Susie Anderson
Staff Writer
Damon Young introduced his collection of short stories, rants, essays and email exchanges, That’s How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor, the Week Two Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection, on Thursday afternoon in the Hall of Philosophy.
Young offered to read from one of two of the essays he wrote for the anthology. He asked the audience between Option A: An essay he has read at every book talk and Option B: An essay he has never read for an audience. Chautauqua responded with a chorus of “Option B.”
“The question was kind of calibrated because I was reading that one regardless,” Young said after the reading.
Option B proved to be a 1,800-word, one sentence, stream-of-consciousness piece titled “You Gonna Get These Teeth” that sprawled from discussing porn to crooked teeth, to Invisalign to money to shame — and back to porn and crooked teeth. In the Q-and-A that followed, Young said that the stream-of-consciousness form was the best way to deliver the story’s themes of shame and humor.
“You are reading it in almost like a manic sort of way, because that is the way I am experiencing (it) and that is the way I am thinking about it,” he said.
Describing the process of curating the anthology, Young compared reaching out to contributors for new material to asking 50 people to prom. “And not just (asking) those people,” Young said, “but their parents and their kids and their aunts and their uncles and their nieces, also. … I am never doing this again.”
However, that stress culminated into an anthology with “24 generous geniuses” who submitted work. Young pointed to the anthology’s contributors — among them Joseph Earl Thomas, winner of the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize for his piece “Reality Marble” — when asked about writers who inspire him and rising stars in comedy to keep an eye on.
As several pieces in the anthology deal with difficult subject matter, Young said there is a delicate balance between shame and humor.
“I have always felt like ‘laughing to keep from crying’ is a bit of a misnomer. Sometimes you laugh and cry at the same time at the same things,” he said. “… It is not necessarily about the insertion of humor, it is just about recognizing the humor and the trauma that (the authors) are existing in.”
In discussing the evolution of Black humor over time, Young referenced the feeling of seeing people at his 20th high school reunion wearing the exact same style of clothing as when they graduated in 1997.
“I don’t want to be a person who stopped evolving in 1997,” he said. “… I think the best humor takes some elements from the past but continues to evolve. … The best humorists are the people who do this, and the ones who get left behind are the people who want to stay behind.”
