New books by Damon Young and Dennard Dayle take different routes to humor
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I genuinely think writing is one of the most difficult forms of comedy because unlike other forms where you can control the tone and the timing, all you have with writing is the words on the page.

Today on the pod, we've got two books taking very different routes to humor. Up ahead, a satire about a Civil War flag twirler. But first, That's How They Get You is an anthology of comedic essays exploring black life in America today. The writer Damon Young put it together, and he talked to NPR's Juana Summers about how, while the topics differ, they're about parenting and marriage and Invisalign, they all are, in part, about shame. That's ahead.

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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. 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.

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. 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's like, you know, 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. I asked Young more about the impetus for this new collection and why the stories can feel universal no matter where we grew up. 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 people.

About America, about who America is, what America is, you know, and when you are when you're 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.

I never like to ask people to pick favorites because it's like picking your favorite child, and that is unfair. Mine. If you're asking my favorite essays, I'm going to say mine. It's yours. All right. Tell us about it. Tell the people about it. Okay. I mean, so I originally – it's about my relationship with my teeth. And it's this maybe 1,800-word long sentence. I wanted to take the reader into the stream of consciousness first.

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 it's like, oh, 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, if the answer to a question that you were going to ask. You think, you know, the question I was going to have. Well, here's the thing, though. I wonder, like you've got all of these amazing contributors who have written. And is there one submission that you either open 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. Well, I I think an essay like Hillary Cross the Cokers.

Right. Where she she writes about and Hillary is a great friend of mine where she writes about having a miscarriage. And it's also weirdly an essay about marriage is that it's about it's the miscarriage is kind of the the plot. But the marriage is the story. Yeah. And that essay just blew me away.

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 because 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 an

living with the humor that can come through something as deeply painful as a miscarriage. 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. Okay, whatever. But I still have to live. I still have to, 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. I want to ask you about one of my favorite essays, and it's the essay by Dee Watkins. Dee 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? I am a dad. Yes. 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? I'm terrified of that thought. You know, I have two kids now, a nine-year-old and six-year-old. And it's like, I don't want to do a thing that's

that they're talking about in therapy, right, 25 years later. Like, yeah, that is a, that's an anchoring message

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 Dee'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, okay, what am I supposed to do with this? Because he's, it's true. He's telling the truth. But this is your, no, you don't say I'm not talking to you, daddy. You, okay. There's another way to express that. What the hell? Well, I hurt my feelings. You know, you,

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 of the parts of this collection is shame. Can you say more about that? So I just had a residency at the University of Pittsburgh. It was a 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...

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. And then you have people who feel shame about, you know, growing up poor or or or maybe not being able bodied or or all these other things that maybe they didn't have much control over. And this collection works.

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 or stuff that maybe they hadn't shared with other people before. Yeah.

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. Thanks for having me. This message comes from Bombas. Nearly 30% of marathoners end their race blistered. Bombas running socks are strategically cushioned to help say bye to blisters. Run to bombas.com slash NPR and use code NPR for 20% off your first purchase.

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I love a novel about a dumb guy. A guy who can kind of wriggle his way out of situations, but always ends up falling into a worse one somehow. Denard Dale's novel How to Dodge a Cannonball is the latest entry into this genre, and he talks to NPR's Aisha Roscoe about giving a character like this more than a smidge of sympathy.

Every man, save a few Simeons, deserves freedom. The men on the other side of this field don't understand that. Just a few pages into his new novel and Denard Dale has written a stirring battlefield speech from a general to his troops at Gettysburg. Right now, we can crush the Union center and throw the continent's largest army into chaos.

We can show their senators and newsmen that we will not kneel. I won't mince words. We are one charge away from winning this war. But I need you with me.

Or rather, Pickett needs you with him. I'll be supervising. The Confederate General Pickett, as in Pickett's Charge. And yes, satire is on the march. How to Dodge a Cannonball is, among other things, about the absurdity of the Civil War, as experienced by a 15-year-old from Illinois who seeks glory through flag twirling. Awesome.

Author Denard Dale is with us now to talk about it. Were you a flag twirler yourself at any point? Let's see. No, I only served briefly in the Civil War. There are so many Civil War novels. Why did you want to write this one? So it had a lot more to do with my own fixation than necessarily some kind of critique of the existing canon.

Though, you know, most Civil War novels are written by serious people. So I think I bring something very unique on that term, this sort of catch-22 by way of the 1860s. Talk to us about Anders, because he is this kind of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn type character, and he's white. And that's like a big part of this. So Anders's voice was kind of one of the main impetuses for me writing this. He is someone who has this...

He has this narrow experience. He has these very tilted viewpoints coming at him. He's trying to sort this information. I mean, he is deluded, but the reason is he does not really have a better bank of information to work from.

And then he is just thrown into the pool of the world, and he is essentially learning about the world, unfortunately, in the most active, bullet-ridden, high-risk way possible. You know, sometimes when you write comedy, it's nice to go with sort of a pure fool or a pure idiot. But with him, I tried to do someone who had a lot of strong sort of, I guess you'd say quantity of or mechanical intelligence. Mm-hmm.

but was just not equipped for the social maelstrom that he is being thrown into, especially at his age. He is convinced that his tiny slice of this war, you know, maintaining morale, performing for soldiers is the most important thing. He takes it very seriously. And he is like very critical of others who try to do it.

Oh, yeah. His ego is wrapped all the way around this thing. In his head, he is the Mozart of spinning this flagpole around. And it seems like Anders, his primary motivation at first is to survive. Because, you know, the thing about it is he twirls for the Union, then he switches sides and he twirls for the Confederates. And then he switches back to twirl for the Union. But this time he attaches himself to a Black regiment.

And then he goes around telling everyone he's an octoroon. None of the black soldiers really buy it, but they just kind of let him in. Why do you think they accept him? So right off the bat, it is clear that this kid who has no idea what he's doing is a breed of misfit.

And they are in this extremely unenviable position where they are being told they have to, you know, fight to earn or deserve their freedom. That's sort of an idea I interrogate throughout all of this. And I think being in that position gives them a little more sympathy than they might have otherwise. And this one figure, Gleeson, who he calls himself a scientific playwright. He's kind of a Jules Verne. It's very important that he meets Gleeson first because...

He's someone who's a very true believer in America as pitched in earning this place in America, that this is the moment for black America, that it can all be OK from here. And that affects how he treats this kid who comes in, just runs in shouting, hi, I'm an actor. And he just sort of nods along like, OK, I can work with this.

Anders also kind of unwittingly discovers this plot that's happening, how the Civil War rages. And there's this showdown with a surprise bad guy, Wendy Ross, the daughter of Betsy Ross. It turns out she's a master flag twirler. Can you read a little bit from their flag twirling smackdown? He started with a crouched walk the eagle, sweeping the pole under his foot and hopping over.

Wendy matched it. She performed a varial flag spin. He matched it. Anders performed a Delaware crossing, spinning the pole on his left knee while imitating Washington's favorite pose. Is this kind of like a, you know, you've been served type thing? That is exactly the frame, um...

I essentially took the type of movements you would do in breaking or b-boying, and I used a lot of sort of stylistic affectations or vocabulary style of skateboarding. Like, you know, it says varial slag spin. Okay. It's just like a game of skate, basically. And they have this whole ideological thing behind it because... I'll be careful of the spoilers, but she has a very particular insane position in...

that she is sort of pitching through the medium of this flag-twirling thing at him. But she has a retro perspective on what the country is and where it should go, and it is kind of a...

Thread that underlies a lot of the psychology of long-term politics in America. You can still sort of see it play out in very strange ways today. Essentially this royalist streak. And Anders essentially has to come in and try to represent this sort of baseline sanity for the people that are, you know, living day to day here. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, what do you think about Gleason's view that this was the moment? Because it wasn't the moment. It was a moment. It did end slavery, but it really wasn't the moment that Gleason was hoping it would be for Black people. You know, it's one of the core tensions because...

You and I sitting on the perch of history, which I have the convenience of writing this book from, we see the whole long road and the dogs and the sharecroppers and any given headline last week ahead. At the same time, there's this tension because you do, in a way, need these people that have this strive or the sort of purest belief to make whatever gains you make.

After kind of plumbing the aspects of American identity, you know, in writing this book, has your sense changed of whether a more perfect union is possible? Or are we, you know, kind of doomed to keep reliving this stuff? So when I fell all the way into the rabbit hole of researching and preparing for this book,

I think I was actually a little surprised by how... I don't know, everything there is always like a sub-viewpoint or a sub-faction. Like, it's all very chaotic. And in a way, it was less samey than I expected. And I think that's a good reminder that this is a place of a relatively short history. These are not immutable things. And I think that's half why a lot of us care or even bother is that we sense that this is a nascent culture that is influenceable. I...

I actually do believe that we can get far better or far worse. We are not necessarily on track for the status quo. Yeah. That's Denard Dale. His new book is How to Dodge a Cannonball. Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate this. This was a great conversation.

And that's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. Let us know what you think. You can write to us at bookoftheday at npr.org. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Adriana Gallardo, Yaman Mani, Melissa Gray, Alana Torek, Julie Deppenbrock, Ed McNulty, Samantha Balaban, Ashley Brown, and Jeffrey Pierre. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.

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