You asked (I mean I know not really). I needed to give a real answer. Yes, I think you are funny.
You know what? I started not to write this. I was sort of like – umm people know he’s funny. Duh. Also I thought “damn Tahirah, people already know you love you some Brian Broome work. They know you are a Broomebassador. They know they’ll get your Broomebastic side eye for suggesting anything less than Brian Broome being a genius.” They might feel like maybe I didn’t need to write about this again but look, I have been struggling these last few weeks. So much of that has to do with life-long shaming I dealt with over the things and people I loved. If I can’t celebrate, double down, turn up and show out about your work, things ain’t never gon get better. So here we go. I wrote a love letter to Punch Me Up to the Gods that maybe is a bit more serious in nature. Maybe makes people a little more somber when they reflect with me about it. I have now been in the room twice when a person asked “wait you thought that book was funny?” So, yeah here are two things from that book (which I now read every May) that I am certain are evidence of the fact that you are funny.
1- In Bee, you have our narrator tell us about his dad being the kind of dude he wants to avoid, to not bother. That he lays around “like a moldy dishrag” all day. That moldy dishrag is funny enough but then we get to the part about LaBrae Middle School being mostly white and how the white kids talk bad about the Black kids all day long…stupid, ugly, poor and don’t have fathers. And then you hit us with “I get mad at that because I see my father every day.” This is brilliance. It’s an unexpected punchline with a juxtaposed irony and a fun turn around a stereotype. All that in a matter of a few paragraphs? Some of the funniest stand up comedians we love take 30 minutes to get to that level. That is all kinds of funny and shit (I need Damon to be proud of my commentary). In this chapter, I also get to laugh at myself. I am sure I was a kid who said “ball-headed.” I know because I also said “mitch match” and “chicken pops.” You are superbly funny when you make people laugh at themselves. And while I’m not sure I ever said someone was “ball-headed,” I’m sure I felt so unpretty when I chopped all my hair off to make a point to my girlfriend and a dude on the bus who was mad I wouldn’t give him my phone number said I was a “ball-head Toni Braxton type bitch.” Yup. It was 1994. I was barely 18 and I should have been incredibly proud to be compared to her – hair, sexuality, or otherwise. What a compliment! But instead I was ashamed and I had to breathe deeply through ignoring him. I can laugh at that a little now. Much of that is due to having read your book. Being taught I wasn’t the only kid on a bus dealing with stuff like that was comic…relief. Comic relief. We survived. Ha.
2- In Carnival we go to Hill’s and meet Joe where you proceed to teach a mother class in anticipation and pay-off. In my hometown, the Hill’s was a place called Bamberger’s. Downtown Newark did not have many Joes but whew we had a few and so in reading Carnival I felt like I was standing next to you glaring up at Joe because I was the nosy little girl who followed bigger kids around the store until my mom called for me. That mom and her sister kept me in stores. Those women loved to shop and by the time I was 5, I was an expert at a few things in the store. I could tell you which racks were the ones where you could collect clothing tags especially ones with tiny safety pins and little buttons attached. I could tell you which layaway person was the one you really wanted when you went to the back of that store. And I could tell you who was getting the item when more than one person wanted it. Shoot, my mom sent someone else to secure a cabbage patch kid for me when people were fighting over those things. She had taught me well. So, I would have known you’d be on your way back to your mom with that shirt. Poor Joe never stood a chance. That super silent showdown with him you wrote? Comedic gold. I laughed through the description of his rat teeth, the brother making him jump like a startled rabbit, and of course “the disembodied Barbie torso with hair you could really style.” Fuh nee. But adult me missed what little girl me would have seen coming a mile away.
Adult me had laughed all the way through only to fall out gagged when I read little Brian’s mother’s reaction “boy if you don’t put that pink-ass shirt back where you found it.” That was beyond pay-off. What’s better than pay-off? Is there pay-on. Pay-out? Yeah that sounds right. Anyway, my 4/5 year old self would have told you to get a pinker, more Diahann Carrollish shirt and put the other one underneath. Then you go to moms and ask for the super femme one. But you gotta be so upset when she says no. Then you pull the carnation one out, sigh and say “what about this one?” That might fail but as long as we have the right layaway lady, we should be good because the right layaway lady is great for mom’s bargaining but also can’t help trying to make the little ones happy. The right layaway lady would have had your shirt up on the counter with a hanger and a completely unnecessary plastic garment bag sliding over it like it was bespoke. Only for you.
There are too many funny moments in this book to list in one post. The Key? Funny. Game Theory? Good gracious…funny! But the real question is why are you funny. It’s the tenderness. The ending scene of Bee where a father is truly trying to have a conversation with his son in the midst of what we could read as a debilitating depression is full of a tenderness we come to know as a Brian Broome hallmark. Underneath all the disdain text about Joe is a tenderness that lets us know you really saw him and understood his world. That tenderness is where you are more than funny. It is where you a true humorist – poetic incongruity. Thank you for sharing that gift with us. Thank you for saying yes when Damon Young asked you to share it again in That’s How They Get You. Because yes, some people will recognize the truth in the jokes as soon as they read the titles in that collection but it’s the tenderness that will take them from joke to joy – the real hallmark of Black humor. And you do that with an incredible transcendent deftness. Of course, I could just be off the mark here. We could always ask the Canadian what he thinks.
With appreciation,
Tahirah