TRIBUTE: Dick Gregory changed stand-up

Dick Gregory’s big break almost didn’t happen.

The national press was buzzing over his killer 1961 performance at Chicago’s Playboy Club, where as a last-minute substitute he played before an audience filled with white Southern food executives. Gregory handled the heckling with ease, told political jokes and even won the crowd over.

Afterward, as Gregory recalled decades later, he expected a call from “Tonight Starring Jack Paar,” a show he had watched without fail for five years. But when a friend pointed out that Paar had never invited a black comic to join him on his couch after a set — the pinnacle achievement for a standup comic — Gregory was devastated.

“Next thing I know, I’m walking home … crying,” Gregory said in 2016. “I get home and (my wife) says, ‘Are you OK?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I’m OK.’ I was embarrassed to tell her. I just knew I would never work that show.”

So when Paar’s producers asked Gregory to come on, the comic said no and hung up on them. Then Paar himself called and asked why Gregory didn’t want to perform on his show. Gregory told Paar: “Because the Negro has never been able to finish his act and walk to the couch.” Paar then insisted that Gregory would sit down on the couch.

It was the turning point not just for Gregory’s career, but for stand-up.

“He broke the color barrier in comedy,” said Kliph Nesteroff, author of “The Comedians,” a history of American comedy.

Gregory, who died Saturday at 84, was both the first black comic on Paar’s

GREGORY