“The best Dick Gregory story is the time in 1961 when he got up in front of a largely white audience and delivered the joke about the white waitress at a restaurant in the South telling him that they don’t serve colored people. The joke ends: ‘That’s all right. I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.’ It is hard to know now how many people laughed. Or maybe the best Dick Gregory story is the one where he ran for mayor of Chicago in 1967, a campaign during which he was arrested by United States Treasury agents for printing and handing out fake dollar bills with his picture on them as a part of his campaign literature. Or else the best Dick Gregory story is the one about how, in 1971, he went without solid food for over two years to protest the war in Vietnam—once