Stories? Yeah, we got stories – and some of them will make you laugh

“That’s How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor,” edited by Damon Young

c.2025,

Pantheon                                           

$28.00                                           

256 pages

 

Bust a gut.

Laugh your rear-end off. Laugh yourself silly, until you almost cried, it’s the best medicine. Had you rolling in the aisles, holding your sides coz they hurt. When something’s funny, you know it but what does humor look like across racial lines? In the new book, “That’s How They Get You,” edited by Damon Young, it might get the last laugh.

When he was a kid in Pittsburgh, Damon Young thought his friend, Var Butler “was the funniest person I’d ever met.” Var didn’t go for nasty humor and he didn’t hurt people who couldn’t defend themselves. Instead, says Young, Var “intuitively knew the power dynamics baked into humor…” And, as he understands now, Var’s humor was honest, homegrown, and not “A rich-white-person thing.”

Says Young, “What makes Black humor Black ain’t the subject matter, because not all humor involving Black people is Black. Sometimes, it’s just humor.”

You don’t have to be Eddie or Martin or Cedric to be funny. You could be like the many authors of the stories in this book.

In “No One Makes ‘Yo Mama’ Jokes After the Funeral” by Hanif Abdurraqib, bad timing can be awkward – but it can also be wholly, perfectly Mama “sung back to life…”

If you’ve ever wanted to change what folks call you, “The Karen Rights Act” by Mateo Askaripour is your story. That woman’s name says it all. Too much, in fact, but only for offending white females.

Nobody but Miss Ruby cooks in Miss Ruby’s kitchen – until Alex Hardy convinces his grandma that he’s capable with a spoon. In “Unmurdered in Grandma’s Kitchen,” his meals for the family hasn’t killed anyone yet.

And if you’ve ever been irritated by a co-worker, then you need to read “The Necessary Changes Have Been Made” by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. When Randolph gets a new job, it seems perfect, until he’s told that his perfect office must now be shared. But his new co-worker definitely doesn’t share his opinions…

Chances are that if you see “That’s How They Get You” on a shelf somewhere, you might grab it, expecting to spend the rest of your day laughing.

And you’d be wrong.

While the personal essays and fiction inside this book are good – very good, in fact; some of them are downright excellent and you’ll want to turn around and read them again on the spot – many of them are not funny.

One essayist even says it: “It’s funny, really. Not ha-ha funny.”

The stories might be about humor or situations that will make you snort. There’s a theme here and it’s clever, sometimes sweet, written in perfectly cynical tones. But will you take off your glasses, wipe your eyes, and call someone to share? Not so much.

Absolutely, read this book. It’s an excellent collection, you’ll enjoy what you find inside “That’s How They Get You,” and you’ll find a whole new group of writers to follow. Just be aware that if you’re looking for ROFL kinds of laughs, it could be a bust.