As Damon Young, editor of That's How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor, sees it, what makes humor "Black is exclusivity. If it only works because we're involved, and if the presence of Blackness grants it a freedom to go places no one else would. Or could." All the funny-thorny places that contributors go in That's How They Get You are very much worth visiting.
Straight-up comedy anchors the anthology. Mateo Askaripour's "The Karen Rights Act" finds a white woman who considers herself a victim of "nameism" filing a class-action lawsuit that goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Wyatt Cenac's "The Jackie Robinson Society" is a faux speech ostensibly given to new inductees into "the Jackie Robinson Society for Negroes Foolish Enough to Be the First to Do Anything Around White People." Scattered among the book's spoofy pieces are wry personal essays--e.g., in "Dancing in the Dark," Clover Hope recounts "a life of chronically self-aware public dancing-while-Black"--but the wit is often laced with something darker. In "Baby Wipes," D Watkins describes changing his toddler's egregiously fouled diaper when "all my dad had to do, literally, was show up."
Young, author of What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, has built a sturdy and eclectic 25-piece collection, and there's cause to hope for a follow-up. As Young puts it, "Don't matter if you from Birmingham or Baltimore or Bel-Air. Existing while Black in America provides enough material." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer