A few years ago I taught a freshman composition course at Penn State, and our anthology included a short humor piece by Andy Rooney, a sometimes funny writer best known for his commentaries on 60 Minutes. The piece wasn’t very funny, but an odd thing happened during the class discussion: with no prompting from me, the white students had seen that Rooney was trying to be funny, and the black students hadn’t. (I’m white, btw.)
Since then, I’ve occasionally wondered about the tradition of humorist writing. By “humorist” I mean writers such as Mark Twain, SJ Perelman, James Thurber, Erma Bombeck, Roy Blount Jr, Calvin Trillin, and Dave Barry: people who write short witty or comic essays, memoirs, observations, and other nonfiction.
All the humorist authors I know of are white. Who are the African Americans writing in this genre? I know there is a great, living tradition of African American humor and there have been many great comedians on stage and in movies. But which black authors could turn up in the next “Best American Humor Writing” anthology (or could have turned up 50 years ago)?
Spike Lee, Wanda Sykes, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Robert Townshend and Dave Chappelle are comic scriptwriters, although they’re better known as performers. Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy write most of their own material.
Are you looking for primarily prose writers? Alice Randall wrote a book-length parody of Gone with the Wind called The Wind Done Gone; not sure how funny it is, though. Aaron McGruder, cartoonist of The Boondocks, has a number of writing projects on the side (which explains why his artwork took such a downward tailspin).
There aren’t many black humorists. Like you said: African-American comedians have a long, rich oral tradition (Moms Mabley performed for more than fifty years) but not so much at humor writing. Black writers are traditionally a very serious lot; blacks in America with a propensity to write at all are encouraged by their teachers, writing mentors, audiences and fellow writing peers to take it very seriously – this goes all the way back to Philis Wheatley. Some funny black writers – Charles Johnson and Walter Moseley-- who can be funny as hell in their fiction and utterly urbane in personal interviews suddenly become as humorless as breast cancer when they write essays. Black humor, for some odd cultural reason, goes to the stage.
Some of the more successful stand-up guys get book deals with ghost writers that essentially distill their stand-up acts to paper (Bill Cosby and Chris Rock, to name two.) There’s the other group of black humorists: professional comedy writers like Ralph Farquhar, Mara Brock Akil and the Wayans clan – the latter’ve been writing their own TV and movie scripts for 20 years now. (Krokodil named the other major ones.) But observational essayists like Twain, Rooney and Dave Barry – newspaper-trained writers who weigh forth on various topics using the written word alone – are rare. Rooney just reads his essays aloud.
The only one I know of who even remotely fits this bill is the late Langston Hughes, who along with Zora Neale Hurston were probably the monarchs of comedy among the writers in the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes wrote a series of articles for black newspapers using as his mouthpiece the character Jesse B. Semple (think: Chris Tucker as a 1940s-50s Harlem denizen) who weighed in on everything from his aching feet to the vagraties of racism to the wiles of women to the nuclear arms race. Great stuff: I’ve been reading it since I was ten.
Some of Malcolm X’s columns in THE FINAL CALL, like his speeches, were laced with an edgy gallows humor.
To a certain extent, cartoonists like the late Brumsic Brandon, Morrie Turner (WEE PALS), Kyle Baker, Barbara Brandon-Croft (WHERE I’M COMING FROM), Ray Billingsley (CURTIS) and Aaron McGruder (BOONDOCKS) do this kind of humor.
THE SOURCE used to have a very funny column by the enonymous RAP BANDIT that scathinging ripped into various hip-hop personalities – but it was more in the style of topical, celebrity gossip column, with pithy witticisms and pointed barbs rather than using the genuine essay format.
Eric Dickey performed stand-up before becoming a best-selling author. The late Lynn Harris also infused humor in many of his novels. As mentioned before, many African American authors avoid humor. Why? A multitude of reasons, I guess. What’s blatantly obvious, however, is visual humor, as in stage, stand-up and films, doesn’t play as well on paper. Two current novels you might take a look at: Family Thang; and Pernicious. Both hilarious, by an African American author.
Similarly, Paul Mooney, who’s also written for many tv shows, wrote Black is the New White.
There’s been a trend in publisher to have any and every successful comedian write a book, black comics included. Cedric the Entertainer, Tracy Morgan, Aisha Tyler, Chris Rock, Damon Wayans, Whoopi Goldberg, and a bunch more I can’t think of right now. Some were ghosted, though. Bill Cosby does not write his own books: the early ones were written by Ralph Schoenstein, but he died and I don’t know who’s taken them over.
Try googling Erickka Sy Savane. She used to write a relationship column called Bitches Brew for Trace magazine. I’m a huge fan of her work. I think she has a blog online where you can read her stuff. It’s extremely funny and witty. I’d def. put her in the category of a humorist african american writer.
Askia mentioned Kyle Baker in passing but I’d like to second that recommendation. Baker’s work is very much in the tradition of the humor writers mentioned in the OP, with the exception that Baker does most of his work in a graphic format.