It merely traces the history of colonization, oppression, and economic exploitation which results wherever those words are read by the religious establishment.” Reparations would see that some of the religious establishment's wealth “be divested back into the hands of the exploited.”Footnote ⁶⁹

As he continued his civil rights activism, now under the framework of human rights, Gregory's engagement with the Hebrew Bible and the teachings of Jesus—absent any focus on the narrative of Jesus's resurrection—revealed the sincere irreverence of his beliefs. In his written humor, Gregory positioned himself as a scriptural authority through liberal biblical interpretation.

Gregorian Biblical Interpretation, or, a Humorous Hermeneutics of SuspicionFootnote ⁷⁰

For the 1974 book Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, with Commentary, Gregory collaborated with James R. McGraw (1935–2012), an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church who graduated from Yale Divinity School and served as a contributing editor to Christianity and Crisis magazine.Footnote ⁷² Upon learning of McGraw's death in 2012, Gregory remarked, “I don't know where it is you go when you die, but it's a much better place now that Jim McGraw is there. . . . What a beautiful human being he was.”Footnote ⁷³ Previously, McGraw edited and wrote the foreword to Gregory's 1968 The Shadow that Scares Me, which the white Methodist minister described as “a book of impious sermons” that stood “in the best tradition of evangelistic preaching,” capturing Gregory's “prophetic words in the midst of social crisis since 1962, when We Shall Overcome expressed hunger for freedom.”Footnote ⁷⁴The Shadow that Scares Me served as Gregory's self-representation as a prophetic truth-teller because, as the comedian claimed, “God is nothing more, or less, than truth.” Gregory informed his readership that contemporary institutional religion, in other words, “the church today,” was now a “sick comedy.” He elaborated, “I tell my own kids to go to church only as a form of entertainment. The church is in such sad condition today that I cannot justify their attendance for any other reason.”Footnote ⁷⁵

In his foreword to The Shadow that Scares Me, McGraw characterized himself as Gregory's “itinerant preacher, occasional chauffeur, and admiring friend.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Therefore, it is likely that, as book editor, McGraw was Gregory's closest theological conversation partner for Bible Tales, with the comedian and the minister generating a humorous sermonic and scriptural discourse that bore the imprint of their liberal religious experiences and commitments. Sections of The Shadow that Scares Me foreshadowed the organization of Bible Tales, including Gregory's criticism of churches for hypocrisy and judgmentalism in “Take a Prostitute to Church” and what he regarded as the absurdity of the Nativity narrative in “Joseph and Mary at the Hilton.” Ironically, this 1968 text represented Gregory's shift in conspiracy theorizing about the Passion narrative—this time, he sympathizes with Judas because of his opposition to the labeling of Jews as Christ-killers instead of the Roman soldier, “the one with the nails and the hammer” who was “the real killer.” For Gregory, institutional religion “twist[ed] the words of the Bible” for social power and oppression, stifling the empirical questioning of young readers such as the adolescent who might challenge its narratives or conventional interpretations. In his prophetic book, Gregory the humorist offered the reader an anecdote to justify his purported theft of church money as a young, skeptical churchgoer:

Dick Gregory's Bible Tales pursued the framing of scripture through humor more thoroughly than The Shadow that Scares Me. It sold for $6.95 (roughly $33–$34 in 2018 U.S. dollars) in 1974 and 1976.Footnote ⁷⁸ The book's original 1974 cover by publishers Stein and Day depicted a smiling Gregory, his head cocked very slightly to his right, in a monk's cassock, holding a scroll and writing quill. To the potential reader familiar with his established comedic presence, activism, and humorous mode of social criticism, Gregory's book representation as clergy or theologian signifies as a sardonic Black biblical authority. In her work to define the “serious parody” of those who don the “sacred clown” social role, religion scholar Melissa Wilcox notes that “the creation of a recognizable role or persona, when combined with the performative use of parody, buffoonery, irony, and/or humor, can provide a powerful source of social commentary through transgression.” Wilcox regards the serious parody of the sacred clown to be “subversive performance,” uniquely accessible for minority communities, evident in Gregory's visual representation on the book cover.Footnote ⁷⁹ Additionally, the book's sleeve established Gregory's relative religious authority, rooted in his civil rights activism and embrace of nonviolence:

Bible Tales consisted of a humorous recounting of biblical narratives followed by Gregory's interpretation and application to contemporary national and global issues. Very often, these interpretations represented Gregory's irreverent reading “against the grain” of the stated morality of the text or subsequent generations of Hebrew and Christian scriptural interpretation, and he paralleled some of America's critical theological traditions in doing so. Systematic theologian James H. Evans has noted that “social location conditions biblical interpretation” in his assertion that “the very marginality” of African Americans in American society “has made them sensitive to the misuses of Scripture and has made them more open to its critical dimension.”Footnote ⁸¹ And as New Testament scholar Allen Dwight Callahan has argued, the Bible, for enslaved Africans in the Americas, “became the iron against which they sharpened the iron of a nascent faculty of criticism.”Footnote ⁸² African American history includes nineteenth-century women preachers who “pioneered a mode of public disputation in which they called Jesus to witness against the Bible itself.” These women include the African Methodist Episcopal preacher Jarena Lee, who “implicitly read against the grain” of Pauline texts to support her claim that women were “the first to bear witness to the resurrection of Jesus” and entitled to preach the resurrection.Footnote ⁸³ Callahan notes that nineteenth-century Black women similarly maintained “a remarkable reading against the grain of the text of the book of Esther,” rendering the story of the deposed Persian queen Vashti as “a tale of one woman's courageous resistance.”Footnote ⁸⁴

As his book dedication indicates, Gregory intended that the audience for Bible Tales would consist of “all those good folks past and present who've made the Living Bible a way of life instead of a new translation” that only serves as the sacred text for one religion.Footnote ⁸⁵ Although Bible Tales lacks any rigorous citation and sourcing that is standard for twentieth-century American theological texts, elements of progressive African American Protestant theology, feminist biblical interpretation, liberation theology, and nonviolent philosophy appear to frame the book's ultimate interpretive commentaries in the quest to connect sacred text to contemporary national and global concerns. Notable topics for Gregory's religious thought in Bible Tales include mentions of war forty-nine times; the poor and poverty thirty-three times; money twenty-eight times; oppression twenty-four times; karma fifteen times; ghettoes thirteen times; justice and injustice eleven times; peace ten times; antiblack racism, antigay slander, and anti-Semitism a combined seven times; capital punishment four times; greed three times; and wealth redistribution and divestment twice.

Importantly, Gregory's readings of certain biblical passages assumed that the texts’ authors had provided an incomplete narrative of events. Highlighting these narrative gaps afforded Gregory the interpretive leeway to speculate meaningfully to generate lessons for his commentary that awakened readers to the “misinterpretations” that structured histories of oppression and neglect. For instance, Gregory understood the importance of sharing, particularly with those in need, as the lesson of the story of Jesus feeding the multitudes with two fishes and five loaves of bread (Matthew 14:13–21, Mark 6:32–44, Luke 9:10–17). He speculated, however, regarding the nature of feeding the multitudes from a rational standpoint, questioning whether some in the crowd brought along food that they hid from others to avoid sharing their meals. In Gregory's mind, Jesus's gesture to feed the crowd may have led those who already had their own, hidden food to share their meals as well, generating a compassionate atmosphere that revealed there was more than enough to nourish the multitude.Footnote ⁸⁶ In such irreverent and speculative manners, Gregory demonstrates his perceived authority to interpret biblical scriptures to offer constructive, relatable religious teachings to help modern audiences regard the Bible as a practical “way of life” in the mid-1970s.

Throughout the text, Gregory refrained from using gendered pronouns when referring to the supreme deity, most often using the name “God” or the phrases “Divine Wisdom,” “Universal Order,” “Creator,” and “Universal Force and Power.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Jesus, following his forty-day fast, was “in tune with the Universal Order, filled with the spirit of love,” according to Gregory, and was, thereby, able to withstand the devil's temptation in the desert.Footnote ⁸⁸ Gregory's acceptance of numerologyFootnote ⁸⁹ also framed his interpretive appreciation of those who visited the infant Jesus at his birth: “The three wise men were astrologers and astronomers. They kept their eyes focused upon the heavens and understood Nature and the Universal Order.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Those who adhered to the “Universal Order” and “Nature” could be members of other religious traditions, and they could embrace astrology and numerology as Gregory did. As he mused to an audience of college students, “I don't know, when you [s]top and think how many religious conflicts there are going on in the world today, Catholics and Protestants, Jews, and the Arabs[,] and it kind of makes you wonder what great secret the atheists have that makes them act so God like.”Footnote ⁹¹ If religious people “haven't got [their] spiritual thing together,” they would repeat cycles of interreligious violence and fail to defeat systems that oppress peoples and drain the planet of its natural resources.Footnote ⁹² His close relationships with Christians, Muslims, fellow numerologists, and religious critics attested to his belief in the pervasive presence of the divine and people's capacity to engage in the spiritual work of saving humanity from itself.

In the Genesis creation narrative (1:1–2:3), Gregory applied to God a thought process that mirrored his own inclination toward comical views of existence. Gregory wrote that, after God proclaims the existence of light, “God was very pleased and said, ‘Now that's really boss!’ Then, realizing Who was The One and Only Boss, God chuckled and said, ‘I mean that's really deep—outa sight!’” Self-realization, amusement, and self-correction exist for God, at this point the only sentient existence in creation. Gregory's commentary for creation emphasizes all that human history has done to destroy both the planet and its creatures, and he offered his belief in karma as the response for humanity “turning their back on God, for ignoring Divine Wisdom and Universal Order.” Here, Gregory incorporated the metaphysical Christian philosophy of Joel S. Goldsmith, who claimed that the principle of karma existed to check human sin rather than humans reckoning with sins through God's punishment. The emergence of human weapons, first to kill animals for food or in self-defense, and, then, for killing other humans, evolved into systems of tribalism and the embrace of nationalisms responsible for patriotic indoctrination. For African Americans, this karmic presence of violent tribalism manifested in the segregated educational system that they had battled for decades. Both segregation and nationalistic indoctrination to support a militaristic U.S. empire prevented the flourishing of “instinctive knowledge and spiritual wisdom,” qualities of human consciousness that Gregory considered to inhere in humanity's divine creation.Footnote ⁹³

Gregory's commentary on the second creation narrative in Genesis (2:4–24) incorporated humor about African Americans as well as his promotion of women's rights. Gregory identified the creation of Eve from Adam's rib as appropriate for African American humor: “God's using a rib to create woman makes one think the first couple must have been Black. Ribs have been a source of survival for Black folks for years!” He follows this joke with an assertion that this creation narrative has set up gender bias for generations of humans who adhere to biblical scriptures: “But there's a real rub to the story of the rib. The rib is the supreme symbol of male chauvinism. It gives rise to the myth of male superiority and female dependency. If God had created both man and woman out of mud, they would have been created equal.” Ever the humorist and conspiracist, Gregory offered a thought suggesting the narrative is the reversal of truth: “Maybe man was made from the rib of the woman and his real name was ‘Madam.’” For American history, the ancient presence of male chauvinism influenced the Declaration of Independence's advocacy of the equality of all men, hampered by the practice of slaveholding as well as the lack of suffrage for women at the nation's founding. Following the serpent's temptation of Eve (Genesis 3:1–24), Gregory characterizes Adam as “laying the rap” for blame upon Eve (or “Woman”). Gregory's tale of God's punishment for Eve was to “create labor pains and male chauvinism.” Complicating Gregory's feminism is his commentary on contemporary dietary practices that led to health issues for Americans. Gregory declared, “It's so tragic that so many mothers unconsciously play the role of the serpent at the dinner table.” In Gregory's telling of Sodom and Gomorrah, however, he details Lot's offering of his two daughters to the men of Sodom in place of the angelic visitors and states, “In those days you were better off being a guest than a daughter.”Footnote ⁹⁴ While Gregory identified women's subordination to men in readings of scripture, his mission to reform modern diets revealed his maligning of women for the meals they prepared for their children.

God was a union buster for the Tower of Babel construction project (Genesis 11:1–9), which became an “unfinished hi-rise.” Gregory offered an additional lesson for this story beyond traditional narratives of humanity's pride and humility and the creation of multiple human languages: “Don't try to organize behind God's back!” To organize behind God's back meant, for Gregory, “leaving God out of [humanity's] plans.” Social construction, absent “the spirit, presence, or will of God,” inevitably led to humans creating “confusion, misunderstanding, and division” because they lacked God's priorities.

Labor unions in the United States that excluded “African Americans, Puerto Ricans, women, and other minorities” similarly “organized with no thought of God's priorities in mind,” seeking to strike “over the issue of a coffee break” while refusing to address their own discriminatory practices.Footnote ⁹⁵

Although Gregory's telling of the narrative of Abram/Abraham, Sarai/Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac (Genesis 12–17, 21–22) contained elements of humor—God was Abram's “agent” devoted to making his client famous—the comedian was critical of the biblical teaching that Canaan was Abraham's promised land and of the notion of sacrificing others because of divine command, as such thought in the early Atlantic European imagination resulted in the conquest of the Americas. Gregory informed readers that the Pilgrims claimed to have discovered a “New World” that was “not only occupied but already being used by someone else.” “Throughout American history,” Gregory wrote, “fathers have been willing to see their sons killed in the name of God and country. So-called patriotic fathers send their kids off to war because they believe ‘God is on our side.’” The story of Abraham and Isaac contained a “very dangerous implication” for readers of the Bible who believed in the human gift of hearing the divine's voice: “The same dude who is willing to kill his own son because he hears a voice will also be willing to kill my son if he hears the same voice. A lot of Ku Klux Klanners are church-goin’ folks. The same mentality that willingly sends sons off to war also supports the right of state police to shoot Black student demonstrators at Jackson State College in Mississippi.”Footnote ⁹⁶ It is likely that Gregory had his own childhood belief in direct communication with God in mind as he contemplated the implication of this Genesis story, as he now connected it to pervasive social violence.

Gregory's commentary on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah noted “two bum raps” in the biblical narrative: “Both are sexist, one male chauvinist, one a slander against homosexuals.” Gregory noted that “Lot's wife” is known only as a possession of her husband. The dark humor of Gregory's account of Lot's male chauvinism is another instance of his hermeneutics of suspicion, where he assumed that Lot, who was not much of a “family man,” given his readiness to offer his daughters for rape, secretly conspired for his wife's demise as a casualty of God's wrath. “God's messengers told Lot, and only him, not to look back at the destruction of Sodom! The story doesn't indicate that Lot's wife got the same message or even that Lot told her.” This perspective on the presence, voice, and involvement of women in biblical narratives finds roots in feminist biblical interpretations, which often have involved critical readings of such absences and interpretative rehabilitations of women in the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament. Yet, in this case, Gregory assumes that the absence of Lot's wife in the exchanges between Lot and God's messengers must have left her unaware of their command. Gregory posed the question, “What better way for Lot to do in his wife than to let God do it for him? It would completely take the rap off himself.” From this perspective, it became evident to Gregory that the actual cause of Lot's wife's demise was her obedience to a deplorable husband and father, who did not pass on the angels’ warning, resulting in her fatal transformation into “a pillar of the community”—pun intended.Footnote ⁹⁷

To counter “[t]he anti-gay interpretation of the story,” reliant upon the charge that the sin of Sodom was homosexuality, Gregory provided readers the predominant liberal religious teaching that the translation of the verb “to know” to imply sexual intercourse in this case was inaccurate. Gregory depicted the men of Sodom as a “lynch mob” and surmised, “If Lot thought he was bribing an all-male gay crowd, he would hardly have offered his daughters as a bribe.” He directed readers to Isaiah 1:10 ff. and Ezekiel 16:49 to identify sodomy as “hypocrisy, oppression, neglect of the poor, and faulty administration of justice.” These were the real “crimes against Nature, the truly unnatural acts from the Biblical point of view,” in contrast to U.S. state laws criminalizing sodomy. Gregory claimed that the devil, who worked to tempt Jesus with quotes from Scripture, had contemporary descendants who were using the Bible passages to justify their opposition to various communities: “Folks quote passages from the Bible to justify anything—such as segregation, oppression of women, youth, or gays, anti-Semitism, war, or obedience to an unjust and oppressive government.”Footnote ⁹⁸

The Egyptian Pharaoh's plan for the genocide of enslaved Hebrews in Exodus 1:8–2:10 proved instructive for Gregory, who viewed U.S. government advocacy of birth control as a modern form of genocide for African Americans and other minority American communities. Gregory viewed birth control as a human practice “against Nature.” His definition of genocide included “Government programs for poor Black folks that emphasize birth control, sterilization, and abortion availability” as obvious modern practices of age-old oppressive strategies to control subordinate populations. Here, Gregory reflected longstanding debates within African American communities—and black Protestant churches—concerning the appropriateness of birth control pill usage and abortion. He also included, however, the practices of involuntary sterilization that many Black women and men suffered unwittingly when they sought medical care. His concept of genocide also included overcrowded ghettos with unsanitary health standards, “the poor food found in ghetto supermarkets, the absence of health services, and the fires that consume the rundown house and the little kids who live in them.” Gregory claimed that the resultant infant mortality rates among African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and Native Americans were the outcome of modern state forms of population control.Footnote ⁹⁹

Moses's encounter with the burning bush on Mount Horeb (Exodus 2–4) served a metaphorical significance for Gregory, who advocated that readers identify the voice of God in the suffering of others and find holy ground wherever they marched in protest. “As American bombs rained terror in Vietnam, and villages were consumed by flames and little children with them, young folks in America heard the voice of God calling attention to the suffering, and they took to the streets in protest.” Here, Gregory emphasized the presence of God among those who suffer, teachings also central to the discourse of liberation theology. Humans were also capable, however, of perceiving God's voice in their aesthetic appreciation of the natural world and in the value of their own lives: “Folks who live by the laws of Nature, who truly respect and appreciate God's handiwork, also hear God's voice in the beauty of autumn, when the leaves turn to flame, or in the fiery beauty of a sunset. They know that all of God's creation, including their own bodies, is holy ground.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Gregory likened the plight of the Hebrew people to the enslaved and free presence of people of African descent in the Americas—a common theme in African American theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this case, however, Gregory related the Hebrews’ task of meeting their brickmaking quota absent the regularly provided straw to the expectation that African Americans compete on a “level playing field” in higher education absent well-funded public schools. In an additional reading of the narrative against the grain, he focused on the supernatural gifts of Aaron and Moses that demonstrated God's plague curses upon Egypt as sorcery, with a modern-day equivalent in the industrialists who “used their special arts to enchant the rulers of the nation and fool the public,” ultimately polluting the earth. In this inversion, those with divine inspiration confront the rulers and industrialists of Western nations to inform them that “the bloodstains of oppression were behind the pollution of the waters and the air”; yet, the profit and greed hardened their hearts, causing the suffering of the planet and its inhabitants.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The human rights movement, wherein “[w]omen, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Indians, gays, and others began to organize and resist their own oppression as never before,” followed the efforts of civil rights activists to crumble the walls of oppression and discrimination. According to Gregory's commentary on Joshua 6, activists of the 1960s were like the Israelite “outside agitators” who demonstrated their endurance, patient adherence to a plan of action, and willingness to “make enough noise—loud enough and long enough” to cause the “walls of oppression [to] crack and eventually come tumbling down.” As an aside, Gregory muses, “Think what would have happened if Louis Armstrong had led the civil rights movement!” It is in this manner that Gregory renders Israelite conquest of territory as instructive for nonviolent militant activism, given his opposition to warfare and violence on any scale (later, in his account of Samson and Delilah, he describes the judge's weapon of an ass's jawbone as “the first asinine weapon used in battle, but many more have been invented since”). He also provides an account of consistent religious rhetoric about movement activism that he would have encountered in the mass meetings he attended during the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁰²

David's battle with Goliath (I Samuel 17) underwent Gregory's nonviolent reading: “David killed Goliath with a slingshot, which only goes to prove what consumer-protection advocates like Ralph Nader have been saying all along. Kids’ toys can be dangerous!” Following this joke was his discussion of how seemingly innocuous play involving toy guns indoctrinates children into militaristic systems, which include armies, police forces, hunting, and violent criminality. Toys have also established gendered and racialized social roles for boys and girls, limiting the professional prospects for women as well as racial minorities in the United States. Moreover, rather than lionizing his triumph over Goliath, Gregory emphasizes David's position as a youth who becomes an instrument of “the old men [who] make the policies that start the wars.” Gregory closed this section of his commentary with a criticism of nationalism that uses scriptures for justification for state forms of mortal violence: “Appeals to the Old Testament or to Old Glory do not provide an excuse for . . . war or capital punishment. Unfortunately, when it comes to justifying war and killing, there seems to be no separation between Church and State.”Footnote ¹⁰³

The politics of the Richard Nixon presidential administration and the Watergate scandal color many of Gregory's extended religious commentaries in the latter half of Bible Tales, and his lessons for readers center on what he considered to be the absence of morality for Nixon. Bible Tales provides more weight to a discussion of Hebrew scriptures than the life of Jesus—New Testament readings and commentaries occupy the final 40 pages of the 187-page book, with no discussion of Jesus's death and resurrection or the emergence of the Christian religion beyond the Gospel narratives.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Fitting with Gregory's irreverent orientation toward religious affiliation, his final commentary ends with a question about the appropriateness of religious affiliation: “Since there is no preferential treatment in the kingdom of heaven, is there any need for denominations here on earth?” Divine Wisdom was the natural gift to all, and as Gregory told an audience at The Ohio State University, “there's a universal god locked inside of you.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

As religious historian Clarence Hardy notes, the 1970s was the decade that Black liberation theologian James H. Cone (1938–2018) was considering Black music as essential African American cultural production for his landmark theological enterprise, identifying “meaning in both the sacred spirituals of old and the more ‘secular’ and modern blues of the juke joint.” As Cone worked throughout the 1970s to demonstrate “how culture would eventually supplant intense political involvement in active social movements as a primary context for religious reflection,” he even identified the humor of enslaved Africans in America as “an important element in black survival . . . often related to the theme of freedom.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Contemporaneously, Gregory was a Black cultural producer of humor and an activist who maintained a politically oriented articulation of religion and spirituality. Like Cone's theological work and mainline Protestant institutional location, Gregory also had an essential investment in dialogue with white liberal American religious thought. Without any apparent coordination, their theological writings and labor in this decade paralleled each other, marching in opposite directions between “culture” and “politics.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷