Author: Paul Beatty
Category: Fiction
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hokum
hokum
an anthology of african-american humor
edited by paul beatty
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2006 by Paul Beatty
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hokum : an anthology of African-American humor / edited by Paul Beatty.—
1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59691-716-3
1. African American wit and humor. 2. American literature—
African American authors. 3. African Americans—Literary collections.
I. Beatty, Paul.
PN6231.N5H65 2006
817.008/0896073—dc22
2005048183
First U.S. Edition 2006
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
contents
Introduction
pissed off to the highest degree of pisstivity
Sojourner Truth—" And a'n't I a Woman?" (1851)
W. E. B. DuBois—" On Being Crazy" (1923)
Zora Neale Hurston—"' Possum or Pig?" (1926)
Chester Himes—" Let Me at the Enemy— an' George Brown" (1944)
Malcolm X—" Message to the Grass Roots" (1963)
Langston Hughes—" Pose-Outs" (1965)
Lightnin' Hopkins—" Cadillac Blues" (performed 1968)
H. Rap Brown— from Die, Nigger, Die! (1969)
Sam Greenlee— from Tlie Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969)
Wanda Coleman—" April 15th 1985" (c. 1985)
"Identifying Marks" (c. 1985)
"On that Stuff That Ain't Nevah Been Long Enuff for No Damn Body" (c. 1985)
Hattie Gossett—" yo daddy: an 80s version of the dozens" (1988)
Ammiri Baraka—" Wise 1" (1995)
Cornelius Eady—" The Cab Dover Who Ripped Me Off" (1997)
Tish Benson—" Fifth-Ward E-Mail" (2003)
Al Sharpton— Presidential campaign speech delivered to the San Francisco Commonwealth Club (2003)
Mike Tyson— The Wit and Wisdom of Mike Tyson (1987-2004)
(nothing serious) just buggin'
Paul Laurence Dunbar—" When De Co'n Pone's Hot" (1895)
Bert Williams—" How Fried?" (1913)
Assorted jokes compiled by Alex Rogers (1918)
Rudolph Fisher—" The City of Refuge" (1925)
Zora Neale Hurston—" The Bone of Contention" (c. 1929).
George Schuyler— from Black No More (1931)
James Weldon Johnson—" Brer Rabbit, You's de Cutes' of 'Em All" (1935)
Sterling Brown—" Slim in Atlanta" (1932)
"Slim Lands a Job?" (1932)
"Crispus Attucks McKoy" (1965)
Gwendolyn Brooks—" at the hairdresser's" (1945)
"One reason cats . . ." (1968)
"a song in the front yard" (1945)
Langston Hughes—" Adventure" (c. 1962)
Gary Belkin (writing as Muhammad Ali)— "Clay Comes Out to Meet Liston" (1963)
Henry Dumas—" Double Nigger" (1965)
Ishmael Reed— from Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969)
Toni Cade Bambara—" The Lesson" (1972)
Etheridge Knight—" Dark Prophecy: I Sing of Shine" (1973)
"Memo #9" (1973)
"Rehabilitation & Treatment in the Prisons of America" (1973)
Kyle Baker—" Sands of Blood," from The Cowboy Wally Show (1988)
Spike Lee— from Do the Right Thing (1989)
Patricia Smith—" Boy Sneezes, Head Explodes" (1991)
Darius James—" Lil' Black Zambo," from Negrophobia (1992)
Lord Finesse—" Return of the Funky Man" (1992)
Hilton Als—" The Only One" (1994)
John Farris— In the Park After School with the Girl & the Boy (1994)
Elizabeth Alexander—" Talk Radio, D.C." (1996)
Erika Ellis— from Good Fences (1999)
Percival Everett— from Erasure (2001)
Colson Whitehead— from John Henry Days (2001)
Willie Perdomo—" Should Old Shit Be Forgot" (2003)
black absurdity
Zora. Neale Hurston—" Book of Harlem" (c. 1921)
Chester Himes—" Dirty Deceivers" (1948)
Ralph Ellison— from Invisible Man (1952)
Charles Wright— from The Wig (1966)
Bob Kaufman—" Abomunist Manifesto" (1965)
"Heavy Water Blues" (1967)
Cecil Brown— from Lite Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969)
Steve Cannon— from Groove, Bang and Jive Around (1969)
Fran Ross— from Oreo (1974)
Franklyn Ajaye—" Be Black, Brother, Be Black"
"Disneyland High" (1977)
Trey Ellis— from Platitudes (1988)
Harryette Mullen—" Any Lit" (1991)
"Jinglejangle" (1991)
"Kamasutra Sutra" (1991)
"Souvenir from Anywhere" (1991)
Suzan-Lori Parks— Devotees in the Garden of Love (1991)
Willie Perdomo—" Nigger-Reecan Blues" (1996)
Danzy Senna—" The Mulatto Millennium" (1998)
John Rodriguez—" How to Be a Street Poet" (1999)
Darius James— from "Froggie Chocolates' Christmas Eve" (2003)
Prophet Omega—" I Am What I Am" (date unknown)
"Swollen Feets" (date unknown)
Contributor Notes
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
People laugh when you fall on your ass.
What's humor?—Jean-Michel Basquiat
Back in college a friend once asked if she could tell me a joke. A sure sign of a bad joke is one which requires permission to be granted in order for it to be told, but I agreed. After all, she'd put up with me stalking her for a semester and a half; the least I could do was listen to a quip that, judging from the "Okay, okay . . . wait a sec" preamble and her finally resorting to reading the joke from what looked to be a mimeographed first-day-of-class handout, was going to be a groaner.
"Okay, I'm ready. You listening?"
"If listening means I haven't choked you to death yet, then yes."
"All right, two black guys, George Washington Robinson and Roosevelt Lincoln Kennedy . . ."
I smirked, and a noise that sounded like something between a chuckle and a snort rumbled from my throat.
"You're laughing. I knew it!"
"Knew what?"
"Professor Boskin said you'd laugh."
"Professor Boskin? Who's Professor Boskin?"
"Today in class he said there were forms and styles of humor that only people of certain demographic groups find funny."
"What group, and more importantly what joke?"
"You're in the African-American group and you laughed at a joke designed to appeal to African-Americans."
"You haven't even gotten to the punch line yet."
"That's the joke."
" '
Two black guys, George Washington Robinson and Roosevelt Lincoln Kennedy,' that's the entire joke?"
"You laughed, so it must be."
"I was laughing to please you."
"I forgot. You don't have a sense of humor."
"If I had a sense of humor, I'd be laughing my ass off that you and Professor Boskin would think that anyone African-American or otherwise would think that two black guys named George Washington Robinson and Roosevelt Lincoln Kennedy is funny. That's the real joke."
"Okay, fine, but then why is it supposed to be funny?"
Why indeed? If it was so damn funny, why would Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry have adopted Stepin Fetchit as a stage name? That disconnect between our humors has stayed with me for some time, and although I slightly exaggerate this twenty-some-odd-year-old conversation for effect, it's a fair example of how, over time, my sense of humor has developed through a confluence of resentment and unsated libido. I didn't find a joke about two black guys named after dead American presidents funny, partly for reasons of minstrel triteness, but mostly because I resent the idea of a people, in this case African-Americans, being thought of as having not a collective consciousness but a collective funny bone. I especially resented that the omnipotent whiteness of the joke's reference point had nothing to be resentful about. The joke is dependent upon a baseless fear, a fear of finding the other too similar to oneself, too American. No matter how heartfelt, white interpretation of Negro humor and Negro existence is often too black. It's Vanilla Ice slant-rhyme jive black. It's poor, beleaguered Bill Clinton pleading temporary blackness and bivouacking in Harlem among his people of non-Rwandan ancestry. It's the in toto blackness of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Check and Double Check, a blackface so pervasive, so complete that even Amos and Andy's and Topsy's palms and fingernails are shoe-polished to a grease-monkey pitch.
My resentment has become so overbearing that these days I'm unable to take anything seriously, much less humorously. Everything is satirical. Not Mad magazine satirical but Orwellian dystopic. The stand-up comedians are indistinguishable from the trade paperback satirists and the round-table news pundits shooting one-liners at each other like Jack Benny and Rochester. They're embittered middle-aged infants, as abrasive as Spanish-language punk rock, as perceptive as Neville Chamberlain, and about as funny as The Patriot Act: The Movie. Much of today's humor seems to be based on the "laugh or else" crime-boss-and-underlings model. A mean-spirited joke gets told and the heartiness of audience response is based not on its cleverness but on its offensiveness. Not to say offensiveness can't be funny, but everyone is so insecure we're afraid to laugh at ourselves and for anyone to laugh at us. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. Fuck 'em if they can't tell a joke. Fuck 'em if you can't fuck 'em.
Two guys, their names are Eleanor Madonna Nixon and Deng Xiaoping O'Malley. They may be guys, women, transsexuals, omnisexual, Hopi, black, Latin, white, transracial, Cablinasian, selfish, stupid, Republicans, or other, in any combination and permutation, but nothing would make me happier than if they were funny. Apart from the five minutes of weekly brilliance on Chappelle's Show, the Onion newspaper, Sarah Silverman, and George Lopez, there isn't much to laugh at these days. The best I can hope for is to chance upon some unintentional comedy. Nothing the chitlin circuit Kings of Comedy have said in the past five years was funnier than football Hall of Famer and angry black-man-in-residence Jim Brown's response to a radio host's suggestion that he calm down and enroll in an anger management class: "What are you talking about, man? I teach anger management!" No one brought more levity to 9/11 than Christine Whitman, ex-governor and then administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, when she stood amid the still-smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center and calmly assuaged my downtown New Yorker paranoia with, "We are very encouraged that the results from our monitoring of [cough, cough] air quality and drinking water conditions in both [ahem, ahem, aaackk] New York and near the Pentagon show that the public [pant, gasp] in these areas is not [wheeze] being exposed to excessive levels of asbestos or other harmful substances. Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that their [hack, cough, gasp, hack] air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink." And then there's Iron Mike Tyson, the Henny Youngman of unintentional humor, who after losing to Lennox Lewis answered a question about his boxing legacy by saying, "I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
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. Three years ago I was in a Berlin bar commiserating with an expatriate black author of some renown. We were doing what African-Americans who live abroad do, which is to castigate the entire black race (apart from ourselves and Thelonious Monk and Harriet Tubman, of course) and all of its overhyped contributions to society, from fire to record scratching to the touchdown celebration. Inevitably, after a few red wines and a sound thrashing of Stanley Crouch, I slurred, "Niggers ain't as funny as they used to be."
"Ain't no such thing as niggers."
"You're right. Well, unicorns ain't as funny as they used to be either, but we should start a humor magazine."
"Yeah, a National Lampoon for black folk."
"We could call it Coon Lampoon."
"Mad as Fuck Magazine."
"Readers Digress—Laughter is the World's Best Medicine Next to Morphine."
"Hokum: A Seriously Funny Magazine."
I returned stateside bandying about the idea of starting a humor magazine to people who, thankfully, knew better than to take me seriously. At the time I was reading Oreo, an incredibly hilarious novel written by Fran Ross. I'm usually very slow to come around to things. It took me two years to "feel" Wu Tang's first album, even longer to appreciate Basquiat, and I still don't get all the fuss over Duke Ellington and Frank Lloyd Wright, but I couldn't believe that Oreo hadn't been on my broad, albeit balky, cultural radar. The relative obscurity of Oreo and some prodding from my agent inspired me to think about compiling an anthology of African-American literature. All the other black tropes, such as eroticism, crime, hair, athleticism, blackness, real blackness, blue blackness, black gay eroticism, black gay thug eroticism, black eunuch and postmenopausal eroticism, have been anthologized to death, creating this nappy-haired, virile Frankenstein monster who growls in a bluesy a-a-b rhyme scheme but has no sense of humor.
Not being ticklish, I see laughter as a learned response and not a reflexive one. However, it's far easier for me to recall learning when not to laugh than learning when to laugh. Don't laugh at the hippies along the Venice Beach boardwalk. Slap. Don't snigger at your grandmother's proclivity to attach an "er" to the end of her words. "This yell-er Tropican-er banan-er is for your sister Ann-er." Wallop. Above all don't laugh at the other neighborhood kids getting smacked around as they learn their lessons as to what is and what isn't funny. Blam.
I suppose the first thing I was allowed to laugh at without fear of repercussion was myself. I was the butt of the first joke I'd ever heard. "Why are you so dark? Because God left you in the oven too long." This also was an affront to my atheism, but I let that slide, since no one was directly teasing me for my lack of faith, and if they had I suppose I'd have let that slide too. The worst part of the racial ridicule was that the time-tested rejoinder "I'm rubber you're glue, whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you!" is useless when you're surrounded by a bunch of cowlick white boys calling you "jungle bunny." I could never come up with a good punch line for "Why are you so white?" It was like asking, Why is the sky blue? There might be a scientific explanation, but it sure as hell wouldn't be funny. There was nothing negative about being white, but thank goodness there was some shame in being Polish.
When my friends exhausted their supply of nigger jokes, my debasement was quickly followed by the schoolyard ridicule of an invisible ethnic group known as Polacks. None of my white playmates were
of openly Polish descent, so I finally had a shield to hide behind. In those days on the spinning rack in the rear of the corner liquor store you could find Mad magazine paperbacks, seventy-five-cent smutty novels, and the paperbacks with fluorescent covers and titles like 500 Ethnic Put-Downs, 1001 Polack Jokes, 1001 More Polack Jokes, 1001 Polack Jokes Not in the Other Two 1001 Polack Joke Joke Books. The Put-Downs book was no good to me because I didn't know any "ethnics" other than maybe David Eisenstadt, my best friend and a gangly, Fudgsicle-brown kid, who due to a complete lack of ethnic identity (other than thinking he was a WWII fighter pilot) never took offense to anything, so I developed an encyclopedic repertoire of Polack jokes. I knew so many versions of the "How many Polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb?" riddle that my answer was liable to be anywhere from one to one thousand. The longer I told Polack jokes, the longer my friends stopped laughing at me, the longer I stopped laughing at myself. Are Polack jokes told by a resentful black kid African-American humor? Are Mad Super Specials #4 through #22 literature?
By the time the family moved to the significantly more urban Westside of Los Angeles, I was a fairly literate eight-year-old. I'd read all the books in my mom's library, Bellow, Heller, Doctorow, Grey's Anatomy, but had only two literary heroes with whom I could identify, Encyclopedia Brown and the black spy from Mad's cloak and dagger cartoon, Spy vs. Spy. Whenever Encyclopedia Brown, the boy detective, solved the case of the missing roller skates, or the earthenware pig, or the natty nat, it was a victory for all Browns, both surnamed and those, like me, left in the oven too long. I shamelessly rooted for Antonio Prohias's black spy; relishing every spring-loaded boxing glove that smashed the white spy's pointy insect proboscis and blackened his beady eyes into X's. A triumph by the duplicitous, conniving, diabolical, plunger-pushing, Mickey Finn-slipping, dynamite-stick-lighting punk-ass white spy was enough to send me to my room to continue my quest to coin a biting ethnic slur for Whitey. Surely the progeny of the people who invented jazz, the hot comb, blood plasma, and the knock-knock joke could come up with something better than honky. Blue-eyed hoogy, inside trader, lipless Larrys, snow niggers . . .