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That's How They Get You

An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor

ebook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 4 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 4 weeks
From the Thurber Prize-winning author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker comes a pioneering collection of Black humor from some of the most acclaimed writers and performers at work today
A critic explores the paradox of finding community in “the dozens” while grieving. A violent town ritual causes an all-too-familiar moral panic. An email thread between friends on why we need an updated Green Book but for public toilets. All across the nation, “Karens” become illegal overnight. These are just a few of the hilarious worlds contained in Damon Young’s groundbreaking anthology featuring the best, funniest, and Blackest essays, short stories, letters, and rants.
With words that roast, ignite, and burn while connecting to and coalescing around a singular thesis, That's How They Get You emphasizes how and why Black American humor is uniquely transfixing. This is a mixture of not just observational anxieties and stream-of-consciousness lucidities but also acute political clarity about America. Edited and with an introduction by Damon Young, the critically acclaimed author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker, the collection features new material from an all-star roster of contributors, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Mahogany L. Browne, Wyatt Cenac, Kiese Laymon, Deesha Philyaw, Roy Wood Jr., and Nicola Yoon.
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    • Kirkus

      May 1, 2025
      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 showKnight 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 atThe 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.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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