Humor & Life Quote by Dick Gregory

Dick Gregory lands this line like a joke and a rebuke at the same time: the “open market” is funny only because it’s so grotesquely literal. He’s compressing centuries of American self-congratulation into a single, cutting image of Black life priced, traded, and displayed. Lincoln, in the national mythology, is the sainted liberator; Gregory invokes that halo, then yanks the audience back to the reality the myth politely edits out. The laugh catches in your throat because the premise is historically accurate.

The intent is twofold. On the surface, it’s a one-liner of gratitude warped into dark comedy. Underneath, it’s a critique of how the U.S. treats emancipation as a finished story with a heroic protagonist, rather than a messy political act followed by backlash, exclusion, and new forms of coercion. “If it wasn’t for” mimics casual barroom talk, but it also exposes how absurd it is that a person’s basic freedom can be framed as a contingency - a historical “if” dependent on a politician’s calculus and a war’s outcome.

Context matters: Gregory was a civil rights era comedian who used mainstream stages to smuggle radical truth into rooms that preferred comfort. By choosing “market,” he ties slavery to capitalism, not just prejudice. The joke dares the listener to recognize that America’s prosperity had a price tag, and for a long time, that price tag had names.