Laughing (and Crying) My Ass Off: Satire And Humor In Black American Fiction

by Anthony Grooms
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10 books
My own writing tackles sober histories straight on Jim Crow, The American Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam War. Even so, occasionally, I am able to insert what critics—well, at least one critic—call “wry humor.” After all, life happens in moments that are sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious, and sometimes both at the same time. I have great appreciation for writers who take on serious subjects with knee-slapping humor or searing satire, finding a balance that doesn’t ridicule the subject while developing tensions between laughter and insight. In this list, I share books that I think achieve this goal around the topics of race relations and identity. Enjoy.
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The Best of Simple

Stories
Langston Hughes, 1961
Though he is celebrated as a poet, Langston Hughes’s “Simple” stories rank among the most important American satirical fiction. First published in newspapers during and after WW2, the stories were later collected in several volumes. The Best of Simple is Hughes’s own selection of his stories. The stories feature Jesse B. Semple, called “Simple,” a poor Harlemite and ne'er-do-well who offers opinions on politics, love, and race relations. The humor is sometimes a little dated and a little corny for contemporary audiences, but these stories are a good insight into the tensions that infuse black America and are foundational to the black American humor that follows.

Baby Sweet's

A Novel
Raymond Andrews, 1988
Raymond Andrews is an under-appreciated master of the revivalist storytelling style. Baby Sweet’s is the third in his Muskhogean Trilogy, which includes Appalachee Red and Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee. In fictional rural Appalachia, Georgia, Baby Sweet Jackson, a black woman, partners with John Morgan, the heir of the town’s leading white family, to open a “cat house.” When Lea, a mysterious new prostitute appears, hilarity ensues. The humor is bawdy and hyperbolic as it needles through to uncomfortable truths about the Jim Crow South.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier

Percival Everett, 2023
Known for his novel Erasure, made into the film, American Fiction, Booker Award nominee Percival Everett has published prolifically on the topics of race and identity. Likely, the foremost black American satirical writer, Everett writes stories that often take on absurdist twists, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier is an extraordinary example. A wealthy young black man raised by TV mogul Ted Turner decides to seek his roots. In travel through the South, he unknowingly enacts scenes from several Sidney Poitier films, in particular Lilies of the Field. His search for identity is complicated by his name, Not Sidney Poitier. The story is an absurdist romp that peels back the respectable veneers of colleges, upper-middle-class blacks, white police departments, and American culture generally. Dr. No, a shtick about spy villains and theoretical physics, is also not to be missed.

The Sellout

A Novel
Paul Beatty, 2015
This is a laugh-out-loud, tour de force satire. It is irreverent and wide-ranging as its urban farmer narrator, Bonbon, home-schooled by his conscious-raising social scientist father, riffs on everything from the Supreme Court to Los Angeles real estate to the Little Rascals. Set in fictional Dickens in metro-Los Angeles, the narrator attempts to reinstate segregation and becomes an unwilling slave master—ironically, as a way to fight racism—all the while growing delicious fruits and hand-numbing marijuana. The narration is, at times, a profanity-laced rhapsody in the tradition of many black American standup comedians, and it references Chapell and Pryor as well as novelist Ishmael Reed. Who are you and how do you become that person is the question that recurs for the narrator and, by extension, for black people. The novel won a Booker Prize in 2016.

Welcome to Braggsville

T. Geronimo Johnson, 2016
This comedy is provocative, irreverent, and seemingly rambling, but well-unified. It is highly successful in its send-up of race and gender theory and as erudite as it is knowledgeable of pop culture. Its voice is engaging—likely the voice of a white, omniscient narrator—likely a Southerner—as it raps, delivers homily, academic jargon and political rhetoric. D’aron Davenport and his Berkley University classmates travel to Braggsville, Georgia to protest a Civil War reenactment with a “performative intervention.” Johnson’s satire is a medley of literary approaches—realistic narrative, magical realism, self-referential meta-fiction, and straight up standup comedy. Winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.

Triangle Ray

John Holman, 2016
John Holman is a skillful short story writer who easily establishes voice and character. Set in Raleigh, North Carolina, this narrative, in story-cycle form, follows Ray Fielding from a youthful marriage and divorce to a search for love in middle age. It is complex in its use of diction, perspective, characterization and setting. Wordplay is central to the stories and is the source of the collection’s subtle humor. Humor and language also bring into focus the tensions of gentrification and exploitation. The character of Ray, and indeed, the Southern black society he operates in, acts as a counter to the too frequent depiction of black Southerners as uncomplicated and homogeneous.

The Coyotes of Carthage

A Novel
Steven Wright, 2020
Dre Ross, an ex-con, now a political consultant, makes a last ditch effort to save his job by managing a dark money campaign for a corporation in Appalachia. This well-constructed serio-comedy, full of quirky characterizations, is an exploration of race and dark money. I was engaged with the characters, who, rendered through the black protagonist’s point-of-view, represent a wide range of people from street hustlers to K-street political types to poor and religious white Appalachians. Though satirical, the narrative avoids stereotypes and successfully creates a complex view of American politics and religion.

The Ballad of Perilous Graves

Alex Jennings, 2022
An insane ghost. Zombie nutrias. Human songs. An evil storm of storms. Fresh and full of wild risks, this is a space-time warping comedic romp through New Orleans that is crazily imaginative and grippingly engaging. A tour de force of language, music, and the supernatural that is as much a playground as it is a psychological rendering of the black American mindset of the Crescent City. Perry Graves, boy wizard, is on a quest to restore nine escaped songs of power and encounters 300 years of black New Orleans history. If he fails in his quest, New Orleans, as we know, will be destroyed. Like nothing else you’ve read or likely will.

New York, My Village: A Novel

Uwem Akpan, 2021
Uwem Akpan follows his award-winning portrayal of brutality in war-torn African countries, Say You’re One of Them, with this satirical look at how “tribalism” plays out in American publishing. In New York, My Village, Nigerian editor Ekong Udousoro wins a fellowship to work at a small New York publishing house. He’s excited and thrilled to go, but even getting through immigration confronts him with challenges that are rendered with stinging satire. In New York city he is faced with micro-aggressions from his colleagues, slights from the Catholic church, and an invasion of New York’s finest bedbugs. All the time, he is editing a history of the Nigerian Civil War, an event which is still raw with him and members of his village in Nigeria.

Pym: A Novel

Mat Johnson, 2012
Taking its name from the only long work written by Edgar Allan Poe, Mat Johnson’s novel is a lost-world-adventure story, satire, and treatise on the construction of whiteness and its dismantlement. Professor Chris Jaynes is denied tenure essentially for not playing the role of the angry black man. He discovers that Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket might have actually happened and then traces Pym’s route to a mysterious black land in Antarctica. The plot is highly inventive, complete with fake footnotes, and one of the funniest satires of academe I’ve ever read.