Funny bones, raised fists, scorching insights into the biz, delicious insults, and much more are to be had here.
A tour through the fine art of Black comedy—sometimes in both senses of the word.
Political commentator and essayist Young has a wicked sense of humor and a vast vocabulary of invective, both of which are put to good use in this anthology. His introduction commemorates a funny friend from his youth who could eviscerate a target in a game of dozens but “also intuitively knew the power dynamics baked into humor, where it’s not just unkind to exclusively target people with less privilege than you; it makes your humor disposable and punchless.” “Existing while Black in America,” Young goes on to say, provides plenty of grist for the comedy mill, and it makes for invincible resistance. Young’s stream-of-consciousness piece “You Gonna Get These Teeth” is a masterwork of surrealist humor built around teeth alignment that soon slips into just that resistance; one snippet from several cheerfully blue pages goes like this: “My divestment of fucks is connected to my wallet and I think maybe the new teeth are a bank statement a long receipt a billboard of fucklessness.” Elsewhere in the anthology are numerous highlights, including Angela Nissel’s lovely memory of melding the ’80s TV show Knight Rider into the Black experience for a grade-school report (“sometimes, you just gotta take advantage of someone’s ignorance and make some shit up”); Mahogany L. Browne’s smart dissection of how the dozens work (“Your house so nasty your roaches got roaches”) and, far more important, why they work; and Wyatt Cenac’s fiercely funny account of being the first Black writer hired at The Daily Show: “When you’re the first Black person at any job, you’ll quickly learn that white fragility is…the cream in every cup of their morning coffee.”
Funny bones, raised fists, scorching insights into the biz, delicious insults, and much more are to be had here.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317112
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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