Humor & Life Quote by Dick Gregory

The joke lands like a polite envelope with a razor blade inside: a banal civic ritual, postage stamps, becomes an intimate act of forced contact. Dick Gregory takes the soft-focus reverence of Martin Luther King Jr. commemorations and drags it back into the body, into saliva, into the kind of physical reality white America preferred not to imagine when it talked about “civil rights” in the abstract.

The specific intent is twofold. First, it flips the power dynamic. The “white bigot” who once demanded segregation now has to participate, however unwillingly, in a tiny gesture of reverence: sealing mail with King’s image. Second, it punctures the country’s self-congratulation. A stamp is cheap sainthood, a way to claim progress without paying its cost. Gregory makes that symbolic “honor” feel degrading to the people who opposed King, not uplifting to the nation that resisted him.

The subtext is Gregory’s signature move: exposing how racism isn’t just ideology but appetite and disgust, a choreography of who can touch whom, who is considered contaminating, who gets to be “above” the mess. By choosing the “backside,” he turns respectable commemoration into taboo contact, forcing the listener to confront the obscene underside of “respectability” politics.

Context matters: Gregory wasn’t a detached observer. As a Black comedian-activist working in the thick of the civil rights era, he used mainstream stages to smuggle confrontation into entertainment. The line is funny, yes, but it’s also a moral audit. It asks whether America’s tributes are penance, performance, or just another way to avoid the harder lick: real equality.