Susie Anderson
Staff writer
Damon Young gave a simple directive to writers when compiling an anthology of Black American humor: be funny. But he did not get what he asked for — at least not exactly.
Instead, he received 24 sharp, hilarious and deeply personal pieces, from e-mail exchanges to rants to speeches, that reveal the brilliance and complexity of Black American humor in all its glory.
“I know these people. I know what they’re capable of. I know the work that they do,” Young said. “So, I wasn’t necessarily just shocked that people submitted things that are so personal — so vulnerable. I guess it was more of a pleasant surprise.”
Young will discuss That’s How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor at 3:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.
Young won the 2020 Thurber Prize for American Humor for What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays. He is the co-founder of the culture blog VerySmartBrothas and was a contributing columnist for GQ, The Washington Post Magazine and a contributing writer for The New York Times. He hosts the Crooked Media Podcast “Stuck with Damon Young” and serves as the inaugural writer-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh’s David C. Frederick Honors College.
The anthology Young edited includes comedians Wyatt Cenac and Roy Wood Jr., author and columnist Deesha Philyaw, memoirist Kiese Laymon, celebrated poet Hanif Abdurraqib and young adult novelist Nicola Yoon, among others. Young said that he brought together a variety of voices that he knew would deliver exceptional results.
“I wanted to think of people who I know could be funny, but mostly, I wanted to get tremendous writers,” Young said. “I think that people who are tremendous writers and thinkers are also naturally funny and can be funny on a page, too.”
The topics are as varied as the contributors themselves. Jill Louise Busby unpacks a parasocial obsession with a social media couple. Mateo Askaripour imagines a world where “Karens” are suddenly outlawed. Wood recounts a disastrous televised stand-up set. Philyaw faces uncomfortable truths via a family text chain. Young himself delivers a momentous six-page sentence about how Invisalign transformed his life.
The collection of essays all fit under the anthology’s thesis and titular phrase: That’s How They Get You. After several texts in several different group chats, Young landed on the title while in conversation with contributing writer Panama Jackson. Young said that the phrase captures a lightness in approaching the world’s absurdities.
“I don’t think it’s exclusive to Black people or even people of color, but it’s something to characterize the sense that there’s a larger, amorphous, invisible force that is out to get you, out to get us,” Young said. “… It’s like when you sign up for cable and see a promotion where it’s like $16 a month. But then you actually sign up for it, and there are all these fees, and it ends up being $32 a month. And you say, ‘Oh. That’s how they get you.’ ”
Young said humor is rooted in collisions or moments of friction that reveal something new about a subject. In this way, Young said, humor offers an opportunity to learn and grow.
“Humor, at its essence, is about truth and vulnerability,” he said. “I think that perhaps … being able to transmute a trauma or some other unsavory experience into humor does represent growth, does represent a change, does represent maybe catharsis, even.”
While many pieces from the collection offer side-splitting hilarity, many are also rooted in grief, loss and survival. Young said the collection’s opening essay by Abdurraqib, in which a boy finds comfort in “the dozens” after the death of his mother, taps into sensitivity.
“It’s more ruminative, but it also gets to a thesis about Black American humor, about the best American humor, and about the level of honesty and vulnerability that’s necessary in order to even make the effort to be funny,” Young said. “And again, if you can’t appreciate that, then I don’t know what you want to get out of a book.”
In a collection grounded in Black experience, deftly navigating observational humor and acute social awareness, Young said that he hopes readers take a chance on each of the pieces they encounter and appreciate the geniuses that trusted him with their work.
For Young, that appreciation goes beyond laughter. It involves recognizing humor as a cornerstone of life and culture.
“I consider humor to be an essential part of humanity,” Young said. “If you’re a person who — I don’t know who believes this — thinks that there’s no space for it, then when is there ever going to be space for it?”
