Hunger and Hilarity: On Laughing and Cracking Up While Black
Maybe the reason so few people are funny these days is that nothing is identified as being absurd anymore. ~Paul Beatty, Hokum, 2006
Poet and novelist Paul Beatty is one of today's funniest writers. I just picked up his third novel, Slumberland, released this past June but I've read his debut novel, The White Boy Shuffle, fifty eleven times and on each occasion laughed as heartily as when I first sped through it by lamplight one teenage weekend at my dad's. Charge that to his love of the absurd and a skeletal-baring hunger for it's often in deprivation that we are most vulnerable and visionary, whether out of delusion or drive. Look to Eddie Murphy or Chris Tucker, once the wiry comics filled out, their punchlines fell flat.
A satirical bildungsroman that parsed the Black male middle class experience with the same intensity and insight as forebear Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man's broadly achieved for the Black experience, The White Boy Shuffle killed thanks to Beatty's incisive peeling apart of 'hood and upwardly mobile Black pretensions and impressionistic portraiture of a skinny Black boy stuck in between.
There are few places to find such smart humor. Even comic par excellence Chris Rock gets lazy and Dave Chappelle admitted on Oprah that his famed Comedy Central show got him "in touch with [his] inner coon." But blogger Fresh has been coming with it for the past few years. She doesn't provide the latest breaking gossip or photos, just the best contextualized. She strikes to the heart of the celebrity foolishness and with a Black, pop-cultural hyper-literacy for which Black culture vultures like me had been pining.
Just look to her coverage of shamelessly color struck rapper Yung Berg. She posted one critical post, Yung Berg's not worth many more keystrokes, and later amended her headline as such, "Fresh would fail Yung Berg's pool test."
Beatty, in the introduction to his 2006 anthology of African American humor, Hokum, layed out the book's aim as this,
I compiled this book because I'm afraid American humor is fading into Bolivian* and that Will Smith, the driest man alive, will be historicized as the Oscar Wilde of Negro wit and wimsy.
My fears are as tall, a bit thicker and much more menacing but I have got at least two witty Negroes to keep me sane should Tyler Perry types continue to suck all the vim from Black comedy and culture.
*A nod to Iron Mike who Beatty describes as "the Henny Youngman of unintentional humor.
Tags: Black Middle Class, Books, Comedy, Fresh, Yung Berg
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