← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
709 Black American Humor (with Damon Young) | The Greatest American Joke Ever Told?
01:31:52
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
- [00:09]
Damon Young
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Unnamed Speaker
My daughter's room is pretty bare. We need a lamp, some comfy pillows, her favorite stuffy dad with pickup options.
- [00:52]
Damon Young
We've got what you need to conveniently order Ikea literally anywhere. Sweet. More time for gaming and studying.
- [00:59]
Unnamed Speaker
Wait, where are you going now?
- [01:00]
Damon Young
Have to show the ultimate Frisbee team how easy it is to order from Ikea. Get Ikea whenever, wherever, however you want. Choose from thousands of pickup locations, affordable delivery options, and more.
- [01:09]
Jack Wilson
Hello, Today on the podcast we attempt to answer the question, what is Black American humor? And how is that different if it is from American humor or just humor humor? And would that distinction, if we can find it, help us understand a designation like Black American literature? We'll talk to Pittsburgh writer, humorist, and now editor of a new anthology of Black American humor, Damon Young, to find out. Plus, Jack nominates a joke for the greatest American joke ever told. All coming up today on the History of Literature. Okay, here we go.
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Unnamed Speaker
Welcome to the podcast.
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Jack Wilson
I'm Jack Wilson. That was me. I don't know why I referred to myself in the third person before. I am Jack Wilson, the host of the show. Today's going to be one of those days where we cover a lot of ground and remember this. I can only say one thing at a time and people listen to a little bit and then say, but you forgot this, Jack. Or what about that? Keep in mind that I'm trying to cover all the arguments and counter arguments in kind of an exploration. It's not that I'm forgetting the exceptions and the caveats. It's that that this would make a good topic for a dialogue where you and I could hash things out together. But the podcast medium is a monologue. Even when I'm talking to a guest, the listener, you. You don't really get a chance to weigh in and say, well, don't forget about X. Or that's not true in the case of Y. I get it. I get it. A friend of mine who listens to the show calls me up every couple of months and says, jack, listen. No, no, just listen. You don't need to say anything. I just need to talk at you for a minute. I've had hours in the car where you've been talking at me on your podcast, and all I can do is shout back at the speaker, but you can't hear me, so just let me talk. Lol. There are thousands of you out there waiting to talk back. Tens of thousands. I suppose. People are passionate. First question on our topic today, a threshold question. Should we even have these categories? Especially in America? Aren't we a melting pot, not a colorful mosaic? Doesn't it reduce Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Norman Mailer to be called Jewish American writers? Why can't they just be American writers or just writers? We talk about this all the time. Why isn't so and so recognized as the best such and such? Why do we have to say the best woman doctor? Why not just the best doctor? Well, a couple of responses to that. First, I didn't talk to Damon about this. It's an interesting question that we don't cover. But the anthology is not Black American Humorists. It's Black American Humor. We're not designating individuals here. We're trying to find some kind of category. We're not trying to limit anybody or put them into some box. We're trying to find out if there's such a thing as Black American humor. Just as we wonder about Black American literature, if so, what is it? What unites it? Where does it come from? Can we trace its origins? Can we notice anything unusual or special about it? What are the distinguishing features? And we care about these questions because it's the nature of this podcast. The history of literature. It's one of our core tenets to say if we understand something better, we can appreciate it more. I can't play the piano at all. My kids have been playing the piano all their lives. They can hear things in music that I can't. I heard a pop song one day on the radio, and I said, oh, man, what the heck was that? Why does that part there sound so good? And my son looked up from his phone and said, they flattened the seventh. Oh, okay. Don't mind me. I've just been listening to that song for the last 40 years. I did not know they flattened the seventh. Thank you. Go Back to your phone. I'll be over here trying to listen. And part of me just wants to listen, so to speak, to leave it at that. When we ask a question about something like Black American humor, in some ways, I do talk about this with Damon. In some ways, this kind of approach is the wrong way to analyze Black American humor or any type of humor. The anthology has a few dozen pieces in it. Why not just read them? I think when I'm talking with Damon, I draw an analogy to a museum full of art. You can stand outside the museum talking about the art inside it. What are the features? What distinctive characteristics? What can we say about the artists who made it? What do they all share? How are they the same? How are they different? How does this art compare to the art in the museum down the street? Or you can just buy a ticket and go inside and look at the art, experience it for yourself. Instead of talking about the pieces, just read them. Instead of saying, oh, they flattened the seventh I with my clunky ears, if ears can be clunky, I could just listen to the song and think, wow, that note sounds so weird and good, so perfect in that spot. Surprising but inevitable. We don't always need to know how the magicians do their tricks. We can sit in the audience and gasp and smile, or we can read a humor anthology and laugh. That's the great thing about humor. It has a litmus test. Do we find it funny? Do we laugh? But there is a difference, isn't there, between slapstick and wry humor, between fart jokes and witnesses, between Woody Allen's neurosis and George Carlin's righteous, wordy anger. And don't we want to know what makes all of those things tick a little bit? When we're done reading a novel that moves us and makes us think, we want to know, what exactly was that magic that did that? And when we finish watching Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock or Richard Pryor, we want to know, why was I laughing at that? Or maybe I laughed at some parts, but not others. Why was that? What does that say about me? Or about the humor that unlocks me? Is there a way to explore this thing I find funny as a way to appreciate it more, A way to understand it in the spirit of celebration, not reduction. We've looked at this before in a lot of contexts, but one that comes to mind, Asian American literature. Try teaching a class in Asian American literature sometime. You'll have a student who just arrived in the States and speaks English as a second language, another one who went to high school and speaks it quite well. And another one whose family has been here for four generations and who speaks no other language, mixed race kids, people who trace their origins back to China and Korea and Japan, but also India and Indonesia and the Philippines. They're all here, Asian Americans. What unites all of them? Does it say? Does anything unite all of them? Now you could say, well, they're at least united by the way they're treated by the dominant culture, white people mostly, who maybe aren't drawing many fine distinctions among the subcategories, the groups. And that gives these people something in common. And maybe that's true to some extent, but that's a little unsatisfying because we know they might not all have been treated the same way, depending on how they look and where they grew up and their level of English and what their relationship to America really is, their financial circumstances, their home life. It's not so easy to say that they've all been treated a certain way. Someone from Los Angeles and someone from Omaha, Nebraska, or rural Wyoming. And also, haven't we given the dominant culture enough space? Haven't they already made enough decisions? Do we need to let them define others, too? Nobody wants to like, who are you? Well, let me tell you who I'm not, and let me tell you how others think I am. Don't we have some self definition? Can't we find something? Or can we find something within those groups that make us say, hey, hey. This is what stands out. This is something inherent. This is a piece in that colorful mosaic we used to hear about all the time. Here's a bright little tile. Or hey, maybe it is a melting pot. Maybe that's the metaphor you prefer. But guess what? Here's an ingredient that has added something on its own. It has this quality. Let's recognize that and celebrate it. So those are some ideas in my head as I go into this conversation with Damon Young, who has edited this anthology of Black American humor. I want to talk about the book, but I'm fascinated mostly by his introduction where he talks about this in the context of Black American humor. As a Black American humorist himself, is Black American humor. What are the tendencies? What are the features? Is it highbrow? Is it low brow? Is it all brow? Is there something he's found in thinking about this and gathering these pieces and getting them ready to present to the world? He's the museum curator, standing in the lobby, proud of his work inside and probably hoping that we can just go look for ourselves, but also willing to Answer some questions as museum curators do. Give us a tour, put together an essay for the exhibit's catalog, do the work of trying to analyze and explain. One should probably not be thought about too much. This stuff is funny. It makes us laugh. Let's stop there. But. But we also kind of want to know what we're getting. It's going to make me laugh how? And it's going to make me laugh why? An anthology of Black American humor. What can we say about it? What does that mean? And am I even talking about this the right way? In one spot here, I talk about a couple of Chris Rock jokes, and then I only mention one of them before our conversation goes elsewhere. So I'll tell you the other Chris Rock joke now that I was thinking of and tell you why I was going to talk about it and why I was wrong. In his introduction, Damon talks about humor that's not black American humor, but just humor humor. And I thought, well, there we go. Here's an idea that should help me get what I'm trying to get at here. What if we can isolate the humor humor humor. That would be universal, that's completely stripped of identity, and then we can compare that against black American humor. We'd have sort of a control group to find this humor humor. How do we find an example of humor humor? Well, what if we look to jokes told by a black American humorist, but see if there's nothing particularly black or even American about them? A joke that lives independently of its speaker. And I thought of a couple of Chris Rock jokes that I've remembered all these years later, after watching the specials in the late 1990s or early 2000s, I can't remember. I guess it was probably early 2000. Anyway, one of them. One of the jokes seemed like it was definitely black American humor. It was about being black and being American, and it was directed at white Americans. I've remembered it all this time, and I think it might be the greatest joke ever told in America about Americans. The greatest American joke ever. It's so crisp and concise and incisive. It makes its point. It's a very deep point, but it's also funny, shockingly funny. People gasp and then they laugh. I'll save that one for the discussion with Damon. You'll hear me present it to him as my candidate for the greatest American joke of all time. It's clearly something you'd call black American humor. But the other joke that I recalled was one that I laughed at. And I remember people quoting and so on it was also kind of shocking because it was about a school shooting, which is not ordinarily funny. It's horrible and tragic, of course, but in the hands of a humorist, that's their job. They make the unfunny funny. They shock us with truths about topics we didn't know we'd laugh about. We laugh in spite of everything we know and in spite of what we think is proper, the humorists pull it out of us. And the joke was something like, those shooters in Columbine, what's wrong with them? They're crying that they don't have any friends. There were six of them. I didn't have six friends in high school. I don't have six friends now. That's how I remembered the joke. And I was thinking, well, now, is that the kind of joke that's not necessarily. It's probably an American joke, unfortunately, with the school shootings. But is that a black American joke? Is that what. Or is that what Damon might call humor humor? I could imagine a white person, an Asian person, a man, a woman, an American, maybe a Canadian, whoever. I could imagine others delivering that joke. The premise of the joke is that a group of kids claim that they don't have any friends, but there was a whole group of them. Most high schoolers struggle to find a group of people and grown ups, too. The humor comes from that observation. So there, there I had my example. Maybe this is humor humor and we can look at other Chris Rock jokes to see where the black American humor is and see if there's a difference. But luckily I didn't just go from my memory because my memory had failed me, had whitewashed the joke, you might say, pun pretty much intended. I don't even know if that's a pun. Here, here's what Chris Rock actually said, the full joke. Actually, wait, before we get to that, let's step back a bit because I also did some research into the best American jokes. I googled the phrase, see what the Internet would come up with. And the first article that came up was from Reader's Digest and it was called what are America's 10 funniest jokes? Well, here we go. Here we go. Here's some examples I could maybe use for my control group. And we won't read all 10. I'm just going to read the first one, which will give you a sense of what they come up with, the sense of what I'm after in the sense that it's not what I'm after. So Reader's Digest convened a Panel of eight comic legends and asked them to come up with America's 10 Best Jokes. And this was the first one on the list. A man, shocked by how his buddy is dressed, asks him, how long have you been wearing that bra? The friend replies, ever since my wife found it in the glove compartment. Okay, very Reader's Digest. Slightly risque, not controversial. They're not trying to be Richard Pryor here, but is that an American joke? It's an American joke if Americans tell it. And Americans find it funny. Funny, I suppose. But that joke could also be told in Poland, couldn't it? Or Australia or Norway. It probably was told there before it was told in America. Does it say something specific about Americans? Maybe a little, indirectly, maybe. It says that husbands like sneaking around, but they're afraid to get caught by their wives. That old. That old tale. And this taps into that tension. I suppose maybe this is how American marriages are supposed to be, or close enough to that that that's supposed to be funny. But that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a joke that's specific to America. A great American joke. How about this one? Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? That's a very American joke, right? It doesn't really make sense elsewhere. People know what it means. Probably. I think enough people are familiar with the story of Abraham Lincoln, but Abe Lincoln, the revered former president? It makes more sense to Americans because it's a bit irreverent. And we all grew up learning about Lincoln, the great president, and the assassination. And the shock of having the assassination downplayed gives it some juice, which is a little more funny for Americans, I think, because the shock is a little more direct. We are willing to laugh even at our sacred figures. That says a little something about American Americans. But that's not really what I'm going for either. If I'm going to call something the best American joke ever, or saying that I don't even think this is an American joke. I'm looking for something that tells you what I'm looking for, right? I'm looking for something that goes into America's psyche, into the dark layers, the dark past, and finds humor there. That would be a great American joke. And the same for black American humor is a knock knock joke. A black American joke. If black people tell it and black people laugh at it, well, come on in. The tent is big. You tell the jokes, and then we'll do the job of analyzing it for what it is. We don't rule things out in advance. Our job is to laugh, first of all, and recognize and analyze secondarily. Your mama jokes could be told in any society, but it's revealing that they're told specifically in black communities often and with a kind of shared understanding. There's a community there telling those jokes. Sociologists can write their theses on exactly what that means, and the rest of us can speculate. But I'm not going to do that here. Let's turn to the Chris Rock joke. Remember that? I was looking for a joke that isn't a black joke, Just a humor, humor. A piece of humor, humor. And I remembered that he made a good joke about not having friends. I didn't remember the full context.
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Unnamed Speaker
But.
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Jack Wilson
Then I looked it up. Here it is. I'm going to edit it a little bit, and I'm not going to deliver it in the Chris Rock style, which I'm sure will take away a lot of its comedic power. But we're just focused on the words here. Hopefully you've seen this before, or you could look it up and listen to Chris Rock deliver it. Trust me when I tell you that is very funny. In the Chris Rock special, people laugh. People called me up to tell me about it. They quoted it to me on the phone. I've remembered it 25 or so years later, and it still makes me laugh. And as you'll see, I was wrong to think it might just be humor. Humor is very much about whiteness and blackness in America. Here's Chris Rock. He says, you know, I was just in my hotel a little while ago on my way here, and I got in the elevator, right? I'm getting in the elevator, and these two high school white boys try to get on with me. And I just dove off. I said, y' all ain't killing me. I am scared of young white boys. If you white and under 21, I am running for the hills. What the hell is wrong with these white kids shooting up the school? The trench coat mafia. No one will play with us. We have no friends. We're the trench coat mafia. Hey, I saw the yearbook pictures. It was six of them. I didn't have six friends in high school. I don't got six friends now. What the hell is wrong with these kids? Damn, the world's coming to an end. You'll have little white kids saying, I want to go to a black school where it's safe. So there we go. I mostly remembered the six friends part, which resonated. But I see in context that this is not a good example of a joke. This just humor, humor. It still makes me laugh, but it comes from an observational angle that's more than just. These high school kids don't realize that high school is tough for everyone. They were ridiculous in wanting more friends. When even someone Chris Rock's age doesn't have six friends. Come on, you're not going to have 50 friends or 100 friends. But Chris Rock goes further. In Rock's rendition, he steers us toward another idea, which is to say that these white kids want everything. They have six friends and they're still aggrieved. They're in a society where they think they're entitled to more and more and more, with no limits, with a little coda, white kids will want to go to a black school where it's safe. Because that's the other premise under this, the other idea underneath the joke, maybe the main one. America takes as a given this fear of black kids and black people. We demonize them on TV and the news and throughout culture, and we assume that black schools will be dangerous, full of violence. But look at the race of the kids shooting up a school. Chris Rock knows and is willing to say that we have a society that takes as a given that little white kids are expected to feel safe in their schools and be afraid of black schools. We can even go back one step from that. We have a society that, for all its rhetoric, even has white schools and black schools. So much for the melting pot. That's the James Baldwin point, right, where he says, I don't know what's in the hearts and minds of American Christians, but I know there are white churches and black churches. And Chris Rock says, we have a society that has white schools and black schools. Those exist. And it's taken as a given that little white kids are expected to be thinking, I want to go to a white school where it's safe, or I don't want to go to a black school where it's not safe. And he turns that on its head to punctuate his routine about some white shooters who made the white school horrendously not safe. The observational position of Chris Rock, Black American, and the delivery system of Chris Rock, Black American, made these jokes what they are. So then I thought about another black American humorist that I grew up with, Bill Cosby, who, until his scandals, was huge, huge as a humorist, as an American humorist, as a black American humorist. Different from Richard and Eddie and Chris for sure. But was he so different that you'd call his humor American? Humor, or even just humor. Humor. Could his routines have been delivered by anyone? He was a, quote unquote, family friendly comic. Clearly he was interested in reaching out to a broader audience. As wide as possible, I would think, was his mission. And I said wide with a D and not white with a T. Although some might argue that it was essentially the same thing. In the 60s and 70s and 80s when Bill Cosby was becoming America's dad and all that. I thought about his famous routine Noah, the exchange between God and Noah, which I had on cassette, listened to all the time. I went back and, and looked at that routine and it does seem to my memory wasn't faulty there. It does seem to be stripped of anything that you might call identity. There's nothing in particular about being white or being black in that routine. If you've been to church, you'll get it. Or even if you haven't, the jokes are pretty much there for you no matter who you are. They're jokes about the story of Noah and his ark from a position of anyone who's not particularly religious or who is religious but believes that even religious people can find humor in stories in the Bible, things God asks us to do, and how they might sound to someone who's hearing them for the first time. That's the premise of the joke. Not white or black people in the Noah routine, but people people. But I don't know how far that takes us because who would have thought that such a thing as humor, humor doesn't exist. That's a straw man argument. And anyway, isn't this black American humor too? The Noah routine? I mean, it's Bill Cosby, he's still black. Our tent has to be big. We can't draw lines and say that a writer who is Jewish and an American and a writer is not a Jewish American writer just because they don't write specifically about those topics or those communities. Because people who reject their communities or are not part of them or who choose not to talk about them, who would rather keep certain topics out of their message, they're also significant. That's also something we can analyze and learn from. Nobody wants to be included or excluded. And I don't want to be the one drawing the lines including or excluding. But there's something a little more black about Chris and Rock and Eddie than there is about Bill Cosby. Right again, this is pre scandal Bill Cosby. This is all before we knew what was actually going on. Maybe I shouldn't say something more black about them as if I'm talking about them as people, but their humor. I mean, Chris's concert I've been quoting from is called Bigger and Blacker. I don't think Bill Cosby has an album or a concert called anything like that. Richard Pryor, all his albums. I mean, we don't need to go too far into the routines themselves. You see it right from the titles. Bill Cosby's first album is called Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow. Right. That's from the Noah routine. The word right is what punctuates all of the jokes there. But Bill Cosby is a very funny fellow. And Richard Pryor's first album is called Richard Pryor. The first track is called Super N Word. His third album is that N Word's crazy. They're going for different things. Two years later, 1976. Richard Pryor's album is called Bicentennial N Word. Bill Cosby's albums are called Things Like Fatherhood and Himself. Now, was Bicentennial N Word an album for me, a white kid in rural Wisconsin? Well, I was five years old when it came out. My parents weren't going to let me listen to it, no matter how much it was intended for me or not. But what about now, when I'm old enough to listen to it myself? Of course it's for me. Even if a novel is by black people and aimed at black readers, or if it's by women and aimed at women readers, or if it's by Russians for Russian readers, I might not be in any of those audiences. It's still for me. Of course it is. It has to be that way. Shakespeare wasn't writing with me in mind. An American in 2025. How could he have been? He had no idea I would even exist. He wrote for his audience, whatever that was, and I get to eavesdrop on the conversation. And if he was any good, there's a universality that I can tap into that I'll recognize or that will recognize me. See me. If he's good, I'll learn about his audience so I can better understand him and what he was up to. If I can approach this literature or this humor with an open mind, I'm going to learn something about the people who write, where they come from and what they care about and how they talk and what they talk about, in this case, what makes them laugh, and whether it's directed at me, as Chris Rock's routines often are. Hey, white people, I'm here to deliver some truths. Or if it's told as if it's a nightclub full of black folks. And if it's or if it's an essay written by some black guy or gal about things that they don't expect anyone to really understand except other black people, it's still for me. I still do the same thing that I do when I read any author, even ones where my demographics line up with theirs. What does this do for me? What do I learn about some fellow human beings? What do I learn about myself if it's a black writer that doesn't shut me out? And there might be points of shared experience. We might be the same age or grew up where where winters were cold or have other things in common. Maybe we had grandparents who lived through the Depression, or we remember the first time that we sent an email or had a pimple that made us embarrassed. Or maybe not. Maybe we have nothing in common other than being alive on this planet. But that too is enough. I can appreciate Perspectives Far Away and Very Close An Anthology of Black American Humor. Yes, please let me read it. I am very interested. So, feeling like I've talked too long about this trip to the museum and the curator is waiting patiently, so let's let him tell us about the collection, what's in it and what it was like putting it together. Damon Young after this.
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Damon Young
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- [32:05]
Jack Wilson
My day kicks off with a refreshing.
- [32:06]
Damon Young
Celsius energy drink, then straight to the gym.
- [32:09]
Unnamed Speaker
Pre K pickup back home to meal prep.
- [32:11]
Damon Young
Time for my fire station shift. One more Celsius. Gotta keep the lights on when the.
- [32:16]
Unnamed Speaker
Three alarm hits I'm ready Celsius Live Fit. Go grab a cold refreshing Celsius at.
- [32:22]
Damon Young
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- [33:12]
Unnamed Speaker
Okay. Joining me now is Damon Young, who is a Pittsburgh writer whose debut memoir, what Doesn't Kill youl Makes yous A Memoir in Essays won the James Thurber.
- [33:23]
Jack Wilson
Prize for American Humor.
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Unnamed Speaker
Damon has written for the Washington Post Magazine, the New York Times, and gq. And he's here today to discuss his.
- [33:31]
Jack Wilson
New book, that's How they get you, An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor, which he edited.
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Unnamed Speaker
Damon Young, welcome to the History of Literature.
- [33:40]
Hey, thanks for having me.
- [33:42]
So your book, you wrote the introduction for your book, and it opens with an exchange between Lumpy and Var that I was hoping we could explore a bit so we can tee up some of the themes and the topics we're going to talk about today.
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Jack Wilson
Who was Lumpy and who was Var, and what was their exchange?
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Unnamed Speaker
Okay, so the intro, I gave a bit of background about just my history, my relationship with humor, my relationship with writing humor, and my relationship with actually consuming humor. My parents allowed me to watch when I was a preteen, all of the half hour specials on hbo, deaf comedy, Comic View. I was reading Mad Magazine. You know, they let me watch, like, Andrew Dice Clay, which probably maybe they shouldn't have, right? So I consumed all of that, right? And obviously all the TV shows, all the sitcoms, too, and tried to read funny books when I could. And the story that I start with is about a person named levar, Levar Butler, who I still maintain of all of that content, all of that awareness, all of the things that I've consumed. He is the funniest person that I've ever met, the funniest person I've ever heard, right? And I start the book with a story about we were all playing on this rec league basketball team, okay? And we were all like 13, you know, 13, 14 years old. And this was mid-90s Pittsburgh. And during this time, gangs seemingly came out of nowhere and just took over the entire city, or at least the parts of the city that we lived in where you had Bloods, you had Crips, and you had another gang called the Law. And one of my teammates, this kid Lumpy, I changed his name for the book, this kid named Lumpy, all of a sudden just joined the Crips. And this happened frequently where you had kids who were just regular kids doing the same shit that you did, playing you know, watching Ren and Stimpy and Beavis and Butthead and playing Contra and Double Dribble on Nintendo and, you know, being scared to talk to girls.
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Jack Wilson
All. All of that.
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Unnamed Speaker
All the same things that 12, 13, 14 year olds do. Right? And then a week later, so, oh, yeah, I'm a Crip now. It's like, what? Like what? What happened? And so, on a bus ride to one of the games, Lumpy said something about his Cripping was talking. Whatever.
- [36:06]
Yeah.
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And Var had enough. Var was like, dude, shut up. You're not a. And Lumpy came back, man, you know, I'll do. And Var was like, man, you're an instant oatmeal Crip. Right? It's like someone added water to your ass and boom. Instant Crip. Go get some toast. My. And. And when he said that, sometimes when, you know, when. When. When the thing reaches a certain level of humor, people don't even actually laugh.
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Yeah.
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You get quiet.
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Right, Right.
- [36:37]
And it's like this silence where you are. You're verifying what you just heard, right. You're like, what? Did he just say what I think he just said? Did he just go where I think he just went, Right. And so the buses fell silent. I don't even remember people laughing. It was such an explosive joke. And again, it's something that, you know, and I say this in the intro, too, is that he was able to articulate our collective exasperation with, like, you know, just gangs coming out of nowhere and people that we knew from playing basketball, playing football, going to school, who are now in gangs. And it just felt like, yeah, this is whack. And Var, you know, just had the perfect thing to say.
- [37:25]
He had the perfect thing to say, and he wasn't afraid to say it.
- [37:29]
And he wasn't afraid to say it.
- [37:30]
Right.
- [37:31]
And Lumpy ended up quitting the Crips like, a month later.
- [37:35]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [37:36]
Unnamed Speaker
Because he knew he was exposed.
- [37:39]
Jack Wilson
And.
- [37:40]
Unnamed Speaker
But. But from then on, you said he was known to everyone as Oatmeal.
- [37:43]
Yes.
- [37:46]
So when I read that story, I'm glad you told the background to it, because I think it's important for the point I'm going to try to make. So when I read the story, it reminded me of a basketball player on my team in high school. And this kid wasn't the best player, but he would kind of get in for two minutes at the end of the half or something, and he would somehow take five or six shots while he was in the game, and our best player would maybe only Shoot two or three times in the half, and then suddenly this guy would come in and he'd be shooting from everywhere. And my dad said, you ever notice.
- [38:23]
Jack Wilson
How he's always in range?
- [38:25]
Unnamed Speaker
It doesn't matter where he is on the court, he's in range. And I told my friends that, and we just laughed at how appropriate it was. And from then on, he was known as range. And he, you know, he'd sign people's yearbooks and he'd sign it range. And he still emails me and he'll sign it range.
- [38:44]
That's perfect.
- [38:44]
And so I thought, well, what, you know, there's something universal about your story where it's the perfect thing to say. It's kind of recognizing something about somebody and giving them this label that sticks. And all of that is kind of universal. But if we're looking for, well, what separates, I think you call it just humor from black humor. And I see all of the overlay of the neighborhood you were growing up in and the. The experience of these gangs, and like you said, the people who were, you know, the kind of exasperation and the confusion of like, well, what is happening when people who I've known for years will suddenly join this gang? And I think those are the elements you would probably say would separate it from humor and give it what we might call black humor.
- [39:39]
Well, I think yes, to a point, because. And I think I make this point also in intro, where it's not just about the reaction to those pretty traumatic circumstances. Right. Black humor doesn't necessarily stem exclusively from those sorts of situations. My belief is that it comes from honesty. It comes from having to be honest about America in a way that other people just don't necessarily have to be.
- [40:07]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [40:07]
Unnamed Speaker
And when you have been, you know, vulnerable community for the centuries that you've been here, then it just makes you more tuned, you know what I mean? More cognizant, more aware and less willing to be seduced by whatever American dream, whatever lies, whatever. Whatever people need to do in order to kind of get them through the day and make themselves feel more quote, unquote, American. And so it comes from that sort of honesty. Right. And honesty that is a survival mechanism because we don't necessarily have the luxury of lies, of lies about who we are in this country, about what this country is. And so best human is cliche, but it's true. Where the best humor comes from honesty. And again, I think I say this in the intro. It doesn't matter if you are from the Baltimore Nehru, you're from Bel Air or you're from Birmingham, wherever. I do believe that black Americans have a unique perspective about the country, about the people in this country. And I think that that right there is what makes our humor unique. And it allows us to go places that other people maybe can't or won't.
- [41:19]
It's like your observational skills have been developed in a way and that you're seeing things for what they are and maybe developing the social skills to survive or to cope or to. To feel like you're. You're not going insane and being gaslit and sometimes maybe to defuse a situation or. But it develops. Like your friend Var had these razor sharp observational powers.
- [41:48]
Yeah, Var. I mean, there was a time, and I didn't even say this in the, in the book, where we all went to the same summer camp one year and Var was known. Everyone knew Varr had jokes and was the funniest. But like, I remember this one time, me and my friend Brian, you know, we were hanging out with Var and we just tested him. We were like, okay, say something about, say something funny about Brian's shirt. And Brian was wearing like a gray T shirt. And Var look at him and was like, you out of order TV shirt wearing. And it's like, oh, okay, you. You're able to do it. He did that in about five seconds. Yeah, probably less than five seconds. Maybe two. Okay. And again, it's not the funniest thing on earth, but the fact that he was able to think of something cool quick. Right. And that's a joke that actually might even be obsolete today because are there out of order TVs? Is that a thing that even exists today? When the TV breaks, it just goes black. It doesn't become like this scrambled.
- [42:43]
Yeah.
- [42:44]
Where you got to hit it on top of it or thing. It just, it just. Yeah, you just need a new TV or something. And I brought up Var also because I think that I definitely fell victim to, you know, there's certain kinds of respectability. Right. We're thinking that a certain type of humor was more high brow, more literary, more intellectual. I appreciate it and still appreciate, like, I feel and, and Frasier and sort of humor that is considered like highbrow or whatever. Right. And that's also a very classed. Like when you think of highbrow humor, you think upper middle class, you probably think like mid Atlantic New York. You know, that might be the first association. But then there are other, other ways of appreciating that or acknowledging that too. You know, I think the Title of my intro is Black Humor. It's every brow. And there were times when I was, you know, much, much younger where if I was trying to impress someone with my, with like my command of humor or like my taste or my sensibility, I would name drop or I would reference something from Satfield or reference something from Fraser or reference something from a Woody Allen movie instead of referencing something from Chris Rock or Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy or Paul Mooney or Whoopi Goldberg when she still did stand up or, or whatever. And, you know, I got older, I got out of that and recognized it for, For I, I guess the logical fallacy in a way that it is. And also the danger of internalizing that, that sort of, you know, that sort of politic. And I wanted to include VAR in this intro because VARS is a perfect example of a kid who was 14, 15 years old and had this razor sharp sensibility, had all the elements, all of the elements of what people consider highbrow, of what people consider. He had all of it, right? And he could do slapstick and he could do physical comedy, right? And to be able to have all of that is a form of genius. I recognized it as a teenager, but it wasn't until, like, I was probably in my 20s, maybe even early 30s, that I was like, oh, he isn't just the funniest person that I ever met. He is one of the smartest people I've ever met too. If he's able to turn things around that quickly, make these insights and also articulate them in a way that made sense. And also, you know, as I say in the intro too, he had a. One of the quote unquote rules of comedy is that you're not supposed to punch down, right? And he didn't. He wasn't one of those people who bullied. He didn't pick on people. He gave it to people who deserved it, right? And. Or people who have more status than him or people who were bigger than him or whatever. He didn't go at, you know, easy targets because that just like, where is the fun and where is the humor in that?
- [45:33]
Jack Wilson
Right?
- [45:34]
Unnamed Speaker
Where's the risk? And going at the easy target.
- [45:38]
One of the things that struck me about your introduction is when you're talking about the. I guess it would be the highbrow comedy of Seinfeld and Larry David and Woody Allen and so on, and you say we've kind of turned that into. That it's governed by neurosis, and we've kind of turned that into a white.
- [45:57]
Jack Wilson
People thing or a rich white person thing?
- [46:00]
Unnamed Speaker
Because it seems like, well, who else, you know, who else has the luxury of being so self obsessed or who would have the time to worry about these minor things in other people's lives? If you're out there struggling to survive, you maybe don't have the freedom to be able to care about the kinds of things that Woody Allen might obsess about or something. But that's kind of a misnomer, I guess, or kind of a mistaken conception.
- [46:30]
Yeah. And who would be more neurotic than like a, than like a 13 year old kid who wakes up one morning, there are gangs everywhere.
- [46:39]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [46:39]
Unnamed Speaker
And has a, has to learn. Okay. How do I navigate these streets? What am I supposed to wear? Who, who can I be cool with? Who am I allowed to talk to? Where am I supposed to go? Who is going to be more cognizant of manners? Who's going to be more aware of diction and of lexicon and of etiquette.
- [46:56]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [46:57]
Unnamed Speaker
Because you know, at this point those sort of things could be, you know, a thing that prevents you from being in an actually violent situation. And so you have to learn those things or not just learn them, but you have to enhance whatever base that you already had quickly. Right. And, and again, that neurosis is something that, yeah, I think generally when, when people, and I said, and when I say people, I mean like mainstream people think of someone who is neurotic. You associate people being neurotic with people being smart. And one of the more violent, racially motivated stereotypes is that black people don't necessarily have the same intellectual capacity as other races of people. And so being erotic is something that, oh, why would a black person be neurotic? Because what does he have to be anxious about? Or what does he have to be particular about? And so again, even say that out loud, it's like, it's like, of course we're human beings, so of course.
- [47:56]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [47:56]
Unnamed Speaker
We're going to experience the same. But I know that those feelings that, that those thoughts, even if people don't necessarily express them out loud, are things that do exist. And, and some people's heads. Right. And, and again that, that messaging could be so strong that it can exist in our heads sometimes too. And you have to do the work to subvert that, to extract that sometimes some people haven't done that work. And I think one of the things about this intro and also about the collection is that it's a product of that work being done. Right. And you know, I have 24 different contributors in this. All of them are like, they're so vastly different and with vastly different perspectives and vastly different forms that they choose to write about. Some people are writing things that are more overtly funny. Like, even the intros are funny. Even the titles are funny. Other people are, you know, written things that are a bit more ruminative. Right. And all of that fits in the spectrum of black American humor.
- [49:00]
Jack Wilson
And there must be.
- [49:00]
Unnamed Speaker
I mean, I've prepared all these questions that are kind of trying to get at these questions about black humor and what's the difference between humor and black humor and so on.
- [49:09]
Jack Wilson
But.
- [49:09]
Unnamed Speaker
But in some ways, you must feel like you're the ticket taker at this museum. And we're trying to analyze paintings and say, well, what can you tell me about the paintings? And what you're probably tempted to say is, like, well, why don't you just come inside and take a look at these? Then you get the analysis. You can do your own analysis. These are like. You can tell me after you read the book what you think black humor is.
- [49:34]
Well, I mean, ultimately, yes, I want everyone listening to this to go and read the book and make those judgments for themselves. Themselves. But it's my job today, while I'm here, to sell you on that, to sell the relations on that. So, yeah, I mean, I do have to be kind of like the carnival barker, you know, in this sense, like, come, come see. Come see. Come on in. You know.
- [49:57]
Okay, so I want to ask you some questions about Chris Rock.
- [50:00]
Okay.
- [50:02]
Because.
- [50:03]
Jack Wilson
Well, first of all, let me ask you this.
- [50:05]
Unnamed Speaker
So you mentioned the holy triumvirate of Richard, Eddie and Chris. And I did have a question. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we would have had Bill Cosby in that, I think. And did he take himself out of that triumvirate because of the scandal, or do you think that his humor was.
- [50:27]
Jack Wilson
Not exactly black humor?
- [50:28]
Unnamed Speaker
And I'm thinking of routines like God and Noah and things like that where.
- [50:33]
Jack Wilson
I'm not sure it has the same.
- [50:34]
Unnamed Speaker
Kind of cultural insight or. Or it doesn't seem like it's coming from the same place as Richard and Eddie and Chris.
- [50:43]
My. Actually, my answer top of hit would be neither. To answer your question, I didn't consciously take them out. I did, like, millions of Americans watch the Cosby show, right? I also, you know, like, I Spy would watch the reruns when it would be on Nick at night and all the other stuff, all the movies he was in. I was a fan, but he wasn't someone who spoke to me the same way. His. His humor. And again, I'm not going to say his humor wasn't black. Right. But it wasn't as transgressive as Eddie, Richard and Chris. Chris's humor was to me. And so a 9, 10 year old who is consuming this stuff for the first time. Yeah. I'm going to gravitate to the people who you seem to be taking more risks. And not to say that Bill Cosby didn't take risk when he was younger or that his standup wasn't risky or whatever, but those were just the people who I gravitated more towards. I would also. It's funny, this book hasn't even been released yet and I already want to make edits and revisions because I think that I would include Paul Moody in F4 just in terms of people whose humor really, really touched me.
- [51:50]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [51:51]
Unnamed Speaker
Okay. So Chris Rock. A couple of his jokes jumped out at me when I was thinking about him. And this is. I was working from memory from maybe 25, 30 years ago almost, and when he was doing his standup Specials in the 90s, and there was one that I thought, well, this. I thought of two jokes and my first thought was that one of them would be a good example of black humor and the other one was maybe just humor. But then when I went back and read the transcript, I kind of doubted myself on that. But the first one I thought, I actually ended up thinking this might be.
- [52:26]
Jack Wilson
The best American joke ever.
- [52:28]
Unnamed Speaker
And it was the one where he said not a single white person in here would trade places with me and I'm rich. And I just thought there's so much social commentary packed into that joke about what we value. And, you know, that first of all, that America's pretty greedy and people value wealth as much as they do, but also that he had that insight and that he was sort of courageous enough to say it. And I remember the audience just kind of being stunned.
- [52:58]
Yeah, yeah. Chris, you know, it's funny. Like, I think his first major special, the special, maybe even the special that one came from, you know, because I know he had three really kind of, I won't say iconic, but like very, very popular ones that came within a five year span. Bigger and blacker.
- [53:16]
Jack Wilson
Bring the pain. Yeah.
- [53:18]
Unnamed Speaker
I think that he has always had very, I guess, just poignant things to say about the intersection of race and class. Like, I remember one joke in one of his specials where he talks about his neighborhood and how Mary J. Blige is his neighbor and he names all these black celebrities who lives in his neighborhood, but the white man who lives right next to him is a dentist. Right. He was like, how many? And I'm, you know, I'm paraphrasing with like, yo, you know, how many people a black dentist would have to fix in order to live in this neighborhood? Right. And one thing that obviously makes Chris and any other, you know, standups who are gravitated towards, you know, also special is their delivery. And I remember the joke that you referenced, that busboy wouldn't change places with me, and I'm rich. And it was like. It was a mic drop moment. He allowed the audience to kind of. To really, like, sit with it and let them do their thing. He didn't say a word for probably about like 5 or 10 seconds, maybe even longer. We just let the audience sit with it and then explode with recognition. Right. And part of the challenge and part of the fun of trying to write funny essays and trying to bring down humor to the page, like, okay, how do I do that? How do I do that with punctuation? How do I replicate that sort of delivery, that sort of timing where the person reading it is going to have the same effect as they would listening to Chris Rock tell a joke or listening to Dave Chappelle. How do I do that on a page? How do I do that with punctuation? How do I do that with rhythm? How do I do that with sentence structure?
- [54:58]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [54:59]
Unnamed Speaker
And to what extent does awareness of the audience and their demographics affect what we're talking about here? Because I hear a lot of. I listen to a lot of interviews with standups, and there's something so pure about the standup form where you're up there with a microphone and you're just trying to get a laugh.
- [55:19]
Jack Wilson
And whether you.
- [55:20]
Unnamed Speaker
If you get a laugh, it's a success, and if you don't, you know, it might not be a success. But, you know, you can imagine if you look out at the audience and maybe they're younger than you were expecting or older than you were expecting, or if it's a black audience or not a black audience, it has to change. It might change what it is that you're going to talk about and how you're going to approach that. But I was wondering, do you sense that in the writers that you were choosing for the anthology? Does it matter where they're publishing, what they're writing? Is there no difference? When you're writing, you're just writing because you don't have an audience right there in front of you are people tailoring their diction or the jokes, the way delivering the punchlines and so on, based.
- [56:09]
Jack Wilson
On who they think the audience is.
- [56:12]
Unnamed Speaker
So that. That's a good question. And I. I don't know if I can answer for the other contributors because I think that each of them were asked to contribute to an anthology that's edited by me. And so perhaps they wrote things that I would find funny or not, or people might have been like, you know what? I'm just gonna write this thing. I hope he likes it. It's a tricky question to ask. I will say, though, that I didn't give the writers any directives other than to be funny and not in. Not even necessarily be funny, but to. I have a human anthology. I would like for you to be in it, whatever that means to you. Let me see what you got. And so there are some writers in it who are. Who are superstar writers, like Hanifa Doorkeep, KSA Layman, Nicola Loon, who are extremely popular. There are stand ups, you know, Roy Wood Jr. Who is blowing up, Wyatt Cenac, who had his own show on HBO and also is known in entertainment circles. Right. But then you have some people who are. They're known to me and they're known to a lot of people in my world, but they might not be known to the mainstream yet. Right. Who I wanted to put in there because I just thought, oh, this person is like, is really gifted and really funny. And yeah, they definitely fit. They definitely deserve to be in here with the quote, unquote big names. Right? And for me, it wasn't necessarily like, I'm gonna try to get the biggest names. I'm gonna try to get the biggest stars in writing and in humor and whatever. It was like, no, I'm gonna get people whose humor I like. Right. Whose humor I appreciate. And now I will say that there were some challenges in putting this list together. I'd never do another fucking anthology again.
- [58:07]
The version I got was a preview version and the acknowledgments page wasn't filled in yet. So I didn't know whether these had been commissioned for the anthology or if you had done the work of. Of crawling through a lot of magazines and online publications and so on in order to find things that you wanted to include. It sounds like you reached out to the writers and they sent you things. And maybe these are original pieces.
- [58:33]
With the exception of Nafisa Thompson Spears, her book Heads to Colored People, which I adore. I love her work, I love her writing. She Had a short story in that collection. I was like, yeah, I have to have this.
- [58:46]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Right.
- [58:46]
Unnamed Speaker
But aside from that, you know, everything in here is going to be read for the first time. Oh, and Angela Nissel. I'm sorry, Angela Nissel had a piece that was in her bulk mix, but she kind of revised the piece a bit. But again, that's. That's two pieces out of 20 something pieces that and the rest of them are brand new pieces.
- [59:05]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [59:06]
Unnamed Speaker
Were you hoping to get like a range of voices or subject matter? Or you just figured you had to if you got the right people, the kind of variety would just take care of itself?
- [59:18]
Well, there was an intentionality in terms of who I reached out to. Like, for instance, Nicola Loon and Dee Watkins are two tremendous, tremendous writers. Right. But they both have very distinct perspectives. They both wrote about the challenges of raising a black daughter in America, but they wrote completely different pieces about that. One of the things I did try to do with this collection is, okay, I'm not just going to have one particular type of black writer. Right. I'm going to have many different types, many different stylistic variations, many different types of craft variations. I have several writers who identify as queer in this anthology. I didn't want to have any one gender over represented, so I try to get a mix. I have fiction writers, I have nonfiction writers. Now, one point of improvement, if I were to do this again, I'm not going to do it again, but if I were to do it again, I think the age range of the writers could have been expanded, you know, because diversity is not just about race, not just about income. It's also age.
- [60:24]
Jack Wilson
Right? Right.
- [60:25]
Unnamed Speaker
Well, that's the thing. I mean, if we talk about this being like you're putting this museum together and you have paintings on the wall, I mean, you must have felt a little bit of an obligation as for it to be called the title, that it is an anthology of black humor that you didn't want to wind up with 24 writers from Pittsburgh who are all men within five years of your age or something. Right?
- [60:49]
Yeah.
- [60:50]
It's giving us this snapshot of this moment in time. And those are the people who are most active. My guess is, yeah.
- [60:57]
And with the exception of two or three people, these are all people I've met in person. And everyone, with no exceptions, I've been a fan of their work. So that was another prerequisite, is that I have to be a fan of your work, too.
- [61:11]
Have you gotten any feedback? Have you had readers who have said that they Enjoy particular things or that they learned particular things that they didn't know before.
- [61:23]
Jack Wilson
Or that they pushed back.
- [61:24]
Unnamed Speaker
In any ways on some of the selections you made or some of the pieces you included.
- [61:29]
You know, most of the. Most of the feedback I'm getting so far from people who know me. And so they're going to just. I can't trust any of that. There was a Kirkus review that was a really good review, but that's the only thing that I've heard outside of my circle. And by my circle, I mean my friends, and also people at, like, Random House and Pantheon. And I'm waiting for people who have no connection to this whatever to engage with it and hear what they have to say, because I'm very curious about which essays people are responding to the most. I guess which writers people are going like, oh, I need to read more of this stuff after this. Which essays surprise people?
- [62:13]
I was going to ask that. Did any of them surprise you where you thought, oh, I didn't expect so and so to take it in this direction.
- [62:19]
Let me ask you, you read it. Which essay stood out to you? Which essay surprised you? Come on. Put you on the spot.
- [62:29]
Well, I would have to say. I mean, I spent most of my time with your introduction because I was trying to figure out. Because I was so taken by it, but I, like, unmurdered in Grandma's kitchen.
- [62:42]
Okay. Alex Hardy. Okay. And Alex is one of those who maybe isn't as well known as Hanif or KSA or Disha, but is extremely gifted. He wrote several pieces for my website, Very Smart brothers. And Alex is so funny and so sharp and. Yeah. And that essay is so good.
- [63:05]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [63:06]
Unnamed Speaker
And the one about the Waffle House.
- [63:08]
Yes. A Sean Crowley essay again. And he's not someone who, you know, people know his writing, but I don't know if everyone associates him with humor. Right. And that essay, you know, it's funny, you know, just to kind of contradict myself a bit. I did hear just from, you know, some of the people at Pantheon that the. The Waffle House essay was one that. That a lot of people responded to, like, a lot of sales people and whatever.
- [63:40]
Jack Wilson
Right, Right.
- [63:42]
Unnamed Speaker
And this is. This is a conversation I had with them back in, like, January.
- [63:46]
Well, here's one. You know, and I think a lot of these resonated with me because I'm a bit older than you, but I'm. I was around for when all of these people, you know, this is kind of my era. And so, like, an essay, like, Dancing in the Dark. You know, I grew up, I mean, it was this rural town in Wisconsin, all farmers and factory workers. And you know, most of my high school experience, we did not have a black kid in our school. And then we got one and we were super excited. But it was that kind of a place and that kind of an atmosphere and we would have wanted nothing more than to be somehow given the seal of approval with our dancing from a black person. You know, we knew, we knew we couldn't do it. We knew. And then to read an essay like Clover Hope's essay, Dancing in the Dark, and to see that a lot of that same anxiety and the Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson and the way that, that affected the author and to feel like coming at it from the opposite side but still feeling that same sense of anxiety, it was eye opening for me.
- [64:58]
And it's a double anxiety because it's like, well, you know, I'm black, so people expect me to be able to do all this stuff and I'm uncomfortable. So it's like a double. It's like a, you know, a two sided anxiety. And Clover, that piece actually mirrored my own experience where I grown up, felt more comfortable in pitch black basements dancing because no one could see me. Like, I don't know if you've seen the Jennifer Hudson show, like the spirit tunnel that they have. No, she has a thing that has gone viral where each guest on her show, the staff of her show, creates like a soul train line for the guests to kind of dance through right before they go onto the show.
- [65:45]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right.
- [65:46]
Unnamed Speaker
And I could not think of a more terrifying thing. Right. You know, that's that point that you made about Clover and about your own experience is something that I think that. And even with my first vocal, what does the kid makes you blacker? You know, some of the examples and experiences I brought up, I know everyone hasn't had the same experiences as like a 46 year old man who grew up in Pittsburgh, grew up in the hood and played college basketball and did this and did that. But some of those anxieties, some of those neuroses, those are universal.
- [66:20]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [66:22]
Unnamed Speaker
I mean, all I wanted to do when I was in high school was play basketball. But there was this feeling of I know that people, I can get to a certain level, but people are going to look at me and say, he plays like a white guy, he's an outside shooter, he hustles and that kind of thing. And then we have this black kid who moves to our school and everybody can't wait because now we have a.
- [66:47]
Jack Wilson
Star, and he comes out for the team and he's not very good.
- [66:51]
Unnamed Speaker
In fact, he's sort of. They put him on the team kind of to help him out or something, but he couldn't play at all. And I was dealing with this sort of set of expectations and these limits I was putting on myself. And he was dealing with, you know, just like clover and dancing. It was kind of like everybody would go to a new town and everyone would expect him to be the star. And then they'd watch him in warmups and realize he wasn't very good. And it was crushing for him. But, you know, one of the problems is we both were watching Michael Jordan on tv and, you know, none of us is Michael Jordan. So it was kind of like we're all kind of these victims of, you know, making these assumptions about who we are. But there's very few people who can dance like Michael Jackson.
- [67:35]
Yeah, I mean, you know, we. What is the phrase, you know, comparison is the thief for joy. And when you have that, plus you add the whole racialized expectation of. And it's the quote, unquote, positive stereotype where like, oh, because you're black, you're expected. Expected to be good at passport or great at dancing. And then you get really specific in esoteric. It's like, okay, well, if you're a black basketball player, you're also expected to have a higher vertical leap.
- [68:03]
Jack Wilson
Right, right, right.
- [68:05]
Unnamed Speaker
You're expected to be a really good ball handler. Right. So certain things that. That even exist within the context of the sport. And then you actually get out there and meet people at play and you realize, oh, okay, yeah, these stereotypes are just stereotypes. Right, right, right. And, yeah, the, you know, we're all out here the same, and some people can jump higher than other people, and some people can handle the ball better than other people, and some people are coaches on the floor. And. And it's just as paramount for you to figure out, okay, what. What can I do? Instead of, you know, I guess, basing your feelings and. And also your feelings about how successful you are based on expectation, it kind of grounds you in reality, once you actually get out there and play or get out there and write or get out there and do anything, it's like, okay, well, yes, this is the stereotype. This is expectation. This is the performance I'm supposed to adhere to, but this is the actual reality. This is what I'm actually good at. This is what he's actually good at. This is what she's actually good at. So let's just do that.
- [69:11]
Jack Wilson
Okay.
- [69:12]
Unnamed Speaker
Well, the book is called that's How.
- [69:13]
Jack Wilson
They get you, An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor.
- [69:17]
Unnamed Speaker
Damon Young, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [69:20]
Oh, thank you so much for having me. This has been great. This has been fun. I'll also be on tour in several cities. New York, Philly, D.C. chicago, New York, again, Baltimore, Pittsburgh. Obviously that's where I'm from. That's where I currently live. So if you're in any of those cities, come, come check us out.
- [69:40]
Jack Wilson
Okay.
- [69:40]
Unnamed Speaker
We will try to put links to all that in the show notes.
- [69:43]
Okay, thank you.
- [69:47]
Okay. I'm joined now by Damon Young, editor.
- [69:49]
Jack Wilson
Of the book that's How they get yout An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor.
- [69:54]
Unnamed Speaker
Damon, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your.
- [69:57]
Jack Wilson
Last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read.
- [70:01]
Unnamed Speaker
You can either choose one that exists.
- [70:03]
Jack Wilson
Or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [70:06]
Unnamed Speaker
Oh, man, that is a great question. I'm gonna cheat a little bit and say that the book I'm currently writing.
- [70:13]
Jack Wilson
Okay, okay.
- [70:14]
Unnamed Speaker
I'm writing my first fiction. It is a satire of the performance of race, also the performance of sex. And it's a satire of the publishing industry, of the anti racism industry. It's called Snowdrop. Recently, just actually got a deal for it too, which I'm pretty excited about. So I'll be spending the rest of the year writing it, finishing it, and it may be the last book I ever write because there's a lot of shit in there. They might not. They might not allow me to write books anymore after this published. I feel like, you know what, David? You gotta go be a farmer or go pursue your basketball career.
- [70:53]
Is that the. Are you selling the book when you say that? Because a lot of people that's. That's exactly what. Yeah, they say I gotta read it now.
- [71:03]
I hope so. Let me say this. The first book that I remember having a tremendous impact on me was actually the Godfather. And I read that after seeing the movie. You know, I was watching R rated movies when I was like 8 years old, 9 years old. My parents let me do that. And my dad's favorite movie was a Godfather. So I watched the Godfather.
- [71:23]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [71:23]
Unnamed Speaker
And then I read the book. And this was taking about how like, pornographic that book is. If you've ever read it. It's like, whoa, there's a lot of. A lot of sex in here. And a lot of like, very explicit descriptions of Sexual organs. Yeah. In this book. And so, you know, maybe the last book that I would read, or let's say if I were stranded on a desert island, like, which book would I want to take with me? I haven't read that again as an adult, so I would be interested in that. Yeah, I'll say. Also, the first book that made me in awe of the writer was the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. That's the first book that made me think, oh, this person is doing something different.
- [72:13]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [72:13]
Unnamed Speaker
With words like things that I didn't know were possible.
- [72:17]
Yeah. And with form, too.
- [72:19]
Yeah. I mean, that. There's. That book is. This is such a full experience reading that. And the first book to make me laugh out loud, and not just laugh out loud, but, like, had the sort of reaction where I physically threw the book across the room because something was so funny was a catch 22. And I read that in college. Yeah. And. And so those three. An Autobiography of Malcolm X is also something I read when I was, like, 12 or 13.
- [72:48]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [72:48]
Unnamed Speaker
And I was fascinated with his life, where he was, you know, pretty much Forrest Gump in many ways.
- [72:54]
Yeah. Like, all of a sudden, what was he, like, Boston Red or something? It was like.
- [72:58]
Jack Wilson
Oh, it was Red Fox.
- [73:00]
Unnamed Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, when he was the. He was Detroit Red.
- [73:03]
Jack Wilson
Detroit Red.
- [73:04]
Unnamed Speaker
That's what it was. And like, he was a busboy somewhere. And, like, Red Fox was like this. This funny busboy that. Who he worked with who ended up being Red Fox. And, like, Ella Fitzgerald was like, another person who was just, like, in his crew or someone he just knew socially.
- [73:20]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [73:20]
Unnamed Speaker
And there's so many examples like that of just like, wow, you just did, you know, everybody.
- [73:25]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [73:25]
Unnamed Speaker
Did you do everything right?
- [73:28]
It's almost like everybody he encountered ended up getting some kind of permission to go be famous in some other. In some other way.
- [73:35]
That's a good way to put it. Permission to be famous. Yeah. So those. Those are my four books. Those are the four.
- [73:40]
Okay, so we've got the Godfather, Catch 22, the autobiography of Malcolm X, and the Bluest Eye.
- [73:51]
Yes.
- [73:53]
Jack Wilson
That's the.
- [73:56]
Unnamed Speaker
That's the wildest assortment we've had. I think in response to this question.
- [74:01]
You know what?
- [74:01]
You're covered in a lot of ground there.
- [74:03]
I do what I can. Let me add one more. If we're naming books that are that induced. Like, a first. First book that made me to develop a crush on a writer was the Broke Diaries by Angela Nestle.
- [74:19]
Jack Wilson
Ah.
- [74:20]
Unnamed Speaker
And Angela Nessel was actually in this anthology.
- [74:22]
Jack Wilson
Right. Right.
- [74:23]
Unnamed Speaker
But I, I read that when I was in college and I was like, okay, I have to meet this woman. Okay, Yeah, I have to. Have to meet this woman someday.
- [74:30]
Yeah.
- [74:31]
She was so funny and it's so. I just loved the way she put things together and, and, and her perspective and her self deprecation and, and, yeah, so those are the five.
- [74:42]
Let me ask you a question about. Because we also have a sixth book.
- [74:46]
Jack Wilson
Which is your book.
- [74:49]
Unnamed Speaker
You're not worried that sometimes writers feel like if they talk about it too much before it's finished, that they'll kind of, I guess, break the spell or they've somehow jinx themselves or something. But this is something you're able, I guess, since you've sent it out and it's been accepted and everything, you don't mind kind of telling people about it.
- [75:08]
And I have so many other anxieties and Rosies that I don't need anymore.
- [75:15]
Jack Wilson
Right, right.
- [75:16]
Unnamed Speaker
I think if I have, if there are any that I have, it might be about me writing fiction for the first time. And I think that with the stuff that's in this book so far, that I know that some people are going to hate it, which I know is a thing that's gonna encourage more people to be excited about reading it. Right? Yeah, but I know that. I know people are gonna. Some people are gonna hate it, some people are gonna be mad at me, but.
- [75:47]
Oh, well, yeah, I have this story I tell about when I was in the MFA program and we all, you know, we were in our fourth semester together and everybody was kind of sick of each other and, and sick of reading each other's work and everything. And so to kind of restore some of our good humor and our camaraderie with one another, we thought, well, let's bring in a book that we all like. Instead of reading each other's books, everyone will take turns bringing in a short story or something that we can all agree that we love. And then we'll just talk about why we admire it and we'll get, you know, we'll kind of hit the reset button on our dynamic here. And then somebody said, okay, well, you know, I'll. I think I'm going to bring in this passage from Dostoevsky. And somebody else said, I hate the Russians. And then someone said, well, I'm going to bring in Margaret Atwood, my favorite writer. And someone's like, ugh, please. And we went around and we couldn't come up with a single author that everybody agreed that we all loved. This is like eight or nine of us, and we couldn't come up with a single author. And then it kind of hit me like, well, this is the best lesson I could learn here. Because if Jane Austen doesn't make the cut, what chance am I going to have in going nine for nine with these people? And you have to find the people who.
- [77:09]
Jack Wilson
There's going to be some people who.
- [77:10]
Unnamed Speaker
Love your book, and that's who your audience is. And there will always be somebody out there who it's not to their taste.
- [77:17]
It sounds like y' all should have done a conclave or something. Had to smoke.
- [77:25]
Jack Wilson
That's right.
- [77:26]
Unnamed Speaker
We have a subgroup and the rest of them can stand out and wait to see what color the smoke is when it comes out of the chimney.
- [77:35]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [77:35]
Unnamed Speaker
Okay.
- [77:37]
Jack Wilson
Well, good luck with the book.
- [77:39]
Unnamed Speaker
I am excited and I will definitely be picking up a copy when it comes out.
- [77:44]
Thank you so much. And again, thank you so much for having me here.
- [77:48]
David Young, the book. I feel like we should be pitching your fiction book. Maybe we should have this come out after it comes out. You said that was called Snowdrop. Okay. And the other book, if people don't want to wait for that, is that's.
- [78:00]
Jack Wilson
How they get you, an unruly Anthology of Black American humor.
- [78:04]
Unnamed Speaker
Damon Young, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [78:07]
Of course. Thank you for having me.
- [78:15]
Jack Wilson
Foreign.
- [78:21]
Damon Young
Hey, business owners. We know you know the importance of maximizing every dollar. With the Delta Sky Miles Reserve Business American Express card, you can make your expenses work just as hard as you. From afternoon coffee runs to stocking office supplies and even team dinners, you can earn miles on all your business expenses. Plus, you can earn 110,000 bonus miles for a limited time time through July 16th. The Delta SkyMiles Reserve business card. If you travel, you know minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Offer in 7, 16, 25PMS, pregnancy, menopause, being a woman is a lot. Ollie supports you and yours with expert solutions for every age and life stage. They just launched two new products exclusively at Walmart. Period Hero Combats blow, mood swings and more during PMS and balance Perimeno to support hormonal balance, mood and metabolism during perimenopause. Grab yours@ollie.com these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
- [79:31]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. Do you agree with me that the Chris Rock joke I told during that conversation is the greatest American joke ever told? If it's going to Be a great American joke. It has to wrestle with the concept of America somehow, right? And I think the core concept, the one most deserving of humor, of what humor does. If we define a truly great joke as one that doesn't just make us laugh, but makes us think and maybe reveals a long buried truth that's right there out there, hiding in plain sight. Not something obscure, but something fundamental. Something that's. But something that's so buried it's not talked about and maybe not noticed, at least by some part of the population. Let me give you another candidate that also goes deep. And that's the joke, famous joke about the Lone Ranger and his native American sidekick Tonto. Indians, Indians all around us. Screamed the Lone Ranger. Well, Tonto, old kimosabe, looks like we're finished. And Tonto says, what you mean we, Pale face. That's up there. That's up there. Not sure if that's politically correct anymore. Not sure if any of these jokes are. But I'll just pass them along. Oh, that one digs deep too, doesn't it? Another great American. Darkness. The theft of land. A foundational sin. That's my America in a nutshell. My view of history. The greatest words and the greatest ideas and ideals ever written right there in the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That is incredible. It's up there with. Turn the other cheek, right? Let's add women for the 21st century. Everyone is created equal and has certain unalienable rights. You could carve that on glass and bury it in the mountain for our alien successors to discover. That's who we were at our very, very best. America, the American nation. Showed the world that this is how you should think of your fellow human beings. That they were created equal and have certain unalienable rights. Beautiful words. And the guy who wrote those very words owned slaves. Knew it was wrong. Did it anyway. Willfully blind. Like the Lone Ranger and his Wii with his kimosabe. Total hypocrisy. Like Bill Cosby, come to think of it. Who turned out to be a moral monster. Even as he purported to be America's dad. Lecturing all who would listen while engaging in horrible behavior. Criminal behavior. There's a thesis for you college students. Bill Cosby as American humor. The black Thomas Jefferson. Compare and contrast those two. As purveyors of ideals they came nowhere near living up to. Pay special attention to Thomas Jefferson's denial of black American Poet Phillis Wheatley's poetry and Bill Cosby's denial of black American comedian Eddie Murphy's comedy. There's a lot there. For your essay, or maybe it will be your first book. You're welcome. Which brings us to Chris Rock's joke, my contender for the great American joke of all time. Here's a longer excerpt. Again, I'll edit it a little bit because I'm not going to do his style and voice, but here we go. He says, who's the maddest people? White people. No. You watch the tv, you see white people pissed off. The white man thinks he's losing the country. We're losing everything. Affirmative action and illegal aliens and we're losing the country, losing. If y' all losing, who's winning? It ain't us. It ain't us. There ain't a white man in this room that would change places with me. None of you would change places with me. And I'm rich. That's how good it is to be white. There's a white one legged busboy in here right now that won't change places with my black ass. He's going, no, man, I don't want to switch. I want to ride this white thing out, see where it takes me. None of you would change places with me. And I'm rich. That is such a good joke. There are other great American jokes or great jokes told by Americans. But to get at the heart of the American dilemma, American history in all its depressing glory, the actions not living up to its words, the aspiration, the reality that is good. It's right there in that joke. And I like it also because it brings in the topic of wealth. The other American sin of greed. We wrestle with that too. Greed to be harnessed. Greed to be an engine of progress. A nation that prides itself on being pretty much Christian and yet ignoring some of the basic tenets of Christianity to favor wealth. Greed is a way of defining who we are and how we get ahead in life. Wealth is the measure of success. All that is baked into our American pie. And here's Chris Rock who says you, currency is wealth. You know it. You would do anything for you'd work your whole life. The whole country is defined by it. Our status is everything. Our golden calf is cold, hard cash. You might recognize that. You might know how much you value money and wish you had more of it and worry about it and celebrate it when a windfall arrives and be jealous of the people who have more of it than you do. You might spend all your days thinking about money and how to get more of it, you might even believe that there's nothing more fundamental than class struggle or working for your family. If that's how you see greed, maybe it's just the fabric. It stitches our fabric together, that we're all doing noble things, working for our family. Maybe it's not so noble. Maybe it's that boat you want to buy someday. Maybe if you win the lottery, or. Or maybe it's how to stay ahead of the neighbors. Or maybe even just to figure out how to survive in a world of economic uncertainty. But it's money. That's all you and your fellow Americans care about. That's what unites you, is money. It's absolutely everything. No one really disputes it. We accept it and maybe we even kind of admire it about ourselves. It's fundamental. Except. Except there's something a little more fundamental, isn't there? Because the one legged busboy isn't willing to trade places with Chris Rock, who's got plenty of money. Maybe there's something a little more fundamental than money, isn't there? Maybe it's so fundamental you don't always see it. Maybe it's so fundamental that you can't bear to let yourself see it. But Chris Rock does. He sees it and he'll point it out. Humor. This was a show about humor, and we dug kind of deep because it was also about literature and also history. Okay, there we go. That's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Damon Young for joining me. Please do check out the book that's how they get you. An unruly anthology of Black American humor. Read it, Laugh, think and feel. What can be better than that? So, people, I've got some special news coming up. Some surprises, some announcements. In our forthcoming episodes, I will reveal some major things for the podcast. We're branching out in some exciting new ways and I hope. Oh, boy. This is either going to be the most fun I've ever had or the most disappointing flop ever. And it's all going to be up to you guys. Gulp. I'm stretching out my neck. Maybe it'll be chopped off. Does it. Does a neck make a different sound than gulp? If it's stretching, let me try. Let's turn down the music and try. Here's. Here's a regular gulp. Can you hear that? And here is a gulp with my neck stretched out. Well, I guess I'm the latter with. Let's turn the music back. There we go. I didn't know that would actually work. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.
- [88:55]
Damon Young
Did you know not all organic food is created equal? While we trust the organic label to mean soil grown, pasture raised, and ethical, industrial agriculture is quietly rewriting the rules. That's why the Real Organic Podcast, produced by the Real Organic Project, is cutting through the greenwashing to expose the corporate greed that is reshaping organic food and farming. Each episode brings you in depth conversations with farmers, scientists, and advocates working to protect organic standards in the US without corporate shortcuts or industrial loopholes. Follow the Real Organic Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [89:25]
Jack Wilson
Lee C Camp here. If you've been enjoying this show, I think you might enjoy my podcast, no Small Endeavor. Produced by Great Feeling Studios and prx, no Small Endeavor explores what it means to live a good life. We sit down with courageous, impassioned people like actor Martin Sheen or civil rights hero James Lawson to ask what it means to live a life worth living. Follow no Small Endeavor wherever you get your podcasts. Living a Good Life is no Small Endeavor and we would love to help.