JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
What do you do if you hear from someone about a really difficult life moment - losing a mother, a baby, facing completely unfair treatment at work? What do you do with those stories? If you're Damon Young, you probably put them together in a collection of comedic essays.
DAMON YOUNG: This was me just trying to reach out to people who represent, I guess, the expansiveness, you know, the virtuosity, the range of Black humor.
SUMMERS: To be clear, when he says Black humor, he is not talking about heavy or taboo topics. He means humor coming specifically from Black American voices. Damon Young is a columnist, culture blog founder and podcast host, among many things. And he tapped fellow writers - including Roy Wood Jr., Clover Hope, Wyatt Cenac and many, many more - for a new anthology called "That's How They Get You."
YOUNG: My only directive for people was to be funny. And it wasn't necessarily like, OK, be funny - ha, ha - tell knock-knock jokes. It was like - you know what? - be yourself. And because I know who you are and I know what you're capable of, I know that you're going to be funny.
SUMMERS: I asked Young more about the impetus for this new collection and why the stories can feel universal, no matter where we grew up.
YOUNG: The premise of my intro is that Black American humor is the best American humor. And I believe that because I believe that we have to be the most honest about America, about who America is, what America is, you know? And when you are - when you're a people who has been vulnerable the entire time - right? - you pay closer attention. And I think that that sort of clarity, that sort of honesty, that sort of, like, reckoning, the best humor comes from that.
SUMMERS: I never like to ask people to pick favorites 'cause it's like picking your favorite child, and that is unfair, but...
YOUNG: Mine. If you're asking...
SUMMERS: (Laughter).
YOUNG: ...My favorite essays, I'm going to say mine. Come on.
SUMMERS: It's yours. All right, tell us about it.
YOUNG: Come on, what's wrong with you?
SUMMERS: Tell all the people about it.
YOUNG: (Laughter) OK. I mean, so I originally - it's about my relationship with my teeth. And it's a maybe 1,800-word long sentence. I wanted to take the reader into the stream of consciousness that I experience. When I'm thinking about my teeth, I'm thinking about the relationship with shame. I'm thinking about, you know, the relationship with class and getting Invisalign, and then leaving the house the first time with my Invisalign. And all of a sudden, I was like, oh, [expletive], can I smile? Can I take a selfie now? Can I do all this, all these things that I was gun-shy about before? But, OK, the answer to your question that you were going to ask...
SUMMERS: You think you know the question I was going to ask? Well, here's the thing, though, I wonder.
YOUNG: (Laughter).
SUMMERS: Like, you've got all of these amazing contributors who have written in. Is there one submission that you either opened up in your inbox or picked up the paper and you were like, this is just so dang funny, it has to be in here?
YOUNG: Well, I think an essay like Hillary Crosley Coker's - right? - where she writes about - and Hillary's a great friend of mine - where she writes about having a miscarriage.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
YOUNG: And it's also, weirdly, an essay about marriage. It's about - the miscarriage is kind of the plot, but the marriage is the story.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
YOUNG: And that essay just blew me away.
SUMMERS: There's this moment that stuck with me where she's writing about how she is still having this miscarriage. Her husband is useless to her 'cause he's hurt himself. Her colleagues are doing their normal whatever it is they're doing at work, and yet she is still enduring and showing up. What is it about our humor that can be such a salve when we're talking about and living with the humor that can come through something as deeply painful as a miscarriage?
YOUNG: I mean, I think it's just - it's a necessity. It's a necessity that is just born out of our experience. And it's, like, yeah, yeah, true. OK, whatever. But I still have to live. I still have to go to work. I still have to be a present partner. I still have to be a good friend. And I still have to laugh. I still have to find the humor. And again, it's not even necessarily finding the humor. The humor is there. You know, it's just, you know, whether or not you choose to acknowledge it.
SUMMERS: I want to ask you about one of my favorite essays, and it's the essay by D. Watkins. D. is talking about changing his little girl's diaper and his role as a father. And then he kind of starts meditating on his dad, who struggled with addictions over the years. But he's talking about how he still really loves him and thought his dad was amazing. And then he raises this question of, like, what will my daughter think of me when I grow up? And I know that, Damon, you are a dad, right?
YOUNG: I am a dad, yes.
SUMMERS: How much of that goes through your head? That just felt so relatable when I read it, that, like, how do I measure up? Like, what is she going to think when she's my age and I'm sitting in a rocking chair somewhere?
YOUNG: I'm terrified of that thought. You know, I have two kids now, a 9-year-old and 6-year-old. And it's like, I don't want to do a thing that they're talking about in therapy (laughter) - right? - 25 years later. Like, yeah, that's an anchoring and animating sort of fear, anxiety - right? - because you don't want to mess your kids up. But we have to figure that out somehow. And again, I just - I really love D.'s work. I really love his perspective. And I thought that, you know, him writing about his experience as a parent, there's so much humor to mine out of parenthood. You know, my son says something, and I ask him, excuse me? And he says, I wasn't talking to you, Daddy. And it's like, OK, what am I supposed to do with this?
SUMMERS: (Laughter).
YOUNG: Because he's - it's true. He's telling the truth.
SUMMERS: And-but (laughter).
YOUNG: But this is your - no, you don't say I'm not talking to you, Daddy. (Laughter) OK, there's another way to express that without, well, hurting my feelings, right?
SUMMERS: You know, I want to ask you - I was reading an interview you did about this collection with the Pittsburgh City Paper. And you made the point that one of the recurring themes that you find across all of these essays and all the parts of this collection is shame. Can you say more about that?
YOUNG: So I just had a residency at the University of Pittsburgh, this two-year stint. You know, the first thing that I told students is that I want you to extract whatever shames you feel about your background, about your personalities, about all these things that make you you, right? Because the best humor comes from an exploration of all those things. It comes from the weird. And the thing is, shame is tricky because the people who don't feel it are the ones who probably need to feel it the most, right? The people who move through life without the capacity for shame should probably feel some shame. But then you have people who feel shame about, you know, growing up poor or maybe not being able-bodied or all these other things that maybe they didn't have much control over.
And this collection, is, you know, is an example of that - right? - where, you know, these tremendous, these, you know, generous geniuses decided to, you know, dive into their vulnerabilities for this collection. And I'm just greatly appreciative that so many people were willing to go there with stuff that, you know, maybe wasn't comfortable to share, stuff that maybe they hadn't shared with other people before.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with Damon Young, editor of "That's How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology Of Black American Humor." It's out now. Damon, thank you.
YOUNG: Thanks for having me.
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