Vital nonsense

Hokum

An Anthology of African-American Humor

Edited by Paul Beatty

Bloomsbury: 468 pp., $29.95

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“You all know how black humor started? It started in slave ships. Cat was ... over there rowing. Dude say, ‘What you laughin’ about?’

“Said, ‘Yesterday I was a king.’ ”

-- Richard Pryor

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PAUL BEATTY is an uncategorizable underground hero with a loyal, loud, smack-talking cult following. A native Angeleno who long ago relocated to New York, he draws on the idiosyncrasies of both regions -- the more peculiar or out there, the better. His comic-book-hued portraits of city life are turned up high in the mix, always threatening to blow out the speakers. No one is safe in his sights. He refuses to color within the lines.

Although Beatty started out as a poet, he is best known as the author of two novels, “The White Boy Shuffle” (1996) and “Tuff” (2000), which embrace the inherent humor that can mark so many of life’s dissonant “isms” -- racism, classism, nationalism, liberalism, conservatism -- at the moment they collide. Yet if he often hits all manner of hot-button issues, his renderings seldom seem oversaturated. No matter how far-fetched or absurd the situation -- in “Tuff,” an African American rabbi mentors the 320-pound son of a man who is both Beat poet and Black Panther -- Beatty’s gift has always been his ability to toss off sly details that serve as searing punch lines. He knows that incongruity and absurdity are the true grit of life.

Six years after his last book, Beatty is back as editor of “Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor,” a 400-page-plus compendium that tromps all over this familiar ground. One glimpse at the cover -- the remains of a watermelon slice hovering in black space, mimicking a smile -- tells you all you need to know. “[E]veryone is so insecure,” Beatty writes in an introduction that is, by turns, witty and cranky, “we’re afraid to laugh at ourselves and for anyone to laugh at us.”

“Hokum” is an eclectic mix fueled by an omnivorous busybody sensibility. You won’t find moldy jokes or sepia-tone one-liners here; this is not a through-the-ages survey or a “Best of” Mantan Moreland, Pigmeat Markham, Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx. There are no old routines from Dick Gregory or Eddie Murphy. And if you’re looking for gems from Richard Pryor or Dave Chappelle, you won’t find them in “Hokum” either -- save for Beatty’s own comments about their ability to kick up dust.

Beatty does offer some familiar examples from the “Black Humor” annals: the off-kilter wisdom of Langston Hughes’ Jesse B. Semple -- or “Simple” (“Pose Outs”); a Br’er Rabbit cameo filtered through the verse of James Weldon Johnson; a trio of Zora Neale Hurston pieces that blur the lines between humor, folklore and anthropology; and two side-aching routines from the magical and underappreciated Franklin Ajaye (“Be Black, Brother, Be Black” and “Disneyland High”). Still, although Beatty is looking for humor in plain sight, he is more interested in what hides in the nooks and crannies, what pops out unexpectedly: the unintentionally funny. Among other things, his book features a string of twisted quips from the King of the Malaprop, Mike Tyson (“I guess I’m gonna fade into Bolivian”), as well as underground-radio sermons from Prophet Omega, the “founder and overseer” of the Peaceway Temple in Nashville. (These have made dub-cassette rounds for decades.) The idea is to collect asides, quips, verse and observations -- material so intrinsic to everyday life that it feels ambient.

Beatty’s reach is broad and borderless. He grabs from across the culture -- juxtaposing Sojourner Truth, Gwendolyn Brooks and Harryette Mullen with Ishmael Reed, Bob Kaufman and Darius James, his hands eager, his arms wide. Wanda Coleman writes about the peculiar phenomenon of being both invisible and visible at the same time in “April 15, 1985.” There are political speeches, memoir excerpts, magazine pieces (including Hilton Als’ exquisitely rendered New Yorker portrait of Vogue’s outre fashion arbiter Andre Leon Talley), poetry, blues songs, rap lyrics, short plays and fragments of screenplays like Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.”

What binds all these seemingly unrelated texts is the sensibility, the way recurring themes butt up against one another in the psyche. The work here deals with lack of power, the struggle of being “the only one” in a sea of “other” and the humiliation of being hoodwinked -- as well as racial segregation, intra-racial segregation, racial authenticity, militancy and the long, bumpy road toward identity -- both collective and individual.

“Hokum,” then, provides an expansive context, a more flexible definition of “humor.” It is all over the map, intentionally so, a work of cultural exploration rather than a collection of one-liners and gags. For Beatty, it’s important to understand the antecedents, the forebears, the tricksters, the fools. You begin to see who is borrowing what from whom -- how stand-ups cadge from preachers, rappers from stand-ups, how poets embrace it all. This is what makes the collection feel not just unusual but fresh, a prism through which the world is viewed.

The “humor” -- the exasperated laugh -- is what arises from that worldview. “I resent the idea of a people, in this case African Americans, being thought of as not having a collective consciousness but a collective funny bone,” Beatty declares in his introduction. “I compiled this book because I’m afraid that 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 whimsy.”

By framing “Hokum” as “more mix tape” than comprehensive overview, Beatty buys himself a lot of leeway. Mix tapes, passed on to friends, are seldom completist ventures. Instead, they are assemblages of high points, epiphanies or departures, rambling, heedless of genre or era but grouped by theme, riff or mood.

That’s exactly what “Hokum” is. It isn’t meant to be scholarly, but a vehicle to broaden our notions of black humor. The key to the book is not to get caught up in categories. Don’t spend too much time thinking about where things got put and why. What Beatty is really after is the big picture -- which has to do with the various ways humor functions. Historically, it has been one of the strategies by which black people have dealt with pain, absurdity and anger, with frustration over circumstances that have been imposed on them. That’s one of the messages shot through Amiri Baraka’s poem, “Wise 1”:

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If you ever find

yourself, some where

lost and surrounded

by enemies

who won’t let you

speak in your own language

... who ban

your oom boom ba boom

then you are in trouble

deep trouble ...

humph!

probably take you several hundred years

to get

out!

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The humor is sewn into Baraka’s delivery, as Beatty connects the dots -- and the reverberations -- of black oratory.

In “Message to the Grass Roots,” Malcolm X spins a parable about the history of black/white politics in America, circa 1963, employing the cadences of a Sunday sermon: “[The] modern house Negro loves his master. He wants to live near him. He’ll pay three times as much as the house is worth just to live near his master, and then brag about ‘I’m the only Negro out here.’ ‘I’m the only one on my job.’ ‘I’m the only one in this school. ‘ ... And if someone comes to you right now and says, ‘Let’s separate,’ you say the same thing that the house Negro said on the plantation. ‘What do you mean, separate? From America, this good white man?’ I mean, this is what you say. ‘I ain’t left nothing in Africa,’ that’s what you say. Why, you left your mind in Africa.”

Forty years later, Al Sharpton evokes the same rhythms, the same reverberations, in a 2003 presidential campaign speech: “Now, I am not a sympathizer of Saddam Hussein, but I do not understand how we are attacked by Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and end up going after Saddam Hussein.... I was born in the ‘hood in Brooklyn. In the ‘hood, unfortunately there is crime, and people break into your house. If they break into your house and you call the police and the police come, you don’t send the police after a guy around the corner that offended your daddy 20 years ago. To add insult to injury ... George Bush and Tony Blair have a meeting and act like the whole world met -- two guys in a phone booth call it a world summit.”

Could be Pryor. Could be Chris Rock. Could be Chappelle. All telling hard truths, cushioned with levity, continuing a tradition. Humor, then, continues to function as a survival mechanism, a way of coping with a condition that is serious if not dire.

Coping, of course, can also involve dirty laundry, from indelible stereotypes to long-internalized racism. In “Dirty Deceivers,” Chester Himes takes on the crucible of passing, describing a husband and wife who go to great pains to hide their true identities from one another -- although as it turns out they are both (coincidentally) black. And in an excerpt that negotiates the same symbolic minefield as “Hokum’s” own watermelon-smile cover, the famous protagonist from Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” relishes a moment when he can publicly consume a yam. “I walked along,” Ellison writes, “suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom.... It was exhilarating.... If only someone who had known me at school or at home would come along and see me now. How shocked they’d be! ... What a group of people we were, I thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked.”

Collectively, the pieces here also work on an unanticipated level, exploring and expanding the range of blackness and multiplicity. Danzy Senna’s clever sendup “The Mulatto Millennium” delves into the post-civil rights babble from her position as a fair-skinned “undercover negro” or interloper. Als’ illuminating profile “The Only One,” meanwhile, deconstructs the character -- and caricature -- that gay, black, 6-foot-7 Andre Leon Talley has for decades carefully stitched together from outlandish costumes and sardonic quips. “You know what one fundamental difference between whites and blacks is?” Talley asks Als. “If there’s trouble at home for white people, they send the child to a psychiatrist. Black folks just send you to live with Grandma.”

Some of “Hokum’s” best moments, though, are in Beatty’s voice: his asides, his childhood recollections and his present-day state-of-the-(human)-race analysis. He takes aim at heroes and sacred cows -- among them Bill Cosby and Maya Angelou. He’s quick, wry and devilishly dead-on, playing with tropes, kicking around stereotypes and outmoded beliefs like noisy, rusty cans. “Growing up, there used to be lots of pressure to take blackness seriously,” he writes. “Public blackness had to be groomed, polished, well creased, and well greased. The risk of running into a white person, police officer, member of Grandma’s parish, or one of the paragons of good blackness, Sidney Poitier, Rosa Parks, and Frederick Douglass, was not to be taken lightly.... Being black then was like growing up in East Germany. The sloganeering. The uplifting songs.... [The] admonishments ... first and foremost, don’t be no fool.... Unfortunately, I was an inveterate fool.”

Thank goodness for that. Indeed, if the word “hokum” is understood to mean nonsense -- a message that seems to convey no meaning -- Beatty’s book tweaks the definition, making the whole idea bittersweet. What is humor? How does it ease our passage through the world? It’s not, in this case, that “hokum” conveys “no meaning,” but rather that what we’re left with is all too often coded, burdened, impossible to untangle: a reflection of what Beatty (the trickster, forever the “wry” fool) considers “life’s black imponderables.”