THAT'S HOW THEY GET YOU

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.