You hear entertainers all the time, saying, ‘If I couldn’t get paid for this, I’d do it for free.’ When’s the last time you ever heard a business person say, ‘If I couldn’t get paid for being chairman of British Petroleum, I’d do it for free?’
Makes you wonder. When I left St. Louis, I was making five dollars a night. Now I’m getting $5,000 a week — for saying the same things out loud I used to say under my breath.
No kid in the world, no woman in the world should ever raise a hand against a no-good daddy. That’s already been taken care of: A Man Who Destroys His Own Home Shall Inherit the Wind.
And we love to dance, especially that new one called the Civil War Twist. The Northern part of you stands still while the Southern part tries to secede.
It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn’t stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.
We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry because we didn’t think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.
