Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works Book

Another 1-star review said "451 pages, no laughs. Not one."

Well, there were a few, but so very few, it makes me wonder at the book's title. "Humor?" What humor?

Signed out of our public library after reading "The Sellout," a book I admired a lot, written by the same Paul Beatty, I am unable to see what he was attempting to give us with "Hokum." It certainly wasn't to make us laugh.

He does succeed in making me think American blacks are filled with self-hatred, and obsessed with skin color far more than us whites. Verbal cleverness seems to be highly prized. (The abominable rap comes to mind.) Morals seem not to be, nor much respect for the law. Not my opinion, but what any objective reader would conclude reading this book.

Yes, I know: slavery, then Jim Crow.

Was it the length of time these awful conditions existed that's at the root of the problem? Because other people who came to America also had terrible suffering in their history -- arguably worse than slavery -- without becoming so broken. We look at that peculiar game, the dozens, where one's mothers are obscenely insulted (mothers!), and wonder why this "game" doesn't exist among any other group.

OK, I'm rambling, going nowhere, and it doesn't really matter if you're considering buying the book, so let's talk about that.

A few pages were enjoyable, a few were brilliant (a poem by John Rodriguez especially).

A few pages had the explicit descriptions of sex (Steve Cannon) that I used to hope to find as a teenager over 50 years ago, but that weren't at all funny and were included in this book for reasons that escape me.

A number of pages were included only, it seems, for their historical quality, not their humor. Al Sharpton and H. Rap Brown were political, not funny, and both individuals reprehensible in my eyes. Why give us the crudity, the stupidity of Brown but not the brilliance of Eldridge Cleaver, both in the same period of American history?

Kyle Baker's cartoons were mostly about white characters. Was Baker included just because he is part black? Which is a ridiculous reason, of course, but then, why? Beatty is clearly no fool; what is he trying to tell us by including Baker?

I think of the brilliant monologues Richard Pryor did on network TV in the 1970s. They made us feel the pain of thrown-away members of society, and yet they were also funny. In this book we get the pain, not the laughter. Pryor showed us how to have both.

This book is subtitled "An Anthology of African-American Humor." If this is humor, pass me the poison. Almost none of this book is funny. Could that be Beatty's point? That the black experience in America is so tragic that very little humor can be found in it?

But that can't be. Not when we have Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Bill Cosby, Chris Rock and countless others.

Again, I'm respectful of the editor's writing skills. I simply have no idea why he thought so much of this book was humorous.