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NPR's Book of the Day
New books by Damon Young and Dennard Dayle take different routes to humor
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- [00:02]
Andrew Limbong
Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. I genuinely think writing is one of the most difficult forms of comedy because unlike other forms where you can control the tone and the timing, all you have with writing is the words on the page. Today on the pod, we've got two books taking very different routes to humor. Up ahead, a satire about a Civil War flag twirler. But first, that's How they get yout is an anthology of comedic essays exploring black life in America today. The writer Damon Young put it together and he talked to NPR's Juana Summers about how while the topics differ, they're about parenting and marriage and Invisalign, they all are in part, about shame. That's ahead.
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- [01:22]
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Damon Young
You hear from someone about a really difficult life moment? Losing a mother, a baby, facing completely unfair treatment at work? What do you do with those stories? If you're Damon Young, you probably put them together in a collection of comedic essays.
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Juana Summers
This was me just trying to reach out to people who represent, I guess, the, the expansiveness, you know, the virtuosity, the range of black humor.
- [02:11]
Damon Young
To be clear, when he says black humor, he is not talking about heavy or taboo topics. He means humor coming specifically from Black American Voices. Damon Young is a columnist, culture blog founder and podcast host, among many things. And he tapped fellow writers including Roy Wood Jr. Clover Hope, Wyatt Cenac, and many, many more for a new anthology called that's How they get yout.
- [02:34]
Juana Summers
My only directive for people was to be funny. And it wasn't necessarily like, okay, be funny, ha ha, tell knock knock jokes. It's like, you know what? Be yourself. And because I know who you are and I know what you're capable of. I know that you're gonna be funny.
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Damon Young
I asked young Moore about the impetus for this new collection and why the stories can feel universal no matter where.
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Juana Summers
The premise of my intro is that black American humor is the best American humor. And I believe that because I believe that we have to be the most honest about America, about who America is, what America is. You know? And when you are. When you're people who has been vulnerable the entire time. Right. You pay closer attention. And I think that that sort of clarity, that sort of honesty, that sort of like reckoning the best humor comes from that.
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Damon Young
I never like to ask people to pick favorites. It's like picking your favorite child, and that is unfair.
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Juana Summers
Mine? If you're asking my favorite essays, I'm gonna say mine.
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Damon Young
It's yours. All right, tell us about it. Tell the people about it.
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Juana Summers
Okay. I mean, so I. Originally, it's about my relationship with my teeth. And It's a maybe 1800 word, long sentence. I wanted to take the reader into the stream of consciousness that I experience when I'm thinking about my teeth. I'm thinking about the relationship with shame. I'm thinking about the relationship with class and getting Invisalign and then leaving the house the first time with my Invisalign. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, can I smile? Can I take a selfie now? Can I do all this? All these things that I was gun shy about before. But okay. To answer to a question that you were going to ask.
- [04:23]
Damon Young
You think you know the question I was gonna ask? Well, here's the thing, though. I wonder, like, you've got all of these amazing contributors who have written, and is there one submission that you either opened up in your inbox or picked up the paper and you were like, this is just so dang funny. It has to be in here.
- [04:37]
Juana Summers
Well, I think an essay like Hilary Crosley Coker's, right, where she writes about. And Hillary's a great friend of mine, where she writes about having a miscarriage. And it's also, weirdly, an essay about marriage. It's about the miscarriage is kind of the plot, but the marriage is the story.
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Damon Young
Yeah.
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Juana Summers
And that essay just blew me away.
- [05:07]
Damon Young
There's this moment that stuck with me where she's writing about how she is still having this miscarriage. Her husband is useless to her because he's hurt himself. Her colleagues are doing their normal. Whatever it is they're doing at work, and yet she is still enduring and showing up. What is it about our humor that can be such a salve when we're talking about and living with the humor that can come through something as deeply painful as a miscarriage.
- [05:31]
Juana Summers
I mean, I think it's just. It's a necessity. It's a necessity that is just born out of our experience. And it's like, yeah, yeah, true, okay, whatever. But I still have to live. I still have to go to work. I still have to be a present partner. I still have to be a good friend. And I still have to laugh. I still have to find the humor. And again, it's not even necessarily finding the humor. The humor is there. It's just whether or not you choose to acknowledge it.
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Damon Young
I wanna ask you about one of my favorite essays, and it's the essay by Dee Watkins. Dee is talking about changing his little girl's diaper and his role as a father. And then he kind of starts meditating on his dad who struggled with addictions over the years. But he's talking about how he still really loves him and thought his dad was amazing. And then he raises this question of, like, what will my daughter think of me when I grow up? And I know that, Damon, you are a dad, right?
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Juana Summers
I am a dad, yes.
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Damon Young
How much of that goes through your head? That just felt so relatable when I read it that, like, how do I measure up? Like, what is she gonna think when she's my age and I'm sitting in a rocking chair somewhere?
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Juana Summers
I'm terrified of that thought. You know, I have two kids now, a nine year old and six year old. And it's like, I don't want to do a thing that they're talking about in therapy. Right. 25 years later, like, yeah, that is a. That's an anchoring and animating sort of fear, anxiety. Right? Because you don't want to mess your kids up, but we have to figure that out somehow. And again, I just. I really love Dee's work. I really love his perspective. And I thought that, you know, him writing about his experience as a parent, there's so much. There's so much humor to mine out of parenthood. You know, my son says something and I ask him, excuse me. And he says, I wasn't talking to you, daddy. And it's like, okay, what am I supposed to do with this? Because he's is true, he's telling the truth.
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Damon Young
And.
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Juana Summers
But, but this is your. No, you don't say, I'm not talking to you, daddy. You. Okay? There's another way to express that without. Well, I hurt my feelings. Right.
- [07:50]
Damon Young
You know, I want to ask you, I was reading an interview you did about this collection with the Pittsburgh City Paper and you made the point that one of the recurring themes that you find across all of these essays and all of the parts of this collection is shame. Can you say more about that?
- [08:03]
Juana Summers
So I just had a residency at the University of Pittsburgh this two year stint. You know, the first thing that I told students is that I want you to extract whatever shames you feel about your background, about your personalities, about all these things that make you you. Right? Because the best humor comes from an exploration of all those things. It comes from the weird. And the thing is, shame is tricky because the people who don't feel it are the ones who probably need to feel it the most. Right? The people who move through life without the capacity for shame should probably feel some shame. And then you have people who feel shame about growing up poor or maybe not being able bodied or all these other things that maybe they didn't have much control over. And this collection is, you know, is an example of that, right? Where, you know, these tremendous, these, you know, generous geniuses decided to, you know, dive into their vulnerabilities for this collection. And I'm just greatly appreciative that so many people were willing to go there with stuff that, you know, maybe wasn't comfortable to share or stuff that maybe they hadn't shared with other people before.
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Damon Young
We've been speaking with Damon Young, editor of that's How they get you, an unruly anthology of Black American humor. It's out now. Damon, thank you.
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Juana Summers
Thanks for having me.
- [09:39]
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- [10:09]
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- [10:43]
Andrew Limbong
I love a novel about a dumb guy, A guy who can kind of wriggle his way out of situations, but always ends up falling into a worse one somehow. Denard Dale's novel How to Dodge a Cannonball is the latest entry into this genre. And he talks to NPR's Ayesha Rascoe about giving a character like this more than a smidge of sympathy.
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Denard Dale
Every man, save a few simians, deserves freedom. The men on the other side of this field don't understand that.
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Ayesha Rascoe
Just a few pages into his new novel, and Denard Dale has written a stirring battlefield speech from a general to his troops. And at Gettysburg right now we can.
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Denard Dale
Crush the Union center and throw the continent's largest army into chaos. We can show their senators and newsmen that we will not kneel. I won't mince words. We are one charge away from winning this war. But I need you with me. Or rather Pickett needs you with him.
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Ayesha Rascoe
I'll be supervising the Confederate general Pickett, as in Pickett's Charge. And yes, satire is a on the march. How to Dodge a Cannonball is, among other things, about the absurdity of the Civil War as experienced by a 15 year old from Illinois who seeks glory through flag twirling. Author Denard Dale is with us now to talk about it. Were you a flag twirler yourself at any point?
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Denard Dale
Let's see. No, I only served briefly in the Civil War. But.
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Ayesha Rascoe
There are so many Civil War novels. Why did you want to write this one?
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Denard Dale
So it had a lot more to do with my own fixation than necessarily some kind of critique of the existing canon. Though, you know, most Civil War novels are written by serious people. So I think I bring something very unique on that term, this sort of catch 22 by way of the 1860s.
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Ayesha Rascoe
Talk to us about Anders, because he is this kind of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn type character and he's white, and that's like a big part of this.
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Denard Dale
So Anders voice was kind of one of the main impetuses for me writing this. He is someone who has this. He has this narrow experience. He has these very tilted viewpoints coming at him. He's trying to sort this information. I mean, he is deluded, but the reason is he does not really have a better bank of information to work from. And then he is just thrown into the pool of the world. And he is essentially learning about the world, unfortunately, in the most active, bullet ridden, high risk way possible. You know, sometimes when you write comedy, it's nice to go with sort of a pure fool or a pure idiot. But with him, I tried to do someone who had a lot of strong sort of, I guess you'd say, quantitative or mechanical intelligence, but was just not equipped for the social maelstrom that he is being thrown into, especially at his age. He is convinced that his tiny slice of this war, you know, maintaining morale, performing for soldiers, is the most important thing.
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Ayesha Rascoe
He takes it very seriously, and he is, like, very critical of others who try to do it.
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Denard Dale
Oh, yeah. His ego is wrapped all the way around this thing in his head. He is the Mozart of spinning this flagpole around.
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Ayesha Rascoe
And it seems like Anders, his primary motivation at first is to survive, because, you know, the thing about it is he twirls for the Union, then he switches sides, and he twirls for the Confederates, and then he switches back to twirl for the Union, but this time, he attaches himself to a black regiment, and then he goes around telling everyone he's an octoroon. None of the black soldiers really buy it, but they just kind of let him in. Why do you think they accept him?
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Denard Dale
So right off the bat, it is clear that this kid who has no idea what he's doing, is a breed of misfit. And they are in this extremely unenviable position where they are being told they have to, you know, fight to earn or deserve their freedom. That's sort of an idea I interrogate throughout all this, and I think being in that position gives them a little more sympathy than they might have otherwise. And this one figure, Gleeson, who he calls himself a scientific playwright, he's kind of a Jules Verne. It's very important that he meets Gleeson first because he's someone who's a very true believer in America, as pitched in earning this place in America, that this is the moment for black America, that it can all be okay from here, and that affects how he treats. This kid comes in, just runs in shouting, hi, I'm an octoroon. And he just sort of nods along like, okay, I can work with this.
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Ayesha Rascoe
Anders also kind of unwittingly discovers this plot that's happening while the Civil War rages. And there's this showdown with a surprise bad guy, Wendy Ross, the daughter of Betsy Ross. It turns out she's a master flag twirler. Can you read a little bit from their flag twirling smackdown?
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Denard Dale
He started with a crouched walk, the eagle sweeping the pole under his foot and hopping over. Wendy matched it. She performed a Varial flag spin. He matched it. Anders performed a Delaware crossing, spinning the pole on his left knee while imitating Washington's.
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Ayesha Rascoe
Favorite pose is this kind of like a, you know, you've been served type thing.
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Denard Dale
That is exactly the frame I essentially took the type of movements you would do in breaking or b boying. And I used a lot of sort of stylistic affectations or vocabulary style of skateboarding. Like, you know, it says varial slag spin.
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Ayesha Rascoe
Okay.
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Denard Dale
It's just like a game of skate, basically. And they have this whole ideological thing behind it because I'll be careful of the spoilers, but she has a very particular, insane position that she is sort of pitching through the medium of this flag twirling thing at him. But she has a retro perspective on what the country is and where it should go. And it is kind of a thread that underlies a lot of the psychology of long term politics in America. You can still sort of see it play out in very strange ways today, essentially this royalist streak. And Anders essentially has to come in and try to represent this sort of baseline sanity for the people that are, you know, living day to day here.
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Ayesha Rascoe
Yeah. Well, what do you think about Gleason's view that this was the moment? Because it wasn't the moment. It was a moment. It did end slavery, but it really wasn't the moment that Gleason was hoping it would be for black people.
- [17:55]
Denard Dale
You know, it's one of the core tensions cause you and I sitting on the perch of history, which I have the convenience of writing this book from, we see the whole long road and the dogs and the sharecroppers and any given headline last week ahead. At the same time, there's this tension because you do in a way need these people that have this strive or this sort of purist belief to make whatever gains you make after kind of.
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Ayesha Rascoe
Plumbing the aspects of American identity. You know, in writing this book, has. Has your sense changed of whether a more perfect union is possible or are we, you know, kind of doomed to keep reliving this stuff?
- [18:39]
Denard Dale
So when I fell all the way into the rabbit hole of researching and preparing for this book, I think I was actually a little surprised by how I don't know everything. There's always like a sub viewpoint or a sub faction. Like it's all very chaotic. And in a way it was less samey than I expected. And I think that's a good reminder that this is a place of a relatively short history. These are not immutable things. And I think that's half why a lot of us care or even bother is that we sense that this is a nascent culture that is influenceable. I actually do believe that we can get far better or far worse. We are not necessarily on track for the status quo.
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Ayesha Rascoe
Yeah, that's Denard Dale. His new book is how to Dodge a Cannonball. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [19:29]
Denard Dale
I really appreciate this. This was a great conversation.
- [19:33]
Andrew Limbong
And that's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. Let us know what you think. You can write to us@bookofthedaypr.org I'm Andrew Limbong. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Adriana Gallardo, Iman Mani, Melissa Gray, Ilana Torick, Julie Deppenbrock, Ed McNulty, Samantha Balaban, Ashley Brown and Jeffrey Pierre. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.
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Charles Schwab
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- [20:30]
Viking
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